Criteria
As this project is partly about promoting transparency, we feel it is important to be open about the types of criteria that we will use to rate foundations.
Year Three
We are delighted to announce our Year Three criteria. We would like to thank those who took the time to respond to our consultation.
In Year Three (2023/24), all the scoring criteria and exemptions are the same as for Year Two. The only changes that we are making are that we are now gathering information on the following – though these do not count towards foundations’ scores or their ratings:
- We will gather information about the diversity of foundations’ staff and trustees, where they publish it. In Years One and Two, we noted whether foundations disclosed those data but we did not log those data; In 2023, after the Year Two report published, we gathered those data in order to start tracking whether and how the diversity is changing (we published the 2023 data about that here). In Year Three, we will gather those data at the same time as we gather everything else.
- We will gather information about the diversity of foundations’ applicants and grantees, where they publish it. We will also note what definitions the foundations use, e.g., how they define a ‘Black-led organisation’. This suggestion arose through our consultation to inform Year Three. In future years, we may create criteria related to this information.
We have made one small change. Only information less than three years old will be taken into account. Consequently, data published by a foundation, such as its pay gap from six years ago, would have been acknowledged in Year Two, but it will no longer be credited from now on.
All other exemptions have remained the same. Check out the exemptions page for more details.
Year Two
We are delighted to announce our Year Two criteria. We would like to thank those who took the time to respond to our consultation. The good news is that the criteria is the same as last year.
However, there have been some changes in exemptions for Year Two. We will change the exemption on publishing a diversity plan from ten or fewer staff to five or fewer staff. This is mainly because if you encounter a foundation with ten staff who are all demographically identical, the chances that this is a random chance are really low, and the foundation should have a plan to improve that. Indeed, the number of staff that a foundation can have, where, if they are demographically identical, that is from random chance, seems rather lower than ten. Five seems like a better number.
All other exemptions have remained the same. Check out the exemptions page for more details.
Transparency
Accountability
Diversity
Eliminated criteria
We also omitted during the scoring process some criteria which proved unworkable, as described above. The table below shows these eliminated questions, the reason, and the stage at which they were eliminated.