I’ve been thinking a lot about the measurement and reporting of charitable impact over the last few weeks, as you might expect given this edition’s cover theme. It’s a topic that can divide opinion – plenty of charities take great care in tracking their achievements and presenting the difference they make via live dashboards and impact reports.
Others warn that collecting swathes of information is just too difficult for many organisations, and can even be counterproductive. And some believe that personal relationships with beneficiaries and comprehension of the cause is a more useful and appropriate metric for charitable endeavour than cold hard data. After all, we can’t count whatever hasn’t happened as a result of a charity’s intervention.
In my view, the collection of impact data should be relevant and proportionate, but I don’t see how a board of trustees can operate effectively without regular impact updates. It’s common practice for a finance report to be presented at every board meeting, and charities don’t even exist to make money.
They exist to create public benefit. Surely it is every trustee’s number one priority to ascertain what and how much their charity is doing for its service users, and to habitually enquire how it might do more.
Reach Volunteering closure
The announcement on 1 September that 46-year-old Reach Volunteering was to close sent shockwaves through the sector. People flocked to social media to express their sadness and anger, with dozens relating personal anecdotes of their own interactions with the matching platform down the years, either as volunteers/trustees or as client charities seeking expertise.
This sent me searching for Reach’s own impact report, wondering if perhaps a failure to effectively present its accomplishments was a contributing factor to its funding woes.
I could not have been more wrong. Reach’s 2025 impact report is truly excellent – nobody reading it could come away feeling anything other than utterly inspired by what its services have achieved, both for charities and for the volunteers that give their time. The platform has been an unqualified success, with demand for both volunteers and volunteering opportunities growing to record levels last year, and nine in 10 charities reporting positive results from using its services.
It’s super effective, brilliant value for money, and plays a vital role in the wider sector ecosystem supporting other, mostly small, charities. This makes the failure of trusts and foundations to maintain support for it deeply depressing.
Even more galling are the large sums that we know are still out there, but out of reach. According to the Association of Charitable Foundations, the largest 300 endowed charitable foundations in the UK are sitting on c.£89bn in assets, while it is generally acknowledged that they disburse around 4% of that each year, on average.
Meanwhile, at least 1,000 UK charity infrastructure bodies have closed since 2010, according to analysis by 360Giving in 2021 – and we can all name many more that have gone since then. We can only guess at the social impact that has been lost as a result.
