Yes SIR, can we boogie?
WITHIN THE NEXT few months an advisory panel will help us decide our updated set of criteria for judging charities' accountability. In preparation for the meeting, we've been looking for good new sources of charity information.
Our great hope at the moment is the Charity Commission's Summary Information Return or SIR*. This document gives a digestible breakdown of a charity's aims, achievements, management, finances and plans. Since last year all charities with an expenditure of £1+ million have had to submit one to the Commission.
The SIR was created specifically for “the interested public”. As a result it is more readable and interesting than the annual report it accompanies - when it's filled out properly. For a good example, see Health Unlimited. For a poor one, see BBC Children in Need.
Properly completed, SIRs cover several facts that we can't usually find in annual reports. Future plans for example, the amount of money received from government (as opposed to the public), the success of the main fundraising projects. And so on.
The only problem is that they only cover larger charities. If, as we would like, they become a key part of our transparency criteria, it means we would have to stop creating our detailed profiles of charities with an expenditure of less than £1million. At the moment our minimum expenditure is £250,000. Is this a sacrifice worth making for the sake of more informative profiles, we wonder?
2 comments:
Can you not have different types of profiles for different levels of charity? SO your detailed ones for £1m+ charities, then more basic ones for £250k+, then even more simple below that threshold?
That's a good point, and one that we're thinking about. However, we want to keep an element of comparability across all the charities we profile - which makes it easier for donors to decide which charity deserves their cash. But these are tricky questions, and ones we haven't by any means got the answers for yet.
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