Who writes the evaluation part of the annual report?
The project team writes and submits the annual report, and the evaluation part draws on the evaluator's own reports. With Grantibly, evaluation reports follow your funder's reporting schedule, with shorter summaries in between, and the project team draws on them for the report it submits.
The report belongs to the project. At NSF, for example, the principal investigator submits the annual project report through Research.gov, and submitting it certifies that its contents are accurate and complete. The evaluator's part is to analyze and interpret the evidence and explain what it means in a form the team can use. Talk through the findings with your evaluator before you write, so the way the report describes them matches what the evidence can support.
What if the report is due before we have results?
If the annual report is due before you have results, report what you can: what has been carried out, early findings, how the evaluation is set up, and when results will come.
NSF, for example, asks for annual project reports no later than 90 days before the end of the current budget period, so each report is written before the year it covers is over. Outcomes that depend on a full year of the program, or on students or participants finishing it, may not be measurable yet. Say what the early findings can and can't show, and avoid presenting early signs as results.
How can the annual report be useful to our own team?
The annual report is most useful to your own team when it isn't the first time anyone hears the findings, so don't wait for it to share them. The team should hear what's working and what isn't while there's still time to act, and the annual report is a chance to step back and plan the next year.
It helps to change the question you start from. Instead of asking what should go in the annual report, ask what the project team needs to understand and what the people outside the team need to know. Writing a report your funder reads, and that your board or partners can use, is a separate question. How do I turn program data into a report my funder actually reads? covers it. Reporting to your institution's leadership and accreditors is covered in How do we report program results to our institution's leadership and accreditors?
The Grantibly perspective
Lauren's perspective
Evaluation may be required by a funder, but compliance should never be its only purpose. At its best, evaluation helps a project understand what is working, what isn't, what it's learning, and what it should do next. An annual report is one of the places that should show.
Data doesn't make decisions. People do. A percentage in a table may be technically accurate and still leave a project team asking, "So what?" We want to go further: what does the finding mean, why might we be seeing it, does it confirm what the team expected or challenge an assumption, and does it suggest something the project should change?
