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Thursday Jan 26, 2006
Transparency in the Voluntary sector..
The whole issue of financial transparency in the voluntary sector has quite rightly been big for a while now. On the back of this (and after £3M + investment) Guidestar launched in November of last year, with the intention of providing donors with a searchable database of registered charities in England and Wales.
It's meant to be a resource for grant makers, researchers and general donors, but I'm not sure how big it's impact will be. Each charity can update some of the information on there, but you can also access standard regulatory documents like the annual report and accounts. Given that these are documents that each charity has to produce anyway, I don't know how useful this is for an "average" donor on the street. Personally, if I'm convinced a charity is doing great work in an area I care about, I'm happy to donate, and I trust them to spend my money in the best way they possibly can - I don't need a new site (that cost more than £3M) to pool all this together.
Another good point (see Charity Blogger's review) is that it still relies on people typing information in from paper records, so how up to date is it going to be next year?
Anyway, what do you guys think?..
Posted by Sam Thomas ( 3:32 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]