Everything about Intelligent Giving totally explained
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 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.
Media coverage
In November 2006, Intelligent Giving published an article about
Children in Need, a big charity, which attracted wide attention – some of which Intelligent Giving regarded as misleading - across the British media. The article, titled “Four things wrong with Pudsey” described donations to Children in Need as a ‘lazy and inefficient way of giving’ and pointed out that, as a grant-giving charity, Children in Need would use donations to pay two sets of administration costs. It also described the quality of some of its public reporting as 'shambolic'.
In March 2007, Intelligent Giving claimed that English
Premiership football clubs were not giving enough to charity.
Chelsea FC was particularly criticized in this work, and an alleged member of the Club's media team threatened an Intelligent Giving employee with violence in response to media reports.
In June 2007 the organisation analysed the Jewish charities it had profiled and concluded, “They are pretty appalling in terms of transparency.” Details from the report were published in the
Jewish Chronicle.
In July 2007 Intelligent Giving won the
New Statesman New Media Award for Information & Openness. -
October 2007 saw Intelligent Giving name and shame in
The Guardian the rugby union charity,
Wooden Spoon Society, for providing a very low return on its fundraising activities.
Intelligent Giving's argument was refuted by
John Inverdale, a BBC broadcaster, in an opinion piece in the
Daily Telegraph as "misguided reporting that fails to understand how fund-raising operates." It was also condemned by Wooden Spoon in its statement
"Putting the Record Straight"
.
In December 2007 an opinion piece in the
UK Motor Industry Magazine viewed IG as "a self-serving organisation...incapable of understanding the difference between overheads and cost of sales"
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 doesn't 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 can't 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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Intelligent Giving'.
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