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Accountability and transparency need improvement in charities

Fundraising | Celina Ribeiro | 26 Feb 2009

Charities are performing well on donor care but are struggling with accountability and transparency, according to early results from a new online benchmarking survey facility.

Results from 30 charities which have completed the ImpACT Coalition’s toolkit have been released today, Tuesday 3 February. According to the survey, the sector as a whole scored high on issues of donor care, at 92.42 per cent, but considerably worse when quizzed on accountability and transparency policy, with a sector-wide score of 56.1 per cent.

The Coalition said that results showed that charities need to emphasise transparency within their general structures. In addition to strong donor care, the interim report found that governance and communications were also areas in which charities are currently performing well across the board.

Director of the ImpACT Coalition Richard Marsh (pictured) noted that larger charities had not outperformed the small; “bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to charities’ toolkit performances,” he said. The survey also found that few charities had performed either consistently well or consistently poorly across the eight subjects the toolkit covered.

ImpACT chair Alan Gosschalk singled out international development organisations and bodies with strong membership bases for particular acclaim, saying that those charities had “some very high scores”.

However, the relative poor performance of charities on the issue of transparency has prompted Adam Rothwell from Intelligent Giving to surmise that there is “a lot of room for improvement”. There was a large disparity in quality of practice on issues of transparency, according to the interim findings, particularly in relation to making documents publicly available.

“The interim results from the toolkit confirm our view that charities must do more to put transparency at the heart of their organisations,” he said.

The toolkit was launched last June in an effort to encourage charities to share best practice, sign up to improve standards and to gauge current practice and attitudes within the sector.

The report is available online and also contains action points for each of the categories, in light of the interim results.

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