reporting public benefit

Last month the Charity Commission reported that new independent research commissioned by them has found that charities need to do more to describe how people benefit from their work. Many charities are missing out on the opportunity to explain, through their reporting on public benefit, how their work has a positive impact on their beneficiaries.

The research, by Sheffield Hallam University, assessed how well registered charities are getting to grips with the new requirement, introduced in 2008, to report on public benefit in their Trustees' Annual Report (TAR).

Put simply, public benefit reporting is about explaining:

• What a charity's aims are and what it has done to carry them out
• Who it seeks to benefit
• How people have benefitted

The research has shown that trustees are generally able to explain their charity's aims and who benefits from its work. However they are less successful in explaining how they have benefitted in practice.

The Charity Commission published its general guidance on public benefit for charities in January 2008, followed by four sets of supplementary guidance in December 2008. This initially caused some concern amongst churches who thought they needed major social action programs to justify their charitable status. However this is not the case. For an explanation of the ‘Public benefit’ requirements for churches please see Stewardship’s Briefing Paper.

We have created  an example of the sort of matters a church could outline in their annual report to show how they achieve this. Every church and charity will be different and the style of writing is not crucial. In terms of content it should be remembered that the most common readers of charities annual reports are regulators, researchers, local media and those who want to know more about the organisation. The report is therefore not primarily written for the church membership or the charity’s stakeholders. You can find the example report here.

The aim is to explain the work , its vision and values, and how it is has benefitted people in practice. We know that much of the impact of Christian work is like seed; sown and only becoming apparent in time, but it can still be explained.

The Commission has also published a selection of fictitious example trustee reports, which aim to demonstrate how charities can effectively report on their public benefit. All guidance and examples are on the Charity Commission website.