How do you communicate and report your program results and learnings to donors, partners, and the public?

As pointed out here, it is best that such communications be adjusted to the needs and wants of the recipient. Timely is also good, maybe more so when communicating with donors. Regular newsletters (including enewsletters could hit many audiences and have a cover email tailored to each audience. A quick phone call to donors to again thank them, update them and let them know the enewsletter might be well received.

I have found it is essential to tailor content about program results and learnings toward a particular segment of stakeholders. If you wish for certain a stakeholder group to take a specific action after receiving and reading the data, consider adapting communications to provide context to surface key issues that have a direct impact on the mission of your organization. If you emphasize where they can best act on learnings, you will leverage their influence and power, both keys to your non-profit's ongoing success.

To start, if a funder or donor wants a report specifically for the funding they awarded you, it would be wise to follow up with them, to determine the type of report they desire. On the other hand, if you would like to report on your organization, and the impact made, I would craft a really nice impact report, that focuses on everything the organization did that year, and share on your platform (linkedin etc..) to allow others to know what your organization accomplished in the current year.

Documenting is a niche role. Writing and sharing reports come easy to many but do they make sense to donors, partners, staff? Each report is written with a target audience - the idea is to get their ears. Sometimes formats are provided but when there are none, key accomplishments both qualitative and quantitative- need geared to what the audience and aligns with their interests. Meaning that their stake in the project needs to have relevance for them to report onward. Given that there are many mechanisms to translate raw data into visualizations, the focus is on information that is grounded and learnings that take the whole team forward. Understanding that progress has been made or that shortcomings overcome keeps everyone on same page.

When you are in the process of organizing and visualizing the date, ensure your intended audience can easily understand the final product. After analyzing the data, it should tell the story of the progress the program made. If graphs are too cluttered or if they do not contain relevant information, they distract from this intended purpose and can cause confusion. Make sure your data representation is clear, concise, and embedded with context.

After identifying your stakeholders and the information that you want to share with them, it is vitally important to choose the medium by which the information will be communicated. Are you going to post on social media and tag a 5-figure donor to say thank you? Probably not. Are you going to have coffee with all 150 of your monthly donors to share results individually? Highly unlikely. We have know what our qualitative and quantitative deliverables are along with the real limits of our capacities along with those of our target audience. This all helps us put our best face and foot forward and discern how we are going to leverage out limited time and resources towards our desired ROI.

This whole piece is shaped by the thinking of the providers. The concepts language and values are those of the aid providers not the users whose experiences may be mikes from graphs and visuals designed without their understanding of the realities. It feels so top down