Todd Sumamno
How do you plan activities for your NPO?
How do you distribute tasks among your workers and volunteers?
And how do you track the process of task completion? Or maybe your donors and supporters need certain feedback on the progress of your project?
Whatever approach you use to plan, run, and process your non-profit initiatives for each project, be it a small one for 1-2 days, or a long-term one with multiple stages, you will need to find the perfect way to report on it to keep things organized.
Depending on the project you have, the reasons you need to create a report, and the resources you have there are various types of reports you could create and complete one time or regularly.
Communication plan
In case there is more than one person involved in your project you will definitely need to plan the communications between workers, volunteers, and donors, for example.
- Communication type – what meetings will you have and how will you summarize them?
- Communication parties – who will be involved in the project and at what stage?
- Communication calendar – how often will your communications occur and when exactly?
- Communication channels – what channels will you use for your communication (messengers, CRM-system, cloud solutions, etc.)
Timeline
This timeline should clearly show each activity planned and required to complete the project, as well as their sequence, importance (priority), responsible person (team), and time needed for completion.
Financial & resource report
In case some funds are involved in the project (which is usually the case) you will need to clearly distribute them at the very planning stage and decide on the way you will run it during the project. It is also important to include both budget and the actual cost in your reports to summarize the project financially after it’s completed. If you are working with a non-profit digital agency it will definitely advise you to include also all the resources you plan to use in the financial report. This way project management will be easier – you will easily notice if some tasks are duplicated, if you can use some additional resources, etc.
Actions & Status report
This report is an advanced and more precise version of the project timeline. There are automation tools that can help you create and update those reports regularly with almost no effort. For example, if each participant regularly tracks and lists their actions, as well as updates the status of their tasks you will be able to automatically receive an actions log to have a clear overview of the whole project or its separate stage.
Report for donors
Some foundations and funding organizations may ask for a tailored report that will contain specific information related to the type of project you have and whether its activities within the progress meet the conditions of funding. Usually, they provide you with a template for this report. If not it might be a good idea to discuss it separately at the very beginning of the project.
Even if your donors do not ask for any special report it is still a good practice to regularly have them updated on the most important project matters.
Proper planning together with a regular pre-planned reporting system makes it easier to successfully complete your non-profit projects!
Brittany
