The grantmaking landscape looks very different heading into 2026. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s latest research shows that in 2025 87% of foundation leaders experienced increased demand for funding, and another 9% expect to feel that pressure soon.
Beyond the headline, the implication is clear: funders are being asked to make harder decisions, faster and to justify those decisions with greater transparency. In this environment, reporting is no longer the final step in a grant cycle. It has become the engine of learning, accountability, and strategy.
But effective reporting isn’t simply about producing more charts or collecting more data. It requires a set of skills that help grantmakers decide what’s meaningful, understand what the data is actually saying, and communicate those insights in a way people can act on.
Based on Fluxx’s recent 3-part Data & Reporting Workshop Series, here are the three skills every grantmaker will need to navigate 2026 with clarity and confidence:
#1: The Ability to Choose the Right Metrics, Not Just More Metrics
Most grantmaking teams today are drowning in data but starving for insight. The instinct is often to track everything “just in case,” leading to dozens of metrics that don’t ladder up to strategy, learning, or decision-making.
Annie Rhode’s session on the foundations of reporting reframed this challenge with a simple, powerful truth: what you measure signals what you value.
In 2026, funders will need to be far more intentional about which metrics actually matter. That means:
- Choosing a small set of mission-aligned metrics: not because a board member asked, not because a report template from 2014 still exists, but because the metric genuinely reflects the change you’re trying to create.
- Tracking those metrics consistently over time: the true story of your organization’s impact often emerges in the movement and changes in data over a longer period rather than in a singular snapshot.
- Ensuring shared definitions across teams: if “time to decision” means something different to programs, grants management, and IT, that indicates you might have three metrics pretending to be one.
- Understanding your place on the data maturity curve: Most organizations stay stuck in descriptive reporting (“what happened”). But future-ready teams are moving towards diagnostic (“why”), predictive (“what’s likely next”), and prescriptive (“what we should do about it”).
Once teams anchor around a shared set of meaningful metrics, they create the conditions for deeper learning and better decisions across the organization.
#2 The Skill of Responsible Interpretation: Turning Metrics Into Meaning
Once metrics are chosen, the real work begins: making sense of them.
Tammy Marinac’s core message during her session on finding the meaning in metrics was that data is only useful if it helps you learn. Too often, reporting becomes an exercise in documentation — a dashboard dump or a collection of numbers with no narrative.
Funders who thrive in 2026 will do something different. They will:
- Understand who they are serving and what “better off” actually looks like: Demographics, reach, delivery, quality, outcomes — these aren’t boxes to check; they are the building blocks of meaningful learning.
- Blend quantitative and qualitative data with confidence: Numbers tell you what happened. Stories tell you why it matters. At the end of the day, you need both.
- Tailor insights to the right audience: Executives, program teams, boards, and community partners look at the same dataset and ask different questions. A responsible interpreter knows how to surface the right insight for the right stakeholder.
- Look for patterns, gaps, and inequities, not just totals: A chart might show that funding increased overall, but a closer look could reveal that the community you’re targeting received only 2% of investment despite being the largest population served. That’s not just data; it’s a call to action.
Responsible interpretation is the bridge between information and action. When you learn to interpret intentionally, that’s when raw data begins to guide strategy, not just record activity.
#3: The Craft of Clear, Human-Centered Data Visualization
Mary Moilanen’s session on how to tell a story with your data made something abundantly clear:
how you present information shapes what people understand, remember, and act on.
Grantmakers often underestimate the cognitive load of “traditional” reporting: spreadsheets with dozens of columns, dashboards cluttered with charts, and visuals that use color for decoration rather than meaning.
But the human brain is not designed to process complexity all at once. It prioritizes:
- preattentive attributes (color, size, position, shape)
- patterns
- contrast
- simplicity
- the first thing placed in the top-left corner
The funders who communicate best in 2026 will:
- Use color intentionally: to direct attention, not decorate the page, and always in color-blind-friendly ways.
- Choose the right chart for the right question: Line graphs for trends, bar graphs for comparison. Stacked bar charts for parts of a whole. Pie charts only when you truly have 2–3 segments (and clarity matters more than precision!).
- Reduce visual noise: If everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasized.
- Guide the viewer’s eye: Layout is not aesthetic, it’s cognitive design. The top-left corner should hold the insight, not the footnote.
- Turn twelve data points into one shape the brain can process instantly: That’s the real power of good visualization: compressing cognitive load so people can learn faster.
Effective visualization doesn’t just make data look better, it makes data work better. It helps unlock understanding that might otherwise stay hidden.
Why These Skills Matter Now (and the Technology to Help You Master Them)
As funders face rising demand, tighter resources, and greater scrutiny, reporting becomes more than a deliverable. It becomes a strategic asset.
Teams that master these skills won’t just produce better reports. They’ll make better decisions, see their work more clearly, communicate with greater confidence, and be better equipped to serve their communities in a moment of heightened need.
And while these skills begin with people, modern business intelligence (BI) tools make it possible to put them into practice every day. For many grantmakers, BI has become the space where strategy, learning, and reporting finally meet.
By unifying operational and impact data, highlighting trends and outliers, and offering clear, accessible visualizations, BI tools help organizations:
- track the metrics that matter
- interpret insights with greater nuance
- communicate findings in ways stakeholders can understand and act on
Fluxx’s own BI solution, Grantelligence, was designed specifically to support this kind of reporting maturity, helping grantmakers move from raw data to real insight using the same principles explored in this workshop series.
Because it’s embedded directly within Fluxx, teams can work with their data in one place without the added lift of integrations or extra logins. The data is already structured into grant-specific datasets, and many of the core reports and dashboards that foundations and agencies need are available as starting points.
If you’d like to see how funders are applying these practices using their own Fluxx data, you’re welcome to join one of our upcoming Grantelligence group demos, where we explore real examples of how embedded BI is helping organizations strengthen their reporting and decision-making. You can also fill out the form below for more information and someone from our team will be in touch!
