Comic Relief UK Start-up form: Guidance notes

Now that you have been awarded Comic Relief funding, the start-up form provides an opportunity to develop your delivery plan and to establish realistic expectations of what you expect to achieve. It will then become the basis for your reporting back to us for the duration of the grant. We will ask you to tell us about your progress in detail every 12 months, alongside a shorter update every 6 month. These reports allow you to reflect on your progress and share your learning with us, and we use them to check you’re on track. We also use this information together with that from other projects to understand what difference we are making and to help us raise money.

The start-up form process

  • Once you have attended a start-up meeting (hosted by Comic Relief and Charities Evaluation Services), you will be invited to complete a start-up form,
  • Once completed, upload your start-up form to GEM,
  • Your grant manager will be alerted and, if there are any issues, may come back to you with questions for clarification or ask you to revise the form.,
  • Once this form has been agreed, we can release your first payment.

The quality of your form will be assessed to ensure that

  • It provides a clear summary of your project ambitions and is easy for you to report back on
  • It largely reflects the information provided in the application form, as well as any recommendations for changes made at assessment.
  • Any other significant changes to the project design have a clear and sound rationale.
  • It provides us with the information we need for fundraising, marketing and communications

Background information

  • Please copy the key information provided in your application form into the relevant fields.
  • Please record the name(s) of those involved in completing the form.
  • Please tell us the date you submitted the report.

Section 1: Beneficiaries

1.1 Beneficiary categories and numbers

Type of beneficiary

Comic Relief uses three categories of beneficiaries. We use these to help us report on the number of people our funding has helped in different ways and to ensure we do not overstate the numbers we use. We know that this may not be the usual way in which you describe your beneficiaries but please try to use these categories to explain how your work involves people, in light of the following definitions.

  • By people benefiting directly we mean people who will actively take part in project interventions, who are identified as key target group(s) by the project. They will directly benefit from a project activity and are typically involved on a one-to-one or group basis.
  • By frontline workers benefitingwe mean people who will actively take part in project interventions because they work with or support the project target group(s), whether in a paid or voluntary capacity. They will generally be given training or other forms of guidance and support to enable them to help those from the target group(s). Please only include the frontline workers you train directly (e.g. by running workshops on an issue) rather than the people employed to deliver the work.
  • By other people benefiting we mean people who will benefit from a one-off, initial or limited involvement with a project intervention. They can be from any of the key target group(s) or the general population,for example, people who attend awareness raising events and receive information leaflets. You should not include those who are assumed to benefit because of their relationship with someone who is directly benefiting, e.g., the family members of a person directly benefiting. We expect that the numbers of other people benefitingwill often be estimated. For projects influencing policy change, where the policy change will have a direct impact on a specific target group, include the numbers of people expected to benefit in this category. However, if people are only assumed to benefit,and this cannot be tracked in any meaningful way, then these should notbe included.

Please note, it is perfectly acceptable to include 0 in any of the categories.The categories you use will depend on the type of project. For examples of how these categories can be used by different types of projects please see

Narrative description of who this includes (100 words maximum)

  • For each of these categories, provide a brief (100 words maximum) description of your target groups, according to your work. This description could be defined according to the issue they face, their profession, characteristics such as age, or where you would find them. Examples of people benefiting directly could be young people excluded from school or women experiencing domestic violence. Frontline workers might be youth workers, teachers, nurses, mental health professionals or police. Other people benefiting could be the people attending local community groups or young people attending a school.

Target for number of beneficiaries over the lifetime of the grant

  • Please review the beneficiary numbers specified in your application form and consider whether they are accurate and realistic.
  • Fill in the table with the number of people you expect to work with over the lifetime of the grant. If you do not expect to work with any people within that category, please specify ‘0’.

Target for number of beneficiaries in the first 12 months

  • Please tell us how many people you expect to work with in the first 12 months of your grant for each of the three beneficiary categories. We will ask you to provide your actual figures in your annual report. If you do not expect to work with any people within that category, please specify ‘0’.
  • Given that this figure is for the first 12 months of the work, do consider whether you need to devote time to setting up the project, rather than delivering it. We recognise that your beneficiary numbers may be lower that subsequent years as a result.

