Your Statement of Service Performance is an opportunity to show what your non-profit organisation is achieving. It can help make the case for supporting your work by telling the story behind the numbers.

Too often, organisations keep using the same measures every year. The numbers get updated, but there’s little thought about whether they still tell a useful story.

Funders may read the report as part of assessing your organisation’s funding application, so it deserves some thought. Your board, supporters and team can also use it to understand what you’ve achieved.

Start with your mission

Start with your organisation’s mission and consider which measures would show progress towards it. Read your mission and ask your team: “How will we know if we’ve been successful?”

Use that question to guide your choice of measures and help readers understand the work you’ve done towards your mission.

Depending on your activities, that might include the number of sessions delivered, people who used your services, or attendance at training and events. Website visitors or social media engagement might be useful where reaching people online is part of your purpose.

Choose measures because they tell readers something meaningful about your work. A number being easy to find doesn’t necessarily make it useful.

Give last year’s measures another look

Carrying last year’s measures forward automatically can mean missing an important part of this year’s work. Before carrying them forward, ask whether they still reflect your activities and priorities. Has a service changed? Have you started something new? Is an important part of your work missing?

Consistency matters too, so readers can compare performance over time. For Tier 3 reporting, changes to what you report or how you measure it need an explanation. You can improve your measures while being clear about what has changed and why.

Tell the story behind the numbers

You can also include some short commentary to support your numbers. This can make the report more compelling to read and help tell the story of what your organisation has achieved this year. Perhaps you delivered fewer sessions because a programme started later than planned. Perhaps you changed how a service was delivered to make it more accessible. Some context helps readers understand what happened during the year.

Don’t use the commentary to introduce extra facts and figures you haven’t checked, or statements you can’t verify. Delivering a service and proving the lasting difference it made are not always the same thing.

Keep the focus on helping readers understand what the numbers mean for your organisation and the people it serves.

Keep the evidence as you go

The service performance information comes from your organisation, and you need to be able to support whatever figures you include. Your accountant can help present it, but your team needs the records behind it. Those records might include attendance lists, session records, service-user records or saved website analytics.

Reconstructing supporting evidence at year-end can be time consuming. Decide early what you’re measuring, how you’ll record it and who is responsible. If several people contribute, make sure they’re using the same definitions.

Where your Statement of Service Performance is audited, the auditor will need supporting evidence. You need to be able to show that what you say you did, you actually did.

Keep the report focused on the measures that tell a useful story. Each additional measure takes work to collect and check and, where it is audited, can also add to the auditor’s workload and fee.

Make time to reflect as a team

It’s also an opportunity for your team to reflect: “What did we set out to achieve, and how did we do?” What went well? What turned out differently from what you expected? What have you learnt that could help with next year’s plans?

That conversation can help you decide whether the measures you’re using are still useful and whether there’s something you should start recording for next year. It also gives your team a chance to recognise what you’ve achieved – something that can get overlooked when everyone is busy delivering the work.

Get support where you need it

At The Accounting Hub, we can help you choose practical measures, identify the supporting records you’ll need and bring your service performance information into your annual performance report.

We’re familiar with the NFP reporting framework and the questions auditors commonly ask. Whether you need a little guidance or more help preparing the report and responding to audit queries, we can work alongside your team.

Your organisation puts a lot of work into its mission. Your Statement of Service Performance is a chance to show that work and what it achieved.