Your goal: to put the important information from the project in an accessible and practical form for an audience who will use and/or evaluate it. To achieve this goal, you need to answer certain basic questions that your audience will bring to the proposal. The structure of the project report takes into account those questions.
What is the bottom line? This part of the report is written for busy executives who will not read the full report and don't particularly care about the details in the report. They need only what is most immediately useful for them and for the organization: a quick overview of the problem or need that generated the report, the major conclusions, and recommendations. Obviously, this summary should be brief and to the point.
What did you do in the project to generate the information? To the skeptical audience, your information is only as credible as the methods you used to get it. If you are reporting the results of an empirical research project--such as laboratory or field research--carefully describe the procedures and materials you used. If the project gathers information in other ways--such as library research and interviews--detail the sources that you used, what they were, how reliable they were, and why you chose them. The purpose of this section is to convince the audience that your research method is reliable.
What did your research produce? This is where you report your findings. The focus in this section should be on the facts. It may be a description of the product you have created or the experimental results of laboratory or field research or the data you have uncovered in the library or in interviews. Describe your findings in words; if graphs, tables, figures, or photographs will be helpful in addition to the words, include them.
What do your findings mean? The facts by themselves don't tell the whole story. In this section you take a step back from the facts and broaden your focus to include your interpretation of the facts. An interpretation is a statement of relationships among the facts. Can you find cause-and-effect relationships? Can you say that one thing is better than another? Can you claim that the success of one thing means the success of another? Can you argue that there is a history that must be taken into account. Can you state that one policy is more expedient than another? This is the place where you help the audience to understand what the facts mean.
How are your findings relevant to the audience? In this section, you step back even further and widen your focus again. The issue now is what the relationships among the facts mean to the audience and to the organization as a whole. This is where you make an argument about relevance. You can do this by referring back to the need or problem that sparked the project and show how your research meets that need or solves that problem. For a school project, your conclusions will show what you have learned from the project and how it applies to the course material.
What do you suggest that we do? If you have specific recommendations to make, this is where you should make them. It's usually helpful to the audience to have them in list form. You should provide any details that may be necessary for following your recommendations, such as suggestions for implementation and sources of funding.