Last month we investigated the donations made by music festivals to charity. We knew the results would have value and would be appreciated by festival-goers and charities alike.

We submitted the results to Third Sector magazine last week. However in Third Sector's follow-up research they found a handful of factual errors (and they reported on these errors today). As soon as they alerted us to this situation, we decided to postpone publishing the results on this site.

We admit that we were not rigorous enough in checking our findings and that this meant our research was incomplete.

While we deeply regret the errors, we would point out that it was not our methodology – which has served us well with countless other research exercises - that was wrong, but the execution of that methodology. A series of administrative errors were to blame. We do feel we have let ourselves down on this occasion and we apologise to the organisations affected.

We are a very process-driven organisation - we have to be, to ensure consistent results in our charity overviews, and we pride ourselves on improving our procedures at monthly process meetings. We have established what went astray during the festivals research and we are reviewing procedures to ensure it doesn't happen again.

In the meantime - the article has not been postponed indefinitely. Once we’ve double-checked our findings we will go ahead and publish the full results.
 

 

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