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CharityCompare

Editorial policy

This page explains, in plain English, how CharityCompare produces its ratings and pages, how we stay independent from the charities we cover, what happens when we get something wrong, and what we will not publish. It exists because a score you cannot interrogate is a score you should not trust. If anything here is unclear, ask us at our contact page — questions about this policy get answered by a person, not a form reply.

1. What CharityCompare is — and is not

CharityCompare is an independent, free UK charity directory. We republish and analyse data from the three statutory regulators — the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) and the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland (CCNI) — and we add our own 0–100 Clarity Score on top. We are not a regulator, not a charity, not a fundraising platform, and not endorsed by any of the bodies whose data we reuse. Register data is reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (see our terms of use). Nothing on this site is financial or legal advice, and we never tell you where to donate — we publish information so that the decision stays yours.

2. Where our data comes from

Every factual field on a charity profile — registration number, status, income, spending, trustees, filing history — comes from the regulator's own published register or annual returns, not from the charity's marketing and not from self-reported submissions. Each profile shows when its data was last refreshed and which accounts year the figures belong to. When a register has not published a value, we show nothing, and we say why there is nothing to show. Absence of data is never treated as evidence of a problem: a missing figure is rendered as "not yet available", never as a negative claim about a real organisation.

3. How the Clarity Score is built, step by step

The score is mechanical — the same inputs always produce the same output. The process is:

  1. Ingest. We download the regulators' public extracts and parse them into one normalised record per charity. The extract date is recorded and shown on the site, because it dates everything downstream.
  2. Scoring. Each record is run through the published Clarity Score formula: four pillars — accountability and transparency (40 points), financial health (30), financial efficiency (20) and community support (10) — described in full on our methodology page. A charity subject to an open statutory inquiry scores 0 until the inquiry closes.
  3. Confidence checks. Records with stale accounts, missing years or contradictory fields are flagged, and the flag is shown on the profile rather than hidden. Where we cannot compute a score we publish an explicit "why there is no Clarity Score yet" explanation instead of a number.
  4. Publication. Scores, profiles and any changes to the formula are logged on the methodology changelog, so a score can always be traced back to the data and the formula version that produced it.

No human adjusts an individual score, and no one at CharityCompare can override the formula for a single charity — the lever does not exist. If the formula is wrong, we fix the formula for everyone and log it.

4. What the score does not measure

The Clarity Score measures how clearly a charity accounts for itself on paper: transparency, filing discipline, governance disclosure and spending breakdown. It does not measure the real-world impact of a charity's programmes, and it is not a moral judgement. A small volunteer-run charity can score lower simply because its filings are thinner, and a large charity can score well while still deserving hard questions about effectiveness. We say this on the score itself, repeatedly, because a rating that overclaims is worse than no rating.

5. Independence, funding and the firewall

CharityCompare is funded three ways: optional charity memberships, business services such as data licences, and optional reader donations. We take no commission on donations — donate buttons go directly to the charity's own website — and there are no affiliate links on this site. The firewall is absolute:

  • Scores and rankings are never for sale, in any form, at any price.
  • Commercial relationships are handled separately from scoring; paying customers get no advance sight of, and no influence over, any score.
  • Paid placements are always labelled "Featured partner" and never appear inside ranked results.
  • Where the free or official route is the better option for the donor, we say so and link to it, even when that earns us nothing.

6. What charities can and cannot influence

A charity can claim its profile and add a description, a logo and contact details, and earn a verified badge once we have confirmed the claim against the register. A charity can also correct us: if we have misread a filing, we want to know. What a charity cannot do — member or not — is change its score, its ranking, its regulator-sourced facts, or the wording of our analysis, and it cannot pay to remove or soften anything a regulator has published. Claimed descriptions are presented as the charity's own words and are never mixed into the score.

7. Accuracy and corrections

We publish factual claims about real organisations, so errors here matter more than a typo on a blog. A correction is triggered by any of: a regulator publishing updated data, a charity or member of the public flagging an error with a source, or our own re-ingest surfacing a discrepancy. Material corrections — a wrong registration number, wrong finances, a wrong status — are fixed promptly, dated, and logged publicly in the corrections log below. Trivial fixes (spelling, formatting) are made without a log entry. The decision on whether a correction is material sits with the site editor, who also signs off the log. We do not quietly edit history: if a page changes materially, its visible "last updated" date changes with it, and we never bump a date for a cosmetic change.

8. What we refuse to publish

  • Invented numbers. No estimated income, no guessed spending ratios, no placeholder ratings. "We do not know" is a publishable answer; a fabricated figure is a defect.
  • Negative claims built on missing data. If a register has no record of a value, we say the record is absent — we never render "unverified" or "not registered" from an empty field.
  • Pay-for-position content, undisclosed sponsored material, or rankings influenced by any commercial relationship.
  • Scraped reviews or user comments rewritten in our voice. Our analysis is built from primary sources so it can be checked against them.
  • Dated-year page slugs or "what's new in 2026" filler designed to look fresh. Freshness comes from re-ingested data, not from cosmetic date edits.

9. Writing standards

Pages are written in plain British English, with jargon explained on first use or in our glossary. Every page that draws a conclusion says who that conclusion is not for — a comparison that pretends to suit everyone helps no one. Where a page answers a common question, the answer comes first, in the opening sentences, because readers — and the machines summarising us — should not have to dig for it.

Corrections log

  • 2026-07-03 — Corrected a data-integrity error: several charity profiles seeded before our Charity Commission ingest pipeline existed carried a wrong registration number (pointing to a different, unrelated organisation on the current register) or financial figures that had never been refreshed since. All affected profiles — including Dogs Trust, Mind, The National Trust, Islamic Relief Worldwide, St Mungo's, NSPCC, Crisis and others — were corrected against the live register. One profile (Bristol Animal Rescue Centre) was removed after we could not verify a current, accurate registration for it. See our methodology changelog for the related scoring update.