Help! It’s reporting time and my evidence is a jumble!

Because of COVID-19 your evidence might be a little bit different, less formal, more varied, more patchy and about different outcomes than agreed.

You may have paused your work, changed your target group, changed your activities or worked towards different outcomes.

In our experience your funders will understand. You can report on what you did and the outcomes from that: just explain what changed and why.

In adapting quickly, you may not have had time to amend existing methods such as questionnaires.  Sometimes it might even have felt inappropriate to use your normal methods. You can call on a broader range of evidence: for example social media evidence, photos, volunteers capturing casual comments, more creative evidence such as childrens’ drawings.

You can pull together very different kinds of evidence using simple techniques. Our Making Sense sheet: Analysing qualitative information can show you how to make sense of more qualitative evidence. Our guide on analysis can show you how to combine different types of evidence in your analysis.

Here is a simple example:

There may be a greater focus on learning rather than proving outcomes. We have been forced to work differently and that’s given us a chance to reflect upon what really works. Some things we might want to keep doing long term, some things we might want to drop or pick up again as soon as possible. This is also a great chance to ask what really matters to the people you support. All of that can feed into discussions about how and when you best achieve outcomes and for who.