2021 Highlights:
- Impact analysis on 280 charities. This could be the most, consistent impact information for donors in the world. Looking past overhead ratios, impact measures the difference your giving makes. It’s not how much you give, but how much good your giving does. We calculate that, if you give to High Impact charities, your giving does +7X more good. Please check out the 2021 Top Impact charities – these charities are truly inspiring and many may be charities you haven't heard of.
- Website visits at an all-time high of 587,100. More Canadians than ever use our research and ratings to give intelligently, a 19% year-over-year increase. For context, approximately 400,000 attended Woodstock in 1969 and 584,000 attended Winnipeg Jets hockey games pre-covid. Charity Intelligence's website is the “go-to trusted source for information on Canadian charities.” Globally, Charity Intelligence is the world’s fourth most visited charity research and evaluation website.
- Our first social media campaign, Give Different, is running during the 2021 Giving Season so more people can learn about Charity Intelligence. Please tell your friends and family about Charity Intelligence – nothing is more powerful than word of mouth – and share this email and our posts on Facebook and Twitter. We’d love you to be a Ci super spreader.
- We updated 416 charity reports over the summer. This gives you the most recent and relevant information at your fingertips to make your giving decisions. We hope to crank this up in 2022 as both donors and charities want more frequent updates.
- Our charity research informed an estimated $103 million in Canadian giving by our estimate - 0.6% of total Canadian giving of around $17 billion. There’s lots more work to do! Charity Intelligence’s total operating costs in 2021 were only $419,000. We are focused and frugal, using digital tools to deliver high impact on your generous support. Every dollar you gave to Charity Intelligence informed $246 of giving - a 38% improvement over 2020’s $178 – yet below the 5-year average of $290. Still, this is phenomenally high impact on your funding.
Financial Review: Charity Intelligence is a small charity with donations of $572,945 in F2021 (our financial year ends June 30). Total operating costs were $419,000 and $56,764 in donor-designated grants to charities. The single largest cost is research costs - impact measurement analysts cost $244,015 and charity ratings cost $84,876. Salaries are our highest cost - we use trained analysts rather than data scrapes to do charity research. We believe this gives you higher quality research and reports. Ci paid $345,639 in total compensation to three full-time staff, eight summer interns and one part-time staff. Another $21,821 was paid in professional fees to our auditor, financial controller, lawyer, and for insurance Indirect research costs of $61,026 include the Give Different campaign, website maintenance and hosting, and legal advice. Charity Intelligence's administrative costs were 4.6% of total revenues and fundraising costs were 0.2% of donations. Overhead spending was 4.8% with 95 cents going to the cause. Charity Intelligence has $579,165 in funding reserves that cover 1.5 years of program spending. For more detailed information, read Charity Intelligence's 2021 audited financial statements and the rating and review of Charity Intelligence.
Thank you for your incredible support of Charity Intelligence. While most people said that doing charity research was pointless, “who cares”, or “who has the time to research a charity”, you believed in intelligent giving for impact. You saw the opportunity for data analytics to improve our giving and make Canada's philanthropic sector stronger and more dynamic.
Your support makes charity research, ratings and reports happen – and helps transform Canadian giving.
Our very best wishes for a healthy and happy holiday season.
Your Ci Team
December 16, 2021