How to assess a charity before you give
Picture a grants committee meeting. The chair opens with ten charity names on a sheet. Someone has colour-coded them. Someone else has a printed-out website. A trustee at the far end of the table mentions that she knows the executive director personally, worked with her years ago, always thought highly of her. The conversation that follows lasts forty minutes. At the end, three charities go forward to a second discussion. Nobody can fully articulate why those three and not the others.
This is not an unusual meeting. It is, in fact, a fairly typical one. And there is nothing dishonest or negligent about it. The trustees in that room care deeply about where their money goes. They have read what was sent to them. But caring deeply is not the same as having a method, and a method is what makes one trustee's view exchangeable with another's.
Assessing a charity consistently enough to compare it against others requires something more than familiarity with the organisation. It requires a framework applied the same way every time.
When instinct lets you down
A few years ago, a small family trust made a three-year commitment to a youth employment charity. The decision was made partly on the strength of the CEO's track record, partly on an impressive impact report. Nobody looked closely at the reserves. The charity folded ten months into the first year. Restricted funds from the trust sat unspent. The beneficiaries that grant was meant to reach did not get reached.
The warning signs were in the accounts. Reserves had been falling for three years. The income was heavily concentrated in one statutory contract that was up for renewal. Neither of these things would have been hard to find. But nobody was looking systematically, so nobody found them.
That story, in various forms, plays out every year across the sector. It is not a story about bad trustees. It is a story about what happens when assessment relies on impression rather than evidence.
The five things worth looking at
A thorough charity assessment does not require a sixty-page questionnaire. It requires five areas of inquiry, each with a small number of specific questions that can be answered from publicly available sources.
Financial health. Is the income stable, growing, or declining over the past three years? How many months of unrestricted reserves does the organisation hold? What proportion of income comes from a single source? A charity that depends on one funder for 60% of its income is carrying a concentration risk that funders should understand before adding to it.
Governance. How many trustees are there, and are they independent? Are conflicts of interest declared in the accounts? Has the organisation had any regulatory action from the Charity Commission? Trustee turnover is worth checking too: a board that changes completely every two years is a governance question waiting to be asked.
Impact evidence. Does the charity measure what changes in people's lives, or just what it does? The distinction between outputs and outcomes matters here. Serving 500 meals is an output. Reducing food insecurity among 200 families by a measurable amount is an outcome. Both require resources, but only one tells you whether anything changed.
Leadership and culture. How long has the CEO been in post? A very long tenure can signal stability or stagnation. A very short one warrants a question about why. Is the safeguarding policy published and current? Organisations working with vulnerable beneficiaries should have one that is specific, not generic.
Strategic fit. Does the charity's mission genuinely match what the foundation is trying to fund? This sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to fund adjacent rather than aligned work, especially when a charity is compelling across multiple dimensions. Geographic reach matters here too.
Where to find the evidence
Most of what you need is free and publicly accessible. The Charity Commission register shows registration status, trustee details, filing history, and any regulatory actions. Annual accounts filed with the Commission include the trustees' report, the auditor's report, and the full financial statements.
Companies House is relevant for charities registered as companies limited by guarantee. It holds filed accounts and director information. For charities that receive or distribute grants, 360Giving publishes open grant data that lets you see what other funders have supported the organisation and at what level.
The charity's own website and annual report round this out. These are self-reported, which means they should be read critically. An annual report with no mention of what went wrong is itself a piece of information.
Scoring consistently across a shortlist
The point of a framework is not the score. It is the consistency. If you apply different standards to different charities on the shortlist, you are not really comparing them. You are comparing how well each charity matches the mood of the room on the day.
The simplest approach is to agree your criteria before looking at any charity on the shortlist, weight them according to what the foundation actually cares about, and then score each charity the same way. If financial sustainability matters more than impact evidence maturity for your particular fund, make that explicit before you start, not after you have seen the results.
Scores work best as an input to discussion rather than a conclusion. A charity that scores 3.4 out of 5 and a charity that scores 3.6 out of 5 are not meaningfully different. What matters is the reasoning behind the scores, and whether that reasoning holds up when trustees compare notes.
What to do with the questions you cannot answer
Good due diligence almost always surfaces questions that the available evidence cannot resolve. That is not a failure of the process. It is the process working.
Contact the charity. Most well-run organisations welcome a direct conversation with a potential funder. The questions you raise tell the charity something about your priorities. Their responses tell you something about how they communicate and whether they are thinking carefully about the same things you are.
Non-response is also data. A charity that does not reply to a funder's inquiry within a reasonable time, or that deflects specific questions about governance or finances, has told you something worth knowing.
Making it repeatable
The goal of a charity assessment process is that it produces consistent results when different trustees apply it to the same organisation. If two board members assess the same charity independently and arrive at very different conclusions, the problem is usually the process, not the charity.
Building something repeatable means documenting your criteria, recording your evidence sources, and writing down your reasoning at the time of the decision rather than reconstructing it afterwards. Trustees who can look back at their decision records tend to get better over time. They see where they were right, where they were wrong, and where the gap between the assessment and the outcome was attributable to factors nobody could have known.
If you want to see what a structured assessment looks like in practice, cleargiving.io runs the evidence-gathering and scoring automatically across the Charity Commission register, published accounts, and web sources, so trustees can spend their time on the decision rather than the research. You can also read more about how the methodology works or look at the giving guides for more on what good due diligence looks like in practice.