Impact reports are far too long, too full of jargon, and often do not clearly explain what difference the charity makes, an audience of charity finance professionals heard yesterday.

Sam Coutinho (pictured), audit and advisory partner at accountants Haysmacintyre, told the Charity Finance Group annual conference yesterday that too few charities asked why they were reporting on impact.

She said charities need to "articulate clearly and simply as an organisation why we do what we do and why it’s so good,” she said.

Coutinho said it was important for a charity to be able to condense impact reporting into “short sharp bullets”, ideally using a spreadsheet with very few words.

Coutinho said many impact reports were 20 pages long and hard to read.

'Too much jargon'

“We get tied up very easily into producing thick documents and lots of long paragraphs," she said. “One of the concerns I have about impact reporting is that there is too much jargon.

“There are too many different things - trying to find outputs and outcomes and I think that’s why so many people get put off.

According to research conducted by Haysmacintyre last year, 56 per cent of charities surveyed said they reported impact in some form – up from 8 per cent just four years earlier. But the majority of charities that reported on impact had an annual income of more that £15m.

Some 44 per cent of charities surveyed did not report on impact, according to Coutinho and the majority of those said they had not thought about impact reporting.

A “significant number” hadn’t thought about it at all, she said.

“We asked where charities most often reported their impact and by far the most were in separate documents that were more than 20 pages long,” said Coutinho. “So if you are a smaller charity with limited resources, it’s quite difficult to justify why you should do that.”  

According to Coutimho, charities would be better off reporting impact within the annual review.

She said that when she had worked with the Woodland Trust, the charity had been able to produce an effective impact report without adding an extra information to its annual review.

“One of the messages we learned was that you just need to reorganise your information," she said. “The most interesting bit of the whole set of accounts is the strategic report – what did you set out to achieve and what did you do – so bring that to the front. It’s just stepping back and thinking about what you write.”