News

More on rating charities

4
March
2020

The Impact Suite's proprietary Social Impact Rating is only for Australian Charities and other social impact organisations. We have extensively researched and consider 5 key factors important to an organisation's sustainability and effectiveness in order for them to make a difference in our community.

The Impact Suite’s Social Impact Rating summarises the social impact and governance standard for your organisation. This helps charities move from sole benchmark measures like administrative expense ratios, which doesn’t ordinarily reflect an organisation’s activities or impact. Instead, The Social Impact Rating gives donors and community confidence that your organisation has good governance standards and social impact measures to make a difference and impact.
Having your Australian charity rated helps your organisations stand out from the crowd of Australia’s 57,000+ charities, providing an important snapshot to donors & stakeholders about your organisation’s corporate governance, impact, and transparency.  Displaying a charity's rating demonstrates a charity's commitment to this. Making greater impact in our community should be the objective of all good organisations, and this is something we seek to enable and share.

The Lotus flower symbolises rebirth and is considered most beautiful and pure. The Impact Suite has taken the symbolism of this flower and used it as a vital measure of an organisation’s sustainability with each petal representing the 5 key success factors - Purpose, People, Process, Impact, and Review.

 

The Social Impact Rating helps anyone instantly identify good organisation with a qualitative rating illustrated by the petals.

 

A grey coloured rating means an organisation has not got a rating.

A rating displaying colours means an organisation has a rating. If all petals have colour, this organisation has the highest rating.

 If an organisation displays any grey petals, it means it may be missing a key governance indicator.

This means the charity has not met the standard needed for that element, or not provided detail. Of those recently rated, the most common elements not met relate to impact and people. This may be because they do not measure their impact, or have not met core governance requirements such as maximum terms of directors and skills matrix for the Board or Council. Addressing these core elements helps build sustainable and effective organisations - and therefore lift social impact in our community.

 

All organisations have a Governance Rating which is based on a number of quantitative data points we obtain independently. Again, relevant colours light up when the organisation has met the quantitative indicator.