Giving with Impact

At Charity Intelligence, our motto is: Be informed. Give intelligently. Have impact. We see these as the basic building blocks for donors to be able to strengthen the charitable sector and produce a better Canadian society.

 

In order to have the most impact with your giving, donors must give intelligently. In order to give intelligently, donors must be informed. So the question that we continually wrestle with is: what information do donors need to be informed?

 

In 2006, Charity Intelligence started researching and analysing charities, gathering the data that we believed was most important.  We gathered information on charities’ management and operations, analyzed financial data, and dug into available information on the social results produced by charities – the impact of the charities’ programs.

 

The essential information about a charity is the clients it serves, the work it undertakes, and the results it achieves - how the charity helps to change lives. Providing this information for donors is called "results reporting". This is far more important than fundraising costs and administrative overhead, in our opinion. Yet this critical information is often not disclosed.  

 

Charity Intelligence assesses a charity's social results from the information posted on its website and in annual reports, newsletters, impact reports, etc. We believe all donors should have access to results information, whether they donate $20 or $100,000. We encourage charities to publicly post annual results for all to read. 

 

We also assess charities' demonstrated impact per dollar donated so that donors can understand what is likely to happen because of their generosity. Is the charity likely to use their donation to create a lot of change or just a little, or is it impossible to tell? We know that donors want to know what impact the charities they support are having, so we let them know what impact the charities have demonstrated.

 

 

 

For donors interested in giving for impact, and trustees of foundations making grants, this is an exceptional article on how to evaluate charities and grant applications. Real World Impact Measurement: "Good enough" = simple enough to do, but rigourous enough to mean something written by Kevin Starr and Laura Hattendorf, Mulago Foundation, published in Stanford Social Innovation Review, September 2012.