I have made some graphs. Goodness knows why I haven’t got round to this before. Here’s what I found.

The ‘average charity’ on this site has a Quality of Reporting score of 68 per cent and an annual expenditure of £20m. Charities which are bigger tend to get higher scores, but there is more than a handful of poorly performing large charities and top-performing small ones.

The correlation between a charity’s size and its score is therefore weak – meaning that small charities have no excuse for producing shoddy annual reports. On top of this, two-thirds of the charities we profile have scores of between 60 and 80 per cent, meaning that charities of any size scoring less than 60 per cent deserve a stern talking-to, and those above 80 really are doing a terribly good job.

Only one charity scores below 20 per cent (Pilgrim Homes); and only one scores above 90 (Cancer Research UK) – which suggests that, although the dreadful end of the spectrum is sparsely populated, there’s still a lot of room for high-scoring charities to improve.

Just over a quarter of the charities we profile are officially Top-Ranked, meaning they score over 75 per cent, and are permitted to display our ‘Top-Ranked Charity’ icon on their websites (like this). This is a larger number than I expected – but it shows that a lot of charities really are committed to transparency: an encouraging sign.

The overwhelming conclusion I draw from the data, however, is that most charities are doing reasonably well. The preponderance of them scores between 65 and 75 per cent. That’s not bad. But it’s not great, either.

• This is the most interesting graph. It shows how our Quality of Reporting scores are distributed across the charities we profile.
• This shows the (weak) correlation between Quality of Reporting scores and charities’ size.

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