What new Charities SORP means for research and evaluation

From January 2026, charities across the UK will work to new reporting standards that put impact front and centre.

The updated Charities Statement of Recommended Practice (SORP) doesn’t just tweak the technical requirements, it fundamentally reshapes how charities need to think about, measure and communicate their work.

For those of us who care about evidence-based change, this matters. Because for the first time, the SORP explicitly asks charities to explain not just what they did or how much they spent, but the difference they actually made.

From outputs to outcomes to impact

The 2019 SORP encouraged charities to describe their activities and outputs. The 2026 version asks for something more demanding: evidence of change and impact on people’s lives.

This shift reflects a growing understanding that demonstrating value means showing the difference you make to people, not just listing what you do.

This matters for charity trustees, who need to explain impact with confidence. It matters for funders, who increasingly want to see evidence of real-world outcomes. And it matters for the people charities serve, whose experiences should shape how success is measured.

But here’s where it gets tricky. Most of us know where evaluation goes wrong: feeling like you’re being audited; interviews that feel like a waste of time; bland extraction of data handed over to external teams; treating people as units in a study rather than as humans with insight to share.

This kind of evaluation generates compliance, not understanding.

Making evaluation work for charities

The 2026 SORP creates an opportunity to do evaluation differently – to design approaches that are rigorous about evidence while being grounded in people’s lived experience.

At Kaleidoscope, we work with charities to develop research and evaluation that combines methodological rigour with a human-centred approach. Our work is based on five principles:

• Being rigorous about purpose – establishing clear questions that matter to your stakeholders, not just ticking boxes for reporting requirements.
• Delivering with kindness – using warm, approachable methods that respect people’s time and avoid abstract jargon, appropriate for busy and complex charity environments.
• Combining different ways to gather insight – blending qualitative depth with quantitative measures, maximising participation while prioritising organisational learning.
• Producing results that have impact – focusing on tangible, actionable evidence rather than abstract concepts, balancing credibility with practical application.
• Respecting people’s time – designing evaluation to be of minimum burden while delivering robust evidence efficiently.

This approach means bringing people together to reflect, share wisdom and build understanding as a group. Our goal is to support learning and improvement through participation in evaluation, not just through its findings.

When stakeholders help shape how impact is defined and measured, when their experiences inform the framework, evaluation becomes part of the change process itself.

How our evaluation principles work

Our principles translate into practical methods that embed evaluation into how charities already work. In practice, it means:

• co-producing impact frameworks with trustees and beneficiaries, so the questions you’re asking are the ones that actually matter
• using interactive workshops to develop theories of change that map the conditions needed for impact, not just the activities delivered
• combining key informant interviews with evaluation workshops that invite stakeholders to interrogate data together, building shared ownership of findings and next steps.

This is evaluation designed to strengthen the work, not add a burden to it. It produces evidence that trustees can use with confidence, and creates learning that flows back into practice immediately, not six months after a final report lands.

Meeting SORP requirements with integrity

The 2026 SORP raises the bar for charity reporting. For organisations committed to impact work that respects people’s time and experience, it’s an invitation to demonstrate the difference they’re making in ways that are both credible and meaningful.

Whether you’re building impact frameworks from scratch, developing evaluation approaches that genuinely include beneficiary voices, or preparing trustees to report confidently on impact, the work needs to be grounded in both technical expertise and human connection.

Because impact reporting done well isn’t separate from the work of creating change. It’s part of how change happens.

Kaleidoscope helps charities prepare for SORP 2026 through inclusive research and evaluation approaches that centre beneficiary voices and build genuine understanding of impact. If you’re thinking about how to strengthen your impact reporting, we’d be glad to explore what that could look like for your organisation – get in touch hello@kscopehealth.org.uk.