With our year-end approaching, it’s all hands to profile writing to ensure that we beat our target of 500 charity profiles. However this hasn’t stopped us from picking out some highlights from the past few weeks.  Top of the list is the newly Top Ranked Send a Cow (see profile), a Christian charity providing livestock and agricultural training to African farmers.  

Also in our good books is Arthritis Research Campaign (see profile), Top Ranked for the second year running. Lately we’ve seen lots of reports from smaller cancer charities and outfits linked to hospital trusts.  With the cancer charities, we found that – unlike their larger counterparts such as the Teenage Cancer Trust (see profile) and Breakthrough Breast Cancer (see profile), both of which gained Top Ranked status again this year - these organisations seem less anxious to tell supporters about their work.

Take Penny Brohn Cancer Care (see profile), a pioneer in complementary cancer therapies. Despite excellent testimonials on its website, its patchy annual report resulted in a poor Quality of Reporting score of 42 per cent. Much-improved but still unable to score even half marks for transparency is Bradford Cancer Support (see profile). The same can be said of Cancerbackup (see profile) whose uninspiring 42 per cent suggests its incorporation with the more open Macmillian Cancer Support (see profile) might be no bad thing.

Charities which fundraise to support a particular hospital also fail across the board to gain reputable scores.  The worst offender is The Royal Free Hampstead Charitable Trust (see profile) whose dismal record is borne out again with this year’s meagre score of 33 per cent.  The trust supporting hospitals in Manchester (see profile) is not much better, only mustering a score of 55 per cent.  In fact, the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust (see profile) is the only hospital charity we’ve profiled recently to attain an average reporting score.

It’s always exciting to see big improvements in quality of reporting scores. This is the case with Sussex Wildlife Trust (see profile).  The last time we profiled this Trust, its underwhelming report gave it a lacklustre 54%.  However, more financial details and some future plans have improved this score by a massive 19 points to 73 per cent.  Well done Sussex!
 

 

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