THE CHARITY WORLD’S MOST TRANSPARENT annual report has just been published. By us.

Today we release our report for the year ending 31 July 2007. You can download it here. It gets a 100 per cent Quality of Reporting score, gives a rounded picture of how Intelligent Giving ticks, and admits our failings as well as our successes.

It’s important that our annual report is up to scratch. We spend our days passing judgment on other charities’ reports, and the Quality of Reporting score – our headline measure of charities’ transparency – is based almost entirely on this key document.

We hope the report serves as a model. If a time-constrained team like ours can pull together enough information to get a 100 per cent score, then so can anyone. All it requires is organised effort, a lot of honesty, and an appreciation of our simple scoring system – which is based upon Charity Commission guidance.

Our report fills in gaps where other very transparent charities fall down. Cancer Research UK (see profile), our top-scoring charity to date, gets 93 per cent – but it doesn’t provide enough information on how the organization runs on a day-to-day basis. The National Trust (see profile) which comes in second place with a score of 92 per cent, fails to reveal how much its vast stock of land is worth.

"It's hard to take charities seriously when they claim to be infallible"

In our report, we cover all of this ground. We explain who is boss to whom; we clarify the range of our property assets (the fact that we don't have any is beside the point); and we give a clear picture of our future expenditure plans – something which grievously few charities talk about.

But most importantly, we explain the difference we’ve made, and we talk about the challenges we’ve faced. No charity is perfect, and it’s hard to take charities seriously when they present themselves as infallible. So we explain our failings. Likewise, we read a remarkable number of annual reports which fail to explain what impact the charity’s work has made. So we’ve made a best-guess at how we’ve made the world a (slightly) better place.

Despite our best endeavours and 'perfect' score, we know our report could be better. We’d like to know how. So please let us know if you have any suggestions.
 

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> Download our annual report

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