Letting us know how your project's going

If you have over £20,000 of National Lottery funding from us, for a project that lasts two years or more, we’ll ask you to tell us how your project’s going every year (we call this a progress update). But you can still contact us at any time if there's anything you'd like to chat about or get help with.

We want to make sure your project is going okay
But it’s also a chance for you to reflect on, and learn from the work you’re doing. And see if it can improve what you do in future.

We want to know how your project has gone over the last 12 months. These are the things we usually like to know.

The exact information we ask for might change depending on:

• where your project is happening in the UK
• what information you and your Funding Officer planned to gather about your project when it started
• which programme your funding is part of.

Sometimes the people we fund think they should gather learning for us. So they try to gather things they think we’ll like, rather than what’s useful for them. But the learning should be useful to you and your project.

We have some information about how to gather learning that’s useful to you, your project, and your community.

You can give us the information whatever way works best for you, for example by using:

• an evaluation
• an annual report
• feedback from staff, volunteers and participants
• graphs, charts, statistics and data
• slide decks and blog posts
• videos, photos and infographics
• meeting minutes.

If you’ve got other funding for the same project
You might already be writing these kinds of reports for them too. So we don’t want to make you write a whole new report just for us. This means you can send us something you’ve already written for other organisations that covers the things we’re funding you for. If you’re sending us something you’ve already written, just highlight the bits that are relevant to us.

We’d like you to keep looking at the difference your National Lottery funding is making in your community - and see if there’s anything you can learn from the work you’re doing, to improve how you work in the future.

We’d like to use your updates to improve our work too - and share what you’ve learnt with other groups to help them transform their own communities.

We also want to know how you’re using our funding and what it’s going towards. So sometimes we need to get these updates from you before we can pay you more of your funding.

Your Funding Officer will look at the information you’ve sent to us. They might give you feedback, talk about ways to support your work, or share your what you’ve learned with others.

If you'd like your learning to be shared more widely, you can ask us to think about adding it to our Evidence Library - you might also want to take a look and see if there's any learning relevant to you there.

You can use the information you’ve gathered to let your community know how your project’s going. So they can see the difference National Lottery funding is making in communities across the UK. You can find more information, logos and free materials to help you promote your project here.