What trustees actually need from reports

Trustees play a crucial role in setting direction, overseeing risk and ensuring charities stay focused on their purpose. But too often, the information they receive makes that job harder rather than easier.

Trustees are often volunteers, fitting board responsibilities around busy jobs and personal lives, and they need information that helps them make decisions quickly and confidently.

Trustees are over-stretched

In 2024, Pro Bono Economics (PBE) in collaboration with Trustees’ Week, reported that 63% of charities had board vacancies.  This results in trustees having to do more than normally expected.

According to the Charities Commission, high vacancy rates are causing excessive reliance on small teams, significantly increasing the risk of trustee burnout.

74% of charities find trustee recruitment difficult.

We owe it to Trustees to make their work easier as they are often overworked and are volunteers.

What do they want?

Many boards are presented with long papers, dense spreadsheets or large volumes of data with very little context. When this happens, board meetings can quickly become overwhelmed trying to decipher information rather than making informed decisions.

In practice, most trustees are trying to answer a small number of important questions:

• Who are we helping? 
• What are we doing?
• What difference is it making?

As one charity leader recently put it,

“Our trustees don’t want more data. They want to understand what’s changing, what’s worrying us, and where they can help.”

Good reporting helps trustees see the bigger picture. It brings together key information in a way that is clear, consistent and easy to understand, allowing boards to focus on strategy, sustainability and impact rather than administration.

This doesn’t mean stripping reports back to the bare minimum. It means being intentional about what is shared and why. A small number of meaningful indicators, explained clearly and supported by narrative, is often far more useful than pages of raw data.

You have probably seen examples of AI photo apps that can strip out a background.  If it is done to make the subject stand out, good, but if it is done to ‘hide’ important background information, bad!  So the message here is not to reduce data for trustees for the sake of it, but to just cut out the background noise.

What makes trustee reporting more effective?

There are a few practical steps charities can take to improve how information is presented to trustees:

• Be clear about purpose.
  Agree what trustees actually need to know to fulfil their role, and design reports around those needs.
• Provide context, not just numbers.
  Explain what the data shows, what has changed and why it matters.
• Be consistent over time.
  Using the same structure and measures makes trends easier to spot and reduces confusion.
• Focus on insight, not activity.
  Trustees are interested in outcomes, learning and risk, not long lists of outputs.
  
  

When trustees have access to clear, well-structured information, they are better equipped to challenge constructively, support leadership teams and make confident decisions.

Ultimately, one of the most valuable ways to support trustees is to make it easier for them to understand what is really going on in the organisation. Clear reporting builds trust, strengthens governance and helps charities stay focused on the impact they are there to achieve.

Tools and systems that bring information into one place can make this process much easier, particularly for small teams juggling multiple reporting demands and limited time.