The number of positive covid cases keeps rising and rising. In the end, thanks to the vaccines, this may not be the problem that we have all become accustomed to treating it as. Or maybe it will. Ultimately, we will continue to live under the shadow of this number for some time to come, whether we fully understand it or not.

Bearing in mind NPC’s interest in the well-being and productivity of the charity sector, I wondered if a similar number can be found to help us better understand the health of our sector, as England takes this big step towards its freedoms.

The financial health of the charity sector seems an obvious place to start. If charities are not financially sound, they can’t help people to the best of their abilities. However, it is surprisingly hard to find rigorous and up to date information about income in the sector. We have good data in the NCVO almanac, but it has a two-year time lag. Lots of polls have been run recently, which generally share worrying results from charities, but it is very hard to do these in a way that represents the whole of the sector accurately.

On giving, we also struggle to find out how this has changed recently. This is unless individual charities report falls in their income. Meanwhile, CAF’s UK Giving and Covid-19 report from 2020 (now somewhat out of date) which polls donors, suggests that charity donations may have actually increased between January and June 2020.

There was rightly a great deal of worry about the impact of the lockdowns on events fundraising. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty difficult to work out how much events fundraising is currently contributing to the sector. We know about high profile events, such as the virtual London Marathon in 2020, which raised £161m for charities but this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the total money raised for charities through events and sponsorships.

A lot (but not all) of the data on this is held by major giving platforms such as JustGiving, GoFundMe or Virgin Money Giving and frankly they could be a lot more forthcoming about how much gets raised for different events. In June, JustGiving reported a 157% increase in the number of appeals between March 2020 and June 2021 compared to previous years. However, they don’t tell us what these appeals were in aid of. Plus, GoFundMe recently reported ‘spikes’ in the number of appeals using words like ‘rent’ and ‘bills’, suggesting an increase in personal appeals on these sites rather than charity fundraisers.

On government funding for charities, last year we found that charities which got a large share of their income from the government felt more ‘insulated’ from the pandemic. It is worth noting here that any post-pandemic belt tightening might have a very negative impact on some charities.

Read the full article about health of the philanthropic sector by Tom Collinge at NPC.