Trustee evaluation practices vary more than most people in the sector like to admit. The question worth asking is not whether trustees are taking their responsibilities seriously, but whether the process they are using would produce the same recommendation twice.
Most grant decisions are made on incomplete evidence, and almost everyone who works in grant-making knows it. Evidence-based grant making is about using the evidence that exists systematically and being clear about what you know and do not know when you decide.
A grant assessment framework does not replace the discussion around the table. What it does is give the conversation somewhere to land, making sure that when trustees disagree about a charity, they are disagreeing about the same thing.
The Charity Commission removed over 4,600 charities from the register in 2023 alone. In many cases, the warning signs were sitting in publicly available documents for years before the problems became visible. This checklist is a practical guide to finding them.
Assessing a charity consistently enough to compare it against others requires more than familiarity with the organisation. It requires a framework applied the same way every time. Here is what that looks like in practice.