What I want to know is essentially:
- What type of work does the charity do?
- Where is it based?
- Does it have any religious affiliation?
- How much do they spend on charitable activities, fundraising activities, and on governance?
- How do they invest their assets?
- What are their revenues, assets, spending and overheads?
In the absence of a decent comparison tool for me to assess charities based on this (please let me know if you know of one!) I've looked around the internet for some ways to decide, and found the following:
In the UK, the Charities Commission website does quite a good job. It is particularly good on the financials, and has links to each charity's accounts for the last few years. It also generates some useful charts showing the breakdown of how they raise money, and what they spend it on. A similar facility for Scotland is available here.
Finding out where charities invest is much harder. There are reports that some major charities are investing funds in companies whose activities fly directly in the face of their charitable aims: take for example the Panoroma investigation from last year which strongly criticised Comic Relief for its investments in tobacco, alcohol and arms companies. Many other charities are likely to be in on the same game; however due to such a dearth of information available readily in the public domain, I would advocate not boycotting charities on this basis. What we risk doing in this event is essentially boycotting charities whose information we can access, whilst turning a blind eye to the potentially questionable activities of those charities who have done a better job of hiding embarrassing financial information.
There are some other useful ways of drilling down into the activities of charities, too. By reading the very informative blog of Charity Watch UK I found that Age UK have been criticised for an almost opposite problem to that of Comic Relief. Whereas Comic Relief invested in companies with questionable ethical values, Age UK have taken donations from a company renowned for harassing pensioners. This blog, and the associated organisation Charity Watch do a reasonably good job of holding the sector to account - something which the Charities Commission have been criticised for failing to do.
The other sites which try to make a useful impact in solving this problem I have mostly found disappointing. I have so far tried Alive and Giving and Which Charity. A factsheet was available from Ethical Consumer, but this only gave a very sketchy overview, and only for a very small selection of the most prominent charities.
If anyone knows of some other worthwhile resources, I'd be keen to hear from you!
