How are project reports handled at Kone Foundation?  

The interim and final reports sent by grant recipients are important to the foundation above all because they provide us with information for developing our funding activities, say Kalle Korhonen, Director of Funding, and Maija Karasvaara, Grant Coordinator.  

Kone Foundation’s aim is to fund research and art as well as possible. The Foundation aims to be an active listener in the fields it funds and to improve the working conditions of researchers and artists. A key tool in this work is understanding people’s experiences of working with funding from the foundation. 

As well as developing our practices, another important function of the reports is to enable the foundation staff to oversee the implementation of projects. Has the money been spent where it was intended to be spent?  

The work plans and research plans of the funded projects already give us a rough idea of what the researchers and artists supported by the Foundation are doing. In the reports, we ask our grantees to describe how their work has progressed or what challenges they have faced, but also how the foundation could do better. The reports also include information on the costs incurred in the projects and the different audiences the projects have reached.  

The reports thus help us to understand how researchers and artists do their work. In the reports, our grantees occasionally share personal issues they may want to share with the Foundation. This is why reading the reports is a confidential task, carried out by staff in the Foundation’s grants unit.  

For the past couple of years, the format for dealing with suggestions and feedback raised in the reports has been a reading group: staff members pick out important issues from the reports and discuss them with our CEO and the communications team. When writing a report, you can be assured that nothing other than summaries of the final reports will be shared with anyone outside the Foundation. 

We have recently started to publish the summaries of the final reports on the Foundation’s website. It is now possible to compare the objectives of the project plan with the report’s description of the completed project; what was intended to be done, and what was finally done. This also gives those outside the Foundation a better idea of what is being done with the money distributed by Kone Foundation.