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.
The rest of this page sets out criteria we used during the first year.
It explains what criteria we used, how the criteria was chosen, other options considered and what exclusions were included.
The criteria were selected through a process which ran from 30th March to 29th June that involved: discussions with the Funders Group; researching criteria used in other self-assessment, rating and ranking projects (UK and international); seeking public feedback on a sub-set of these criteria through an open consultation online process; soliciting suggestions from the general public via Friends Provident Foundation’s (FPF) website, Giving Evidence’s (GE) website and wider social media; and interviews with sector and rating experts.
In scope:
The criteria corresponds with the agreed three ‘pillars’: these are diversity, accountability and transparency.
Any criteria that did not relate to these are out of scope. For example, criteria only about sustainability or relating to an assessment of a foundation’s impact or its strategy are out of scope.
Observable:
The rating process only uses data in the public domain (via a foundation’s website or the relevant regulator’s website). Therefore, we can only include criteria for which the data could be in the public domain: the evidence of whether a foundation meets a criterion must be observable from the outside, and not require (for instance) interviews with staff or insider knowledge. This requirement means that we can include a criterion of whether the foundation has a diversity policy; but excludes (a suggested criterion of) “whether BME organisations are used as bid candy” (another suggestion made via the consultation process). It also excludes measuring foundations on criteria which only very few are likely to formally report, such as the specific age of trustees.