It’s rare to get a chance to see how charities in the UK measure up with others across the world. So when Guidestar USA, (an organization that publishes info on charities, see their UK arm) published some research into the state of charity transparency in America, I was keen to take a look.

First, the good news: the vast majority of non-profits they studied put some information about their work on the internet. But the report had bad news too: only 43 per cent posted their annual reports on their websites. And only 13 per cent posted their audited financial statements on the web. Larger charities were slightly better at publishing this information, but not much. So some of the most revealing documents about charities in the states are kept hidden. That’s worrying.

And the situation in the UK is not much better. According to our stats, 42 per cent of the 500 charities from England and Wales we profile have their annual report and financial statements ‘easy to find’ on their website (meaning they can be accessed through the main webpages, search function or sitemap). That means a firm majority of these large charities don’t feature their annual report on their website. In the vast majority of cases, this is because the annual report simply wasn’t on the website at all.

'So what?' you might say, 'At least charities in the UK are no less transparent than their partners in the States?' Not so! In the US, there is no law requiring charities to produce an annual report - it's entirely voluntary. But in the UK, by law almost all charities must produce detailed annual report and accounts.

Now, I try not to take statistics too seriously. After all, in the UK donors can visit the Charity Commission website and download any registered charity's report from there. But it is more than a little troubling that so many charities have this info to hand, but don’t bother to bring it to the attention of donors and supporters.


 

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* In the US, charities seem to publish details of staff, trustees etc... in separate documents. For charities in England and Wales, these must be included in the annual report. So although 43% of US charities publish their annual report on the net, probably fewer than that include all the information that UK charities include.

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