OwlIMPACT
Trusts · Foundations · National funders

Lighter reporting for your grantees. One shape of evidence across your portfolio.

You buy Owl Impact for a cohort. Your grantees get it free, and it does the assembling behind the return they already write for you. What reaches you: the same measures, in the same shape, from every organisation. Nobody adds anything up.

Light-touch reporting and portfolio evidence only conflict if the grantee does the adding up.

Over a hundred UK grantmakers have committed to light-touch reporting. The trade-off — ask for less, learn less — only exists because the grantee does the collecting, costing and adding up by hand. Take those jobs off them and it disappears.

The old way

  • Every grantee reports in their own format, their own words, their own year end
  • Volunteer and pro bono time described in a sentence, or left out because nobody could cost it
  • "It made a real difference" — with nothing underneath it
  • A programme officer reads twelve documents and re-keys the numbers
  • The portfolio total is assembled by hand, once, and cannot be traced back to anything

With Owl Impact

  • Everyone logs their own, as they go — seconds each, on their phone
  • Volunteer and pro bono hours costed at rates agreed with you at setup
  • Change captured before and after, per person, per programme
  • Each grantee's report compiles itself, branded to them, ready to print
  • The portfolio view is the same entries, filtered — no re-keying, no adding up
Nothing here asks a grantee to do more. It asks them to do the same thing once, at the moment it happens, in a form that serves them as well as you.

What your grantees get

The test we hold this to: would a grantee choose to keep using it after your funding ends?

One tap on their phone

No app store, no download, no manual. They tap what happened as it happens. Works offline.

Training that fits around delivery

Short training videos supplied as standard — watched once, there whenever a new team member starts. A training day for programme managers can be arranged if your cohort wants it.

Their end-of-grant return, already written

Everything logged, filtered to your grant and period. Return day becomes ten minutes, not a weekend.

Volunteer and pro bono time, valued properly

Hours costed by who gave them — general volunteer, skilled volunteer, pro bono professional — at rates agreed at setup.

Distance travelled, before and after

Confidence, readiness, wellbeing — the shift, tracked anonymously by code.

An evidence base that is theirs

Their records, their branding, their reports — usable for their next application and their other funders.

What you see across the portfolio

You are not being given a window into anyone's organisation. There is no live feed of a grantee's day, and there is nothing in the system that would allow one.

A capture layer, not another framework. It collects the evidence underneath the model you already use — your outcomes framework, theory of change or quality mark — and reports against it.

Three lenses. Never summed.

An hour of someone's time can be described three ways. They answer different questions, so they sit side by side on a report, each with its method shown.

Lens one

Cost

What it cost to deliver. Hours your grant paid for, at actual salary. These belong in the investment line of a social return calculation — never in the return.

Lens two

Social value

What was given beyond what anyone paid for — time nobody funded, contributed anyway. Costed at a recognised proxy, published with source and year.

Lens three

In-kind

What donated time would have cost to buy — what the organisation did not have to pay for, priced by who gave the time.

Combining them counts the same money twice. It is the first thing an evaluator tests.
RateApplies toSource and year
£16.93 / hrSocial value proxy — time given beyond what was paid forNational TOMs 2022, ONS replacement-cost basis, 2021 prices
£12.71 / hrGeneral volunteerNational Living Wage, 21 and over, from 1 April 2026
£19.67 / hrSkilled volunteerONS ASHE April 2025 — median gross hourly pay excluding overtime, full-time
Actual salaryPaid staff on funded deliveryThe organisation's own payroll — recorded as cost, not contribution
Their charge-out rateProfessional pro bonoThe firm's own published price
Your rates, your rules. Set the rates your cohort is costed on once, at setup — per role, per category. If you publish your own rates, we use those. Every source and year: owlimpact.wales/methodology.

Everyone can evidence that they asked. Almost nobody can evidence what it changed.

The Lundy Model (Lundy, 2007) asks for Space, Voice, Audience and Influence. Most reports can show the first two. Owl Impact gives the other two a place to be logged as dated entries — an Audience and Influence tag set configured for the cohort at setup — so the chain reads back: view, audience, decision, change.

Why it matters: a cohort that can show Audience and Influence is one whose participation claims hold up when a trustee or co-funder asks the second question. More on the Lundy alignment →

No data about children. By design.

No names, no dates of birth, no free text about a young person — outcomes sit against an anonymous code, and only the grantee's own team holds the key, offline. The only personal data in the system is the name and email of the people who log. UK GDPR — ICO registration C1941169.

Priced around the cohort, not the seat.

What we scope is a programme: how many organisations, how long, what you need to show at the end. Tell us, and we put a firm number against it — a monitoring and evaluation line in the programme budget, carried by the grant, not by your grantees.

See it working

A 20-minute walkthrough of the live product with sample data — what your grantees would use, and what a portfolio view puts in front of your board. And a straight answer on whether your cohort is the right fit.