Category: uncategorized

Canada’s charity sector loses a valued platform in improving transparency, accountability and impact.
April 8, 2016, Imagine Canada shelved its CharityFocus website. CharityFocus was just launched in February 2012. Too young to be gone so soon. The purpose of CharityFocus was to help “transparency in Canada’s charity sector and communicate impact”. It showed donors a charity’s financial information, annual reports, research and evaluation studies to get a well-rounded picture.
CharityFocus’s site was heralded as transforming “government filings into graphs and visuals”, helping charities be transparent to donors and the public. Janet Gadeski of CharityInfo wrote “it’s a welcome, essential contrast to stories and information services that focus on financial ratios, select very few of Canada’s 85,000 charities for analysis, and restrict input from the charities themselves.”
Canada’s charity sector desperately needs better transparency and accountability. In Charity Intelligence’s research on 650 Canadian charities, 136 of Canada’s largest charities with donations over $1 million still do not provide audited financial statements. Each year in Canada, $750 million in giving goes into a dark pool.
Charity Intelligence’s research process can never replicate the scale of CharityFocus’s presentation of government filings. As for its redundancy with the CRA’s Charities Listing new graphics, we feel strongly Canada needs more organizations championing for transparency and accountability, not less. As the voice of Canada’s charities, Imagine Canada’s CharityFocus was an essential tool working within the sector to improve transparency and accountability. As a charity, representing charities, working for charities, Imagine Canada has a closer relationship with charities than the government regulator. Canadians looking for better charity transparency have lost an important program.
On the measuring impact side, CharityFocus’s shut down is devastating. CharityFocus’s portal had charity annual reports, program evaluation and impact assessments. The CRA’s Charity Directory has nothing on communicating impact. Imagine Canada says it will be “working on new partnerships to communicate with Canadians on how charities are making an impact”. Please hurry. Charity Intelligence has published impact reports on just 10 Canadian charities. This is a critical area where there is too much work for any one organization to do alone.
With CharityFocus gone, Canada’s charity sector falls back to the status quo of 2012; accreditation on over 160 charities – an elite few – no tools to help charities accurately file annual returns and, for now, silence on the difference charities make.
We’re often asked how is Charity Intelligence different from Imagine Canada. Charity Intelligence works for donors. Imagine Canada works for charities. Together we strive for Canada’s charitable sector to be more transparent, accountable and focused on results.
For donors who care about charity transparency and accountability, please consider donating to Charity Intelligence. It’s not a sexy area of giving, it’s nuts and bolts, but we believe it is absolutely essential for a healthy charity sector. To see Charity Intelligence’s results in improving transparency and accountability, please read our 2015 annual report.
Posted: April 20, 2016 Kate Bahen kbahen@charityintelligence.ca
References: 
http://upfront.pwc.com/trust/669-making-case-charity http://upfront.pwc.com/trust/669-making-case-charity
http://www.charityinfo.ca/articles/CharityFocus-launches-wants-your-charitys-story http://www.charityinfo.ca/articles/CharityFocus-launches-wants-your-charitys-story
http://www.imaginecanada.ca/resources-and-tools/charity-focus http://www.imaginecanada.ca/resources-and-tools/charity-focus
 

If you would like to request that Charity Intelligence rate a charity that is not on our a-z list of rated charities, please form” target=”_blank fill out this form.  We are working had to research more charities and are focussing our efforts on those charities that most donors are interested in.  If you are interested in more tailored analysis, please contact us at mailto:kbahen@charityintelligence.ca kbahen@charityintelligence.ca or 416-363-1555.

November 6, 2014
Canadian donors give for impact yet 43% are not sure if a charity will wisely spend their donation.
BMO’s Philanthropy Report 2014 was released this morning. Firstly, Charity Intelligence extends a big “thank you” to BMO and its partners for doing this survey of Canadian donors and publically sharing the findings on changing donor attitudes. Research costs money. Data helps us all better understand the trends underway in Canada’s charitable sector. Good data helps all of us charities do better.
This 2014 BMO survey reports that Canadians are givers and giving remains strong. 91% of “rich” Canadians give to charities compared with 79% of all Canadians as reported in prior BMO surveys. It makes total sense that those with the most give the most. Across all income levels, Canada is a giving nation. Giving is part of the Canadian DNA. We cheer this aspect of what it means to be Canadian and should also, individually, do our part to ensure Canadian giving grows strong.
BMO’s Philanthropy survey reports that the highest motivation of donors is giving for impact. The other top motivations are a desire to give back to the community and feeling passionate about a cause. The survey reports that donors are least motivated to give out of obligation (that they should share their wealth with others) or to reduce taxes.
The largest hesitation is that 43% of donors said they fear a charity would not use the money wisely. Charity Intelligence is witnessing this trend. More Canadians are doing their homework before giving to a charity through getting research and being informed donors. Visitors to Charity Intelligence’s website have tripled since 2011 with more than 625,000 research reports downloaded.  Charity Intelligence hopes our independent research can address donors’ fears so they can give with greater confidence.
Donors want charities to show impact. As donors’ first priority is to have impact, it is increasingly important for charities to respond to this. Charities will need to improve their communications to donors. Donors are asking for more than “success” as measured by fundraising results or low administrative overhead, with a new focus on a charity’s “bottom line” results, namely the impact it achieves. This new emphasis on delivering impact will require charities to do better evaluation of the work they do, the people they serve, and the results they achieve. This higher level of information will be essential in providing donors greater certainty that their giving is making a difference. Charity Intelligence hopes BMO’s survey will raise the level of impact reporting among charities.
It will not be easy. Getting this information and doing these evaluations is difficult work, as Charity Intelligence has found in researching and analysing over 600 Canadian charities. But it’s work worth doing; it matters most to donors.
http://newsroom.bmo.com/press-releases/bmo-philanthropy-report-91-per-cent-of-affluent-c-tsx-bmo-201411050977128001″ target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer Link to the BMO 2014 Philanthropy survey

