24 November 2008
Charity analyst from Charity Intelligence Canada shares her experiences of NPC
Bri Trypuc is a charity analyst with Charity Intelligence Canada. She recently spent eight weeks at NPC as part of her graduate programme in Fundraising and Resource Development. Here she talks about her time at NPC and the differences between the UK and Canada.
Tell us a bit about Charity Intelligence Canada (Ci) and what you’ve been doing there?
Ci, which recently received charitable status, was founded by Kate Bahen and has been analysing charities since 2006. Kate, a financial analyst and funder, became interested in charity effectiveness from her own giving experiences and stemming from the Donner Canadian Foundation Awards, which makes grants to Canadian charities and recognizes excellence in non-profits delivering social services in Canada.
Ci currently uses the pool of charity names that have been finalists for the Donner Awards as a starting point for charity analysis. We take our analysis to an external committee of experts, similar to NPC. Recently I’ve been focusing on the Canadian education sector and identifying charities that best address the largest educational need for charitable funding, the dropout epidemic. I’ve also been doing general analysis of charities across a range of sectors—some bespoke work and others that we think look interesting.
How long have you spent at NPC and what projects have you been involved with during your time here?
I’ve been here for eight weeks now and have mainly been based in the Tools team. The main thing I’ve been doing is helping with the National Performance Programme project, which is looking at how funders use results when deciding how to make grants. I’ve also developed a survey on NPC’s relationship with charities, to try and gather information on what effect our work is having and have done a bit of work relating to the Results Library.
How does NPC’s work compare to what is going on in Canada and elsewhere?
One big difference between the UK and Canada is the regulatory environment; in Canada there’s no real equivalent of the Charity Commission, although the Canada Revenue Agency is beginning to regulate, so just being able to access audited financial statements is at times difficult. Also, the Donnor Awards makes a big difference to the sector; we know that the charities we analyse from that pool of names are measuring their results or collecting data on their services, and we have found there are very few of those charities that don’t meet Ci’s standards. NPC is ‘searching blind’ to some extent—you have to find out everything during your analysis.
One similarity is that in Canada, there is a lack of organisations helping funders identify effective charities. There are philanthropic advisors in banks but so far they don’t focus much on outcomes or effectiveness. NPC and Ci are both at the forefront of engaged, informed philanthropy.
Did anything surprise you about NPC’s approach?
I had thought NPC was very much focused on donors and funders, but it’s clear there is an increasing focus on charities themselves, on assisting and improving the charity sector and really ‘working in the trenches’ with charities. I was really interested in how this transition has come about and how it’s going to work.
The thing that struck me was that NPC really are pros in terms of knowledge of different sectors and how charities fit into them, key sector players and the overall working of the charity sector as a whole. NPC is terrific at creating dialogue within the field.
Do you think charity analysts benefit from coming together and sharing ideas?
Yes absolutely, collaboration is definitely the answer for measurement because at the moment there’s no general standard of measurement in charity analysis. How else are we going to make progress as a sector if we don’t collaborate and share ideas? It’s the only way to advance.
It’s always good for people to share ideas and learn. There is so much dialogue here between knowledgeable people on the same wavelength.
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