Before/after evidence pack template.
The one-page artefact to produce at day 90. Hours saved. Report turnaround. Data disaggregation coverage. Ready to attach to your next funder report.
The evidence pack is the one page you produce at the end of a setup and attach to your next funder report. It answers the question a funder always has and rarely gets a clean answer to: what actually changed. Keep it to one page. A funder will read one page. They will not read ten.
Copy the template below into a document, fill the blanks with your own numbers, and keep it to a single side. The power is in the pairing, so never show an "after" number without the "before" next to it. If you do not have a real "before" figure, estimate it honestly and say that you estimated it.
The header
Everything in brackets is a blank for you to fill.
- Organisation: [your NGO's name].
- Prepared by: [name and role].
- Date: [day 90] · Reporting period: [start] to [end].
The three numbers that matter
Pick the three changes your funders care about most. These three work for almost everyone. Show before and after side by side, because a single "after" number proves nothing on its own.
- Time to produce the monthly report. Before: [e.g. two days of manual counting]. After: [e.g. one hour from a dashboard].
- Hours per week spent on data admin. Before: [__ hours]. After: [__ hours].
- Data disaggregation. Before: [e.g. totals only]. After: [e.g. by location, age band and sex, on demand].
The one-line story
Under the numbers, one plain sentence a programme manager could say out loud.
- Before: [what a normal reporting week used to look like]. After: [what it looks like now].
What made the difference
Two or three lines, no jargon, so a reader who was not there understands what you changed.
- We moved [beneficiary records, consent forms, the monthly count] from [spreadsheets and paper] into [one system], so [the specific thing that got faster or more reliable].
What is next
End on momentum, not a full stop. One forward-looking line.
- Next quarter we will [the new thing the system makes possible], which we could not do before.
How to use it
Produce this at day 90, and again at the end of every funding cycle. Attach it to funder reports and to new proposals as proof you can measure your own work. Keep every version, because the second one shows a trend, and a trend convinces a funder more than a single snapshot.
This is the artefact SF Fellows GH sits down and builds with every NGO we set up, in the final week of the plan. If you want help getting to the point where you have real before-and-after numbers to put in it, book a fifteen-minute call.