November 28, 2014

Moneysense has released its 2015 Charity 100, rating Canada’s largest 100 charities. We applaud the fact that Moneysense is providing information to help Canadian donors.  However, we would like to point out a couple of key differences in methodology between the Moneysense grading system and the Charity Intelligence star ratings.
A difference of opinion: Does a charity’s impact or governance matter more?
At Charity Intelligence we believe that the most important metric that charities should be assessed on is impact. The vast majority of the 550 charities we’ve analysed are not reporting their impact. As an interim proxy, we’re grading charities on how well they report preliminary impact measures. Charity Intelligence allocates 40% of a charity’s overall rating to the public reporting of these impact measures. These reporting grades show great diversity among charities with only 3% scoring A+, 15% scoring A- or better, and over 10% scoring between a D+ and F. Charity Intelligence does not assess a charity’s governance since we haven’t found clear tools that would indicate “good” or “bad” governance.

The Moneysense grading is skewed by its Governance Grade. Moneysense grades a charity’s governance based primarily on a survey of charity governance practices.  On this governance metric, 75 of the 100 charities score an A+. Only 16 score less than an A-. These stellar scores would show charity governance is strong in Canada’s largest 100 charities. These high marks raise the overall score of most charities.
Funding reserves. Both Moneysense and Charity Intelligence feel that the amount of money a charity already has is important information for donors. Some charities raise money because they can, not because they have an immediate need for donations to run programs. Increasingly in Canada, charities are raising donations for endowments and long-term campaigns. Donors are aware of the opportunity cost of donations sitting “idle” in a charity’s funding reserves compared with the social good a donation could do if spent. Furthermore, some donors, particularly those who give each year, want to ensure that their charitable giving goes where it will be spent.
The Moneysense Reserve calculation adds up a charity’s cash and investable assets and expresses it in years and months; however, it is not clear what the reserves are divided by to obtain the number of months.  Moneysense has given a grade of A+ to charities that have a funding reserve to cover between 3 months to 3 years. The reported grades are wildly different from Charity Intelligence’s calculations. Moneysense gives an A+ grade to some charities that our data shows have more than 3 years of funding reserves.
This significant discrepancy may be due to the data source. Moneysense data comes from the charities’ 2010, 2011 and 2012 Canada Revenue Agency T3010 filings. Charity Intelligence’s financial analysis uses the most recent audited financial statements.
No rating is perfect. Not ours. Not Moneysense’s. Interestingly, in most cases, the Charity Intelligence and Moneysense ratings show similar things about the charities.  However, in some cases there are discrepancies.  For instance, Moneysense has rated both the Ontario and B.C. divisions of the Canadian Cancer Society in the bottom half of the charities rated (B-) whereas Charity Intelligence has them both in the top third of all charities rated (3-star).  The key difference is the significant weighting of administrative and fundraising cost ratios used by Moneysense.  As well, there are a few charities that score very well on the Moneysense ratings but do not score as well using Ci’s ratings.  For instance, both War Amps of Canada and Chalice Canada received A+ by Moneysense but due to their lower-than-average reporting of their social results, they both are rated as 2-star charities by Ci. These areas of difference add to the need for donors to get the facts on charities from different sources rather than giving solely based on a rating score.

text-align: left; Charity Gift Catalogues.  So Much Choice…How to Pick the Best Christmas Charity Gift
text-align: right; Greg Thomson
text-align: right; December 16, 2014
text-align: right; updated October 27, 2016

The charity gift catalogues are arriving in the mail, and you are calling in with questions. What’s better? To buy a goat or a soccer ball? Maternal health or biscuits? Charity gift catalogues showcase dozens of gifts. Some of these are nice gifts, some of these gifts are proven to save lives. 
Charity Intelligence looks for demonstrated impact when choosing which charities we recommend, so to understand the demonstrated impact of international aid programs, we looked at studies compiled to help evaluate development projects. The best evidence we’ve found is the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab  (J-PAL) ( http://www.povertyactionlab.org” target=”_blank www.povertyactionlab.org), and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) ( http://www.poverty-action.org” target=”_blank www.poverty-action.org).
If you are looking through the gift catalogues, we recommend these Best Buy items found to be most effective in J-PAL and IPA impact research:
Deworming medication: If you want to help kids attend school, deworming medication has proven to be 20 to 700 times more cost effective than scholarships, uniforms and direct cash transfers in increasing school attendance in southern Africa.
https://shop.unicef.ca/anti-infection-tablets” target=”_blank Best Buy: UNICEF’s “anti-infection” tablets, $20 for 450, $0.04 per pill. The tablets  protect children from worms and potentially deadly intestinal infections. 
 Here’s a link to buy UNICEF’s deworming tablets https://shop.unicef.ca/deworming-tablets
2016 Gift Catalogue Prices offered by highly-rated Canadian international development charities with gift catalogues offering deworming pills and/or bed nets.