A consulate, a local authority or an institutional partner does not read your report the way a member does. That reader is looking neither for the story of the year nor for the enthusiasm of the board: they want to know who you represent, how you know it, and what you did that can be checked. Four requirements hold the whole document together: a scope written down in black and white, registered members rather than followers, figures a third party could reproduce, and an explicit admission of what you do not know. A short report, dated and honest about its limits, carries more weight than a thick file in which no figure holds. We describe here no award criteria and no official procedure: every institution publishes its own, and those documents are the ones to rely on.
An institution does not read your report the way a member does
An activity report written for the general meeting addresses people who were there. They saw the events, they know the people mentioned, they know what went wrong and why. The document lets them sign off on a year they lived through. A report written for a consulate, a local authority or an institutional partner addresses the exact opposite: someone who saw nothing, knows nobody, and has no particular reason to take your word for it.
That reader has a constraint your members do not have. They must be able to repeat what you wrote in front of a third party: their own management, a case officer, an elected official, sometimes an assembly. Anything they cannot repeat without risk, they leave out, and they leave it out without telling you. A sentence such as "our community brings together several thousand people around the world" is not false; it is simply unusable, because nobody can take responsibility for it.
Hence a rule that governs everything else: in this document, a statement is worth only as much as the method that produced it. This is not an exercise in communication, it is an exercise in traceability. That is what separates it from the activity report for a general meeting, which can afford a share of narrative because its audience shares the memory of the facts. The two documents can share their data; they share neither their tone nor their burden of proof.
Followers count for nothing next to registered members
This is where the credibility of the whole thing is decided, and it is almost always dispatched in a single line. Many diaspora associations open their report with an audience figure: the number of followers of a page, the number of participants in a messaging group, the number of recipients of a newsletter. Those numbers are flattering and easy to obtain. They do not answer the question being asked.
A follower is a person who has declared nothing. You do not know where they live, whether they belong to the community concerned, whether they can still be reached, or whether they are already counted somewhere else in the total. A registered member is a person who filled in a record: they declared themselves, they gave a country of residence, they can be contacted again, and they are unique in the database. The difference is not one of degree, it is one of nature. The first figure measures visibility, the second establishes representation.
An institutional reader makes that distinction immediately, because it is the first question they will be asked: how many people do they represent, and how do they know? A community that lives only in a chat thread cannot answer, not out of negligence but by construction. There is no member record in a messaging group, therefore no country of residence field, therefore nothing to count, as we set out in WhatsApp group or diaspora platform.
The practical consequence is uncomfortable and yet liberating: a smaller figure of registered members is worth more than a larger figure of followers. The first can be defended line by line, the second collapses at the first precise question. If the count has not been carried out yet, that is where to start, before writing anything at all; the method and its levers are described in how to count your diaspora.
Scope is declared before any figure
The most common flaw is not a wrong figure, it is a figure whose subject nobody can identify. Before the first data point, the report must set out three definitions. They take a few lines, and their absence makes everything else unreadable.
- Who counts as a member. Someone registered on the platform? Up to date with their dues? Having taken part at least once? None of these definitions is better than the others, but a single one must be chosen, written down, and applied throughout the document. A report that counts registrations on page 2 and paying members on page 5 without saying so loses its reader for good.
- Which territory, and seen from where. A diaspora is defined by an origin and by a dispersion of residence. Both must be explicit: where members come from, and where they live today. For a regional diaspora, the connection to the territory is often wider than birth, since it includes those who studied or worked there. Say so, rather than letting the institution guess.
- Which period. A calendar year, a financial year, a season of activity. And above all, the date on which the figures were extracted. A living database changes every day; a figure without an extraction date is a figure nobody will ever find again.
These three definitions have a valuable side effect. They force you to settle internally questions the board sometimes works around for years, and which will resurface sooner or later, not least when opening a local branch or putting a motion to a general meeting.
A figure exists only if someone can reproduce it
The test to apply before writing down any data point is simple: if a third party took your database and your definition, would they find the same number? If the answer is no, the figure is not ready. A definition, a date or a source is missing.
Every figure in the report should therefore carry three attributes, even implicitly: what it counts, when it was extracted, and where it comes from. The number of members comes from the directory, the number of participants comes from event registrations, the number of paying members comes from recorded payments. These are not the same populations, they do not overlap, and adding them up produces a total that means nothing.
Measured and estimated figures must also be kept clearly apart. The number of registered members is measured. The number of people from the territory living in a given country is, in the vast majority of cases, an estimate you are in no position to produce. Writing "we have registered X members in this country, which says nothing about the total number of nationals living there" is sturdier than any extrapolation, and it is a sentence a case officer can quote as it stands.
Finally, missing data should be written down. "We do not know the age distribution, as the question is not asked at registration" is worth more than an approximate table. An acknowledged gap is evidence of seriousness; a gap filled in on the fly is a time bomb, because it will show the moment one figure is compared with another.
The structure of a report that reads in ten minutes
An institutional report does not need to be long. It needs to be navigable: the reader must find in seconds the figure they are looking for, and the note explaining how that figure was obtained. Seven blocks are enough, in this order.
- 1. Identity and scope. Name, legal status, date of creation, purpose, and the three definitions above.
- 2. What we know about our members. Registered numbers at a given date, breakdown by country of residence, and how they were collected.
- 3. What we did. Activities over the period, dated, with the number of registrations or attendees where it was measured.
- 4. What it produced. Concrete, verifiable results, modest ones included, rather than intentions.
- 5. Resources and governance. Composition of the board, how it is elected, the association's resources, volunteer time mobilised.
- 6. Limits and method. What is not measured, what is estimated, and the date the data was extracted.
- 7. What we are asking for. If there is a request, it is stated here, precise and bounded, never scattered through the text.