1.2Age and gender of people benefiting directly

  • Only complete this section if your project has ‘people benefiting directly’ – you do not need to tell us about the age and gender of ‘frontline workers benefiting’or ‘other people benefiting’ (as defined above).
  • Please provide targets for the age and gender of the ‘people benefiting directly’ that you anticipate working with over the lifetime of the grant and for the first 12 months.
  • If your beneficiaries do not classify themselves within these categories, or would prefer not to say which they fit into, or if you are unable to ask for their gender or age, please use the category ‘Gender not known/defined differently’ or ‘Age not known’.
  • It is helpful to us if the totals add up to the number of ‘people benefiting directly’. However, if your beneficiariesdo not classify themselves within these categories, or would prefer not to say which they fit into, or if you are unable to ask for their gender or age, please use the category ‘Gender not known/defined differently’ or ‘Age not known’.)
  • If you record people’s age or gender according to different categories which overlap our own, please choose the best reflection of this and use this for the duration of your reporting. For example if your category is 55-70, this would be best recorded in our category of 60-79.
  • We will expect you to provide the age/gender profile of your actual beneficiaries in your annual report.

1.3Diversity and hard to reach groups

  • Please only complete this section if you are working with ‘people benefiting directly’

Which groups are under-represented in accessing or engaging with your services and how do you plan to address this in the next 12 months? (350 words maximum)

  • In this section, we are keen to ensure that the funding we provide to services reaches the broadest range of people from different backgrounds and that it is inclusive. We are particularly interested in ethnicity, sexuality, religion, gender and disability (as well as age and gender reported in 1.2). We understand that, depending on the people you work with and the services you deliver, there may be other groups that are hard for you to reach.).
  • Here, we want to understand which groups are under-represented in accessing or engaging with your work, as well as how you are going to improve this. We expect you to be monitoring this so that you can tell us about the success of this plan this in annual reports.

Section 2: Outcomes

How Comic Relief understands outcomes

By outcomes we mean statements which summarise the difference your project intends to make. Depending on the nature of your work, outcomes could relate to benefits seen for individuals, communities, organisations, sectors or policy. We see outcomes as the result of what projects do, rather than the activities and services they provide, which we refer to as outputs. For example, an outcome would be ‘young people achieve a coaching qualification’ as the result of providing sports development courses. It is up to you to decide what scale of change these outcomes describe, depending on the nature of your work. They can relate to change in a target group, community, sectors or policy.Your outcomes might refer to a stage of progress that people make, such as improving skills, completing a course and securing employment.

For us, relevant outcomes should:

Relate to the Comic Relief theme that you applied, whether this is Safer Lives, Better Futures, Healthier Finances or Fairer Society.

Be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time (SMART), individually and as a set of between two and five outcomes.

Go beyond project activities to focus on the resulting changes to people’s lives from the specified target groups, describing what you expect to increase, improve, decrease or reduce.

Be expressed as a result and be easy to understand (simple, clear, short).

Focus on one change and one target group or issue.

Be distinct from one another, whethera step change in progress (for instance, improving young people’s confidence to learn and young people achieving qualifications), target groups (such as older people and volunteers) or the results of different types of activities (such as improved influencing skills for service users and improved policy). At least one should describe the end result of your work in a tangible way.

How Comic Relief understands outcome indicators

By indicator, we mean a tangible sign of change that you can observe in your target group/area of work, and that you will measure to evidence progress towards your outcome. This is not about the activities or work you have carried out (outputs) and neither is it about the key deliverables for your project. Instead it is a statement about the type of change you will tell us about to demonstrate you are achieving your outcomes.

For us, relevant indicators should:

Be a mix of quantitative (i.e. number based) and qualitative (i.e. descriptive) statements which you intent to collect data about (this may involve either quantitative or qualitative methods)

Be neutral statements (such as level of, number of) which do not assume change (i.e. an increase) as the expected change is described in your outcome.

Be tangible statements of change that you can measure.

Be realistic and relevant to your ability to measure, monitor and evaluate change.

2.1 Your outcomes for the grant

  • Please provide between two and five outcomes which summarise what your work will achieve.
  • For each outcome you must specify at least one outcomeindicator or up to three if relevant.
  • For each outcome indicator please describe what progress you hope to see over the lifetime of the grant, including any relevant numbers or percentages relevant to the outcome.

