Boring Accountant: I understand your argument, and our method of choosing charities is not perfect. But the point remains that we evaluate charities (as a single legal entities) rather than as institutions.  And from a practical perspective, aggregating associated charities would be pretty difficult, particularly when it comes to applying our 43 criteria. Age Concern, for example, have over 300 affiliated charities!

SimonK: Good suggestion. We’ll think about adding that when we next overhaul the website.

Sarah, Intelligent Giving

My mistake about the exempt charity status. But I still think it is inconsistent to compare charities that incur fundraising costs within the charity to those like Tate that have several fundraising entities. If Wooden Spoon had a separate events co, that incurred all the fundraising costs, and passed the surplus on to the main charity, would that be OK by you?

BTW I'm not suggesting Tate is doing anything wrong;their are a number of good reasons for such structure. Just that if IG is trying to give a fair comparison, it should take the associated charities into account. Tate Members alone has voluntary income of £5.5m (to Mar 07), which is higher than many charities that you do cover.

See here for more info. Maybe IG needs a page somewhere explaining the difference between registered and exempt charities.

Hi again, 

The Tate we profile is a charity, but it is unusual in having exempt - rather than registered - charity status (if you're interested you can see this on p7 of the annual report).  This means, among other things, that it does not have to submit accounts to the Charity Commission and does not have an entry in the register.

To answer your other query, since hospitals aren't charities, we profile charities that are linked to the hospital if their voluntary income is big enough to make it into the top 500.

Hope this answers your questions!

Sarah, Intelligent Giving

You say 'Our Objects state that we are authorized to promote charities which are based in England and Wales'. The Tate you cover isn't a charity.When you cover, for instance, a hospital , you report on the 'Friends of' rather than the hospital itself. What's the difference?

The reason why we don't take the other Tate charities into account is because we are evaluating the charity, rather than the institution itself.  As for choosing which Tate charity to profile, this choice is made for us since we currently evaluate the top 500 charities by voluntary income. The other Tate charities aren't in this list. More information on how we choose can be found here.

Sarah, Intelligent Giving

I notice that you seem to be reporting on the Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery, which isn't itself a registered charity but a Non-Departmental Public Body (NDPB). Donations are usually solicted by The Tate foundation (charity 1085314) or Tate Members (charity 313021), or American Patrons of Tate (a US entity). Shouldn't they be considered as a whole if you are trying to help potential donors?