Block 6 is the one that gets cut first when the document grows, and that is a mistake. It is precisely what makes the other five credible, because it shows that you know what your own figures are worth. A one-page methodological annex at the end serves that purpose without weighing the reading down.
Block 7 deserves particular attention. A vague request invites a vague answer. A request bounded in its object, its duration and its scope can be processed. We describe no award criteria here: every institution publishes its own expectations and its own procedures, and those documents are what count, not a blog article.
What is better left unwritten
A few formulations cost you the reader's trust immediately, and they almost always slip into reports written with the best of intentions.
- Population figures you did not produce. Repeating an estimate read somewhere about the size of your community exposes you to being corrected by your own reader, who sometimes has other sources. Count what you have registered, and nothing else.
- Personal data. A report is built on aggregates, never on lists of individuals. Members signed up to belong to a community, not to appear in a document sent to a third party. The applicable framework is set out in our GDPR guide for a diaspora platform.
- Superlatives. "The largest", "the only", "the reference" are unverifiable claims that lower the value of everything around them, including your exact figures.
- Commitments made on behalf of members. An association can describe what its members do. It cannot promise their future mobilisation without having asked them, and an institution knows that better than anyone.
- Positions outside your purpose. An activity report describes an association's activity. Anything spilling over into the public affairs of the territory of origin turns a technical document into a political one, and you lose control of how it is read.
When a two-page note remains the right choice
Resist the reflex of answering every approach with a file. In at least three situations, a long document works against the sender.
When it is a first contact. A two-page note saying who you are, how many members you have registered and at what date, what you did this year and what you are looking for is enough to open a door. The full file will come if you are asked for it, and it will be received all the better for having been requested.
When the community is still small or recent. A thick report on thin activity produces exactly the opposite of the intended effect: the reader measures the gap between the size of the document and the size of the facts. A young association gains from owning its size and showing a trajectory, however short.
When you have nothing to ask for. A report sent to maintain a relationship does not need the apparatus of a funding application. It must be short, regular and accurate. Regularity matters more than thickness here: three reliable notes a year build a relationship that a single isolated file never builds.
The full report answers a real need. When that need is absent, it consumes board time that will be missing elsewhere, and it returns nothing.
Producing the report in seven steps
- Settle the three definitions. Who counts as a member, what connection to the territory, which period. Write them down before opening a single data set.
- Extract the data on a single date. One extraction day for the whole document, stated in black and white, rather than figures collected over several weeks.
- Separate the measured from the estimated. Two mental columns, and nothing that moves from one to the other along the way.
- Write the activities with their dates. One line per activity, with the number of registrations or attendees when it was recorded, and nothing when it was not.
- Write the note on method. Collection method, definitions, extraction date, known limits. This is the block that makes the others usable.
- Have it read by someone who was not there. A member from outside the board will spot in ten minutes the sentences that assume context the reader will not have.
- Archive the version you sent. The document and the data behind it, in the same place, so that the next board can answer questions asked a year later.
The last step is the one that gets skipped, and it is the most expensive. An institution rarely comes back within the month: it comes back the following year, often after a change of board, with a question about a figure nobody can reconstruct any more.
What the platform should take care of
None of the above requires sophisticated tooling, but all of it becomes painful with no tooling at all. Four functions make the difference, and they are exactly the ones missing when a community lives in a spreadsheet and an inbox.
The first is the member record with a country of residence filled in. It is what turns an audience into a registered headcount, and it belongs to the base available in every plan, along with the directory, posts and messaging. The second is the geographic breakdown, which produces without re-keying the table by country that the institution will look at first. The third is the trace of events and their registrations, which gives numbers recorded as they happen rather than reconstructed from memory. The fourth is membership and dues tracking, which documents the share of the community that actually contributes.
Two further elements matter over time. A dashboard with export avoids rebuilding the same aggregates every year. And data export, with the principle that the database belongs to the association and not to the vendor, guarantees that the next board can answer questions about a report it did not write.
At Terrilink, the map and geographic breakdown, events with registrations, memberships and the dashboard are available from the Pro plan onwards, at 149 € per month. They are not part of the Starter plan, at 69 € per month, which stays centred on the directory, posts and messaging. That is a limit worth knowing before committing rather than when preparing your first report.
In short
What should a report for a consulate or a local authority contain?
Seven blocks are enough: identity and scope, what you know about your members, the dated activities of the period, their verifiable results, resources and governance, limits and method, and the request if you are making one. The block on limits is what makes all the others credible.
How many members do you need to be credible?
There is no threshold, and nobody can honestly announce one. What matters is not the size of the number but the way it was established: a written definition, an extraction date, a database in which each member declared themselves. A modest, verifiable headcount carries more weight than a large, anonymous audience.
Can member data appear in a report?
As aggregates, yes: headcounts, breakdown by country, number of participants. In named form, no: your members signed up to belong to a community, not to appear in a document sent to a third party. Our GDPR guide for a diaspora platform sets out the applicable framework.
Which Terrilink plan provides these elements?
The directory and member records belong to the base present in every plan. The map and geographic breakdown, events with registrations, memberships and the dashboard are available from the Pro plan onwards, at 149 € per month, and are not part of the Starter plan, at 69 € per month.
Method and sources. This is a method article: it describes a way of writing, drawn from observing diaspora associations, and relies on no external source. We deliberately put forward no funding amount, no award criteria and no procedure presented as official: every institution publishes its own expectations, and its documents are what count. No estimate of the population of any diaspora is put forward either, for lack of a measurement we could verify. The only factual elements stated concern the product: member records and the directory in every plan, the map and geographic breakdown, events with registrations, memberships, the dashboard and export from the Pro plan onwards, as well as the prices of the Starter and Pro plans.