Overall, how many people do you realistically expect to benefit in relation to this outcome, over the lifetime of the grant?

  • If your outcome relates to people benefiting, and you can report back to us on this, please tell us how many peopleyou hope will achieve the outcome over the lifetime of the grant.
  • Here we are looking for a realistic estimate for the number of people who will demonstrate progress towards the outcome. For some outcomes, this may be every person you are working with (therefore representing 100%), but for most this is likely to be a proportion of your beneficiaries because change may take time, may not be achievable for everyone or because it is often a complicated process involving a range of external factors.
  • In future annual monitoring reports we will ask you to tell us how many people have achieved the outcome. We do not hold you to account for these targets. Instead, we use these numbers to understand what difference you have made.

2.2 Data collection method for evidencing progress of outcomes and indicators

  • We want to understand if you have appropriate plans in place for monitoring and evaluation, so that you can report back to us on your progress towards outcomes and so that you can learn from and improve your work. You can use your application as a basis for this.
  • Your answer should include how you will collect data for outcome indicators, includingyour sample size, briefly describing the types of tools you will use, how many of your beneficiaries they will be used with and when, as well as how you will collect and analyse the information.

Do you intend to commission someone external to your organisation to conduct an evaluation of your work? This question is not compulsory. It is only relevant if you arepaying an external agency or consultant to evaluate all or part of the delivery or project work, especially if your grant funding is paying for this. Indicating this will provide us with a record of which projects are being externally evaluated and the reports we can expect in future.

If so, can you provide further detail about what this evaluation will involve and what the focus is?Here we are looking for relevant information about the evaluation you will carry out. This may include who you expect the evaluator to be or what type of evaluator you expect to recruit. You can tell us about their background sector (e.g. academic or third sector agency), subject discipline (e.g. mental health clinician, dementia expert), or methodological approach (e.g. qualitative, statistical, theory of change) where relevant. You can also summarise the focus of the work, such as monitoring progress towards outcomes or building internal monitoring and evaluation capacity (e.g. verifying your monitoring data, developing a theory of change).

Do you intend to produce any publications or publically available resources that you will share with us? This will provide us with an insight in to how you will share your findings and where we might expect to receive a resource or toolkit in future.

2.3 Use of online and social media: Please tell us any relevant direct links to online and social activity which may be useful to teams across Comic Relief (including grants and other marketing and communications teams) to learn more about your project activity. This allow us to search across our projects when we need to find out about specific types of work.

Section 3: Outputs

How Comic Relief understands outputs

By outputs we mean the project activities and the specific direct deliverables, such as products, services and resources provided to the people benefiting, frontline workers or project partners as part of the projectactivities. These are products, resources, or services that you are expected to produce in order to achieve your project’s outcomes. For example, we consider group work, counselling, training sessions, research publications, and meetings with local authorities as key deliverables. In contrast, processes such as recruiting a project worker, distributing leaflets about the service or collecting and monitoring feedback forms should not be included when they are part and parcel of delivering the main project activities. Outreach and awareness raising activities should only be included when they are integral to achieving outcomes, such as increasing awareness of an issue and the support available.

Outputs for the next 12 months

  • Please review your original outputs provided in your stage 2 proposal (application form)
  • Please provide up to tenoutputs you plan to deliver for the next 12 months which summarise your delivery plan. These should describe the main components of your work, rather than detail the full processes involved in delivering your project.
  • We are ideally looking for five key outputs, but you can go up to 10.
  • Provide a name to describe each output (10 words maximum) and please ensure that very similar types of outputs (such as group work to different target groups) have a clear and distinct description.
  • For each output, specify a target for delivery which summarises key aspects of your plan. Your target could include the number of sessions, publications and meetings you intend to have, who they will involve and how long they will be.
  • For each output, where relevant, also state how many people this output will involve or reach in the next year;thiscan be any type of beneficiary. For outputs that do not involve direct or intensive contact with beneficiaries these numbers can be estimated because they may not necessarily be unique beneficiaries (for instance, if they are reached through social media and news articles).
  • Please note you need to list here only outputs planned for Year 1: the first 12 months. At the end of each year of the grant, we will then ask you to report onoutputs actually delivered during the previous 12 months and those planned for the followingyear.

Section 4: Finances