Please note: to fully understand the requirements of the UKSPF Community Grants, you must read the full guidance notes.
UKSPF community grants: monitoring
The success of your project will be measured by monitoring what your project achieves. Information about your project's achievements will be collected by you and reported to us.
Depending on the nature and length of the project, we will ask you to provide us with regular progress updates (every three months) on:
- how much you have spent
- if your project is keeping to schedule
- what UKSPF outputs and outcomes your project has achieved
Reports will be expected every three months, as follows:
- two high-level progress updates
- one detailed midway report
- one detailed end-of-project report
We understand that projects will be of different lengths, so alternative reporting schedules may be put in place for certain projects.
Project outputs and outcomes
As part of the application process, you will be expected to select at least one UKSPF output and one UKSPF outcome (which your project must deliver) from the UKSPF intervention(s) you choose. Read more about this on our What we fund page.
Each output and outcome have different requirements (for example, what evidence you should collect to prove you've achieved them).
It is important to build monitoring and reporting into the project from the beginning. This will help to identify areas of success and areas for development and change as you roll out and deliver your project.
Please make sure you review the guidance notes to understand the reporting and monitoring requirements of the Community Grants.
Outputs and outcomes example
As an example, your project might be to improve a local community facility with some new display equipment to enable you to put on interactive training sessions for local community groups.
This would fit nicely under the E11 Intervention (capacity building and infrastructure support).
Two E11 outputs could fit within this project:
- number of amenities/facilities created or improved
- number of people attending training sessions
And one E11 outcome would fit:
- improved engagement numbers
In other words, your project will demonstrate that thanks to you purchasing the new equipment and being able to put on the training sessions, more people in local community groups will have been engaged.
How you show this
For the 'number of amenities/facilities created or improved' output, you would want to make a note of what type of building it was (for example, a village hall), and how it was improved (with evidence such as before-and-after photographs for installing the new equipment, and keeping receipts for your purchase of the equipment).
For the 'number of people attending training sessions' output, you would want to keep a note of what training sessions happened as a result of the new equipment (including the content of those sessions), when they happened and keep an attendance register of who went as evidence.
Finally, for the 'improved engagement' outcome you could use the training attendance registers again as evidence of engagement. You might also choose to collect feedback forms from the training, so attendees can say how it benefitted them.
As the improved engagement outcome is measuring change (improvements in engagement over 12 months), you will also want to make sure you know how many people were engaged by training sessions at the community hall before your project, so you can compare it to the numbers engaged during your project. Though if no training sessions were held before your project, this number will be 0.
It is important that wherever your project's output(s) or outcome(s) are measuring a change, that you have a 'before' figure to compare to the 'after' figure as a result of your project.
The above is just one example. For more information, the guidance notes provide details on what types of evidence you should collect for each output and outcome.