Being different | Intelligent Giving

			A special case OUR RESEARCHERS FOUND identifying then prioritising religious charities* a challenging task. In each sector we try to profile the majority of charities with an expenditure of over £250,000. But there are literally hundreds of Christian charities which qualify, many of an equal size, so they are hard to prioritise. And then of course there are a handful of charities from other religions, so we had to try to cover at least 20 each of them. Our resulting list is not scientific but we hope representative. Religious charities are very different to the rest. We discovered for example:

			Catholic charities are generally much larger than Anglican ones, since the Anglican Church has a flatter structure - and more money from Anglican collection plates stay within the parish, helping local charities. More Catholic money appears to float up to more regional levels and causes. Most Sikh, Hindu and Muslim charities support a church/mosque/temple and the surrounding community. Most charities supporting a church/mosque/temple take the unconventional approach of including the value of their buildings in their "Unrestricted Funds". This vastly inflates their reserves figure in our listings. This is unfortunate and misleading. Most charities classify their buildings as "Restricted Funds", so the resulting reserves figure gives a more accurate sense of "spare cash". We couldn't inform some charities that we were listing them because they had no email address and when we phoned them, the person who answered didn't speak any English. Many Sikh charities emphasize sporting facilities. Religious charities were more likely to be suspicious of our motives and several were upset that we were listing them. * By religious charities, we mean charities with a clear religious ethos.