International Charity Financial Benchmarking Report 2019

The charity sector continues to face uncertain times and this is particularly relevant for international charities. Significant media attention, such as high profile safeguarding cases and the public’s perception of the sector, combined with economic and political uncertainty, including Brexit, has created a difficult environment for many organisations within the sector. Whilst the external environment is challenging, there remains great need around the globe.

Our report, which builds upon and utilises the results from last year’s benchmarking survey, again takes a broad look at the sector, and includes charities of different sizes and operating models. The sample includes 180 organisations with total income of £6.2bn, net assets of £2.1bn and more than 80,000 employees. We have again considered in his report a selection of the areas which, in our experience, are most important in achieving good financial governance: risk; reserves; fundraising and the trustee board itself. In addition to the areas considered last year, we have expanded our research to encompass metrics such as the page length of the annual accounts and the way that key messages are presented, and support and governance costs.

We hope you will find the results of our work useful, both to inform debate and to help your individual organisation benchmark its own figures against similar organisations. Even more importantly, we hope this work will help to stimulate debate and support the adoption of best practice in the sector. We would welcome feedback on the contents of the report, as well as suggestions for areas to benchmark in the future.

To download our 2019 report below.

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