Toby: We could do this, and indeed we have done. But we're cautious about plugging the results too much. That's because the 'charitable expenditure' figure we publish here (and on all our profiles of charities) can be misleading.

The main reason for this is that 'charitable expenditure' is legally defined as being (virtually) all of a charity's expenditure except for fundraising costs and the cost of getting the accounts done. So 'charitable expenditure' isn't the same as 'money which goes directly to the cause'. Charities with HR departments, for example, must categorize the cost of running those departments as 'charitable expenditure.' This might seem a bit counter-intuitive, but it does make sense (big charities couldn't do fieldwork if they didn't have office backup).

Second, charities which receive a lot of income from government receive uniformly high charitable-expenditure ratios. That doesn't mean their fundraising is efficient. What it does mean is that a lot of their income comes in without any fundraising effort - or at least any fundraising effort which shows up in the accounts. It could be the case in these charities that their fundraising is woefully bad. But, because only a small portion of the charity's total income was raised in this way, that wouldn't show up on our profiles.

Nonetheless, we have crunched the numbers in the way you suggest. And you can see the results here.

Adam, Intelligent Giving

Adam,

Given all the data you've collected on charities accounts, would it be possible for you to publish some comparative data for all the charities you've covered? I was thinking in particular about the % that's spend on charitable activities box - 78% sounds like quite a bit to me, but I've got no idea what the average for the charitable sector would be...

Thanks...
Toby