Intelligent Giving
2008/9 Schools Wikipedia Selection
Intelligent Giving is a website for charity donors run by a small, not-for-profit company based in Bethnal Green, London. It was founded in 2005 by two former journalists, David Pitchford and Peter Heywood, and launched on 1 November 2006.
Overview
Intelligent Giving aims to raise public interest in charitable giving and advises donors how to make the most satisfactory use of their money. It is one of several organisations, including New Philanthropy Capital (UK) and Charity Navigator (US), that have formed for this purpose, and it operates in a relatively new sector in the not-for-profit arena. It seeks to bring its findings to as wide a readership as possible, employing chatty and casual English on its website and issuing timely press releases of charity-related material. The authors align themselves with donors, not with the charity fundraising community.
Services and work
The central feature of Intelligent Giving’s website is a charity ratings service. In 2005-2006 it researched and rated over 500 UK charities and listed a further 1000. Although it clearly acknowledges that quality of work is the most important way to judge a charity, it holds transparency as an important indicator of a charity’s diligence, and says that this is the most important aspect - and a cross-sector comparable one - of a charity's annual report.
Intelligent Giving claims to assess transparency using 43 criteria derived largely from research carried out by the Charity Commission in 2004. Intelligent Giving gives a percentage score for the transparency, or "Quality of reporting" of each charity.
The website also contains overviews of charity sectors, an explanation of the full range of ways to give, interviews with givers and short articles by experts. It also provides a discussion forum for the donor community.
Charity Commission
Intelligent Giving has been criticised by the Charity Commission following the complaint it raised regarding Wooden Spoon. In a letter dated 13th November 2007 a Charity Commission representative disagreed with IG's financial analysis and stated, "The Commission does not concur with your view that the charity's costs were excessive, taking into account the method of fundraising which is employed by the Charity" . This judgement subsequently attracted attention in the Sunday Telegraph, where it was given as an example of the Charity Commission's poor decision-making process.
Voluntary sector response
Intelligent Giving says that it has received good and bad responses from charities in equal measure.- Negative responses include: Steve Taylor of Sue Ryder Care, who decried the organisation as a ‘self appointed guardian’ with ‘little demonstrable understanding of the operating framework’ of charities; the Institute of Fundraising, which called its research methods ‘rudimentary’; and Sir Terry Wogan (a trustee of Children in Need) who condemned its work as 'contemptible'.
Intelligent Giving's analytical approach - which results in the production of league-tables that rank charities by their degrees of transparency - has also caused concern. Detractors argue that charities do complex work that cannot be summed up in tabular form. Intelligent Giving, however, says that its approach is significantly more nuanced than that of other charity-profiling services, such as Charity Navigator in the US.