Progress & Outcome Auditing

Progress and outcome based auditing and their implications with funding categorisation

There are two main auditing types in the Catalyst funding process which can be considered against how they impact funding categorisation.

Progress auditing

Progress auditing concerns the execution of a funded proposal. The community needs to know how a funded proposal is progressing and when execution is complete.

Relevance to funding categorisation

Progress auditing has little to no relevance to funding categorisation as this auditing is applied to every funded proposal regardless of what they are executing and trying to achieve. The purpose of progress auditing is to determine the amount of progress achieved by a given proposal and when that proposal is completed.

Responsibility for submission and audits

The funded proposer is responsible for submitting their progress updates. Full time contributors for Catalyst would be suitable candidates to be responsible for ensuring that progress reports are submitted and to respond to issues concerning proposal execution. The community can also be involved and can even be incentivised to be part of this process of auditing the progress of funded proposals.

Outcome auditing

Outcome auditing concerns whether the execution of a given funded proposal has met any the objectives set out by the community or set by the proposal team themselves. The community is looking to understand whether a funded proposal resulted in a positive impact or that helped push a certain objective forward in a positive direction.

Relevance to funding categorisation

Outcome auditing is highly relevant to funding categorisation. Funding categorisation deals with what proposal types can be submitted in the funding categorisation along with the budget that is made available to those proposal types. The funding that is available for certain proposal types will impact whether certain objectives can be met and what proposals the community will be able to audit against meeting those objectives.

Responsibility for submission and audits

The funded proposer is responsible for recording any metrics or feedback that help to provide evidence towards meeting objectives. Both full time Catalyst contributors and the whole community would be responsible for determining whether those results are accurate and whether the proposers did indeed meet or partially meet the objectives that were set out.

Summary

• Guidance and processes are needed for the auditing of any proposal type surrounding their progress and execution. Progress auditing does not need to be tied to how funding categorisation decisions are made and how it is structured.

• Funding categorisation needs to consider the impact on auditing around whether objectives are being met against the budget that has been distributed.

• Auditing around outcome is an important consideration for funding categorisation however this does not mean that the auditing metrics must be attached to the funding categorisation itself. Instead it is just an acknowledgement they are interconnected.