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Charity Commission website improvements
Submitted by finbarcullen on 21 January, 2008 - 09:09.
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In 2006, I was told that the Charity Commission proposed to improve its website (making it as good as the advanced search facility available via Guidestar UK?). In July 2007, the website relaunch actually saw a search function removed! It wasn't the most useful function (Area of Operation search), and it was apparently a temporary removal. Well, that search function still isn't available, and the other search functions that were discussed are still not available. However, a very interesting and useful facility has been added to the website.
If you visit the website (www.charity-commission.gov.uk) and click on the link for "About Registered Charities", you should notice an option to check out Recently Registered Charities. This enables users to check out charities registered in the last week/month/ quarter. It is well worth checking out, as there are some interesting names on the lists.
For example, The Brelms Trust offers grants to a wide range of charitable interests. The application form can be downloaded from the Trust's website, and detailed guidelines are also available online.
The Chello Foundation has an interest in Africa, and The Ashmore Foundation looks like it might warrant further investigation.
If you have a very localised geographical focus, it might be worth searching by postcode. However, this might work better on Guidestar UK (http://guidestar.org.uk/), but there is a slight delay in new trusts being added to Guidestar UK.
Go rummage!
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Great detailed explanation of the new function, Finbar.
I actually found the "Area of Operation" function quite useful and suspect it may have been withdrawn by accident rather than design.
Another aspect which might be worth flagging is that the Charity Commission only provides access to the accounts of charities whose income was £25,000 or more, so for smaller charities, one needs to look at the Guidestar site instead. This gives access to the accounts of all registered charities with an income of £10,000+, although only has one set of accounts on site, unlike the Charity Commission website which often has a number of consecutive years.
And whilst we're on the subject, how very annoying that we now have two sites both funded from the public purse doing almost the same thing, so we have to toggle between them. What a waste of time and money!
Charity Commission inquiries
On the other hand, the CC is now limiting access to their investigation reports.
They say:
Inquiry reports published in the last six months can be seen below under “Recently Concluded Inquiries”. After six months, reports are transferred into our archive, “Alphabetical lists of Archived Inquiry Reports”.
According to the CC call centre, you may request a copy of the old inquiry through the call centre or by post.
This could be detrimental to charities which have been investigated for a relatively minor problem which has been solved. Their names remain on the list but most people wouldn't go to the trouble to get the report.
Maybe I'm nitpicking and only the charity gossip obsessed (me?) will take notice.
Very useful list
Thanks Finbar. I agree - the list at
www.charity-commission.gov.uk/registeredcharities/recent.asp
is a very useful list, and a good example of what can be achieved with just a little user-centric tweak to existing data.
Of course, I would like to see a few more tweaks, like the ability to filter the list by post code, and the ability to receive an email alert when a new charity appears in a postcode that you've stated is of interest to you.
Also, an RSS feed of this data would be rather handy to help bring the useful content to a wider audience. I'm not sure, however, how Crown Copyright applies to RSS feeds of anything other than news releases.