Sightsavers International plans to be “honest beyond what is necessary” and publish its balanced scorecard on its website for the world to see, according to its chief executive.

Dr Caroline Harper told yesterday’s public meeting of the Charity Commission that the balanced scorecard – a colour-coded management tool commonly used in the private sector for setting targets and measuring progress – is already on the charity’s intranet and in two months’ time will be published on the public-facing website.

“I’m scared about that, it’s very honest,” she said. “There are some reds in there, but that’s because we’ve set ourselves some quite stretched targets. If they were all green we wouldn’t be stretching ourselves enough.

“But explaining that to our donors is going to be a challenge, and my head of fundraising is having kittens about the fact we are putting this on our website.  But I think we will be trusted more if we admit that not everything works. Trust is our lifeblood – and not just trust from the public, but trust from the communities we work in.”

Click here to find out more about the use of balanced scorecards by civil society groups ...

...and click here to find out more about Sightsavers’ balanced scorecard.