The Foundation Practice Rating assesses UK-based charitable foundations on their practices on diversity, accountability and transparency. We do this to encourage them to improve their practices. Each year, we take a sample of 100 foundations, and assess them on ~50 criteria, which were designed using a public consultation. We take the stance of a prospective applicant to a foundation, and therefore our assessment uses only the foundations’ publicly-available data.
The first year’s results were published in March 2022, here, and the second year’s results were published in March 2023, here. The criteria are published here, and more information about the Foundation Practice Rating is here.
We are inviting views as to how the Foundation Practice Rating could be amended / improved for future years.
Any person representing a charitable, philanthropic or social-purpose organisation based in the UK is welcome to participate in this consultation. We are interested in views both of grant-makers, and of organisations who seek and receive grants from those foundations.
The project is led by the Friends Provident Foundation, funded by a set of UK foundations, and the research is conducted by Giving Evidence.
In this survey, we:
a) invite you to share some information about yourself and any organisation that you mainly represent;
b) invite you to comment on any aspects of this project, including but not limited to: anything that we should add (to the criteria or to the process), anything that we should remove or amend (to the criteria or to the process), the selection of foundations assessed, the criteria used to assess these foundations, and the overall process.
All responses to this consultation are anonymous. Friends Provident Foundation and Giving Evidence will not collect any personal data and will only use the anonymous data gathered to help inform the UK Foundation Practice Rating’s future iterations.
Note that we are not envisaging making major changes to the criteria for this coming year, Year Three. This is so we can provide stability and avoid continually moving the goal-posts for foundations. Rather, we envisage being open to changes from Year Four onwards. That said, we are open to changing other elements of the process this coming year. Also, we are keen to hear ideas for what might be amended or included: for instance, in the consultation before Year Two, respondents suggested that we look at foundations’ reporting of the social class of their staff and trustees, and their lived experience of relevant issues. We were unsure about whether / how criteria around those would work. So, in Year Two, we gathered data about foundations’ reporting on those issues and that experience can help us to define suitable criteria for them.
Friends Provident Foundation and Giving Evidence will publish key findings from this consultation shortly after it closes.
This survey will close on Wednesday 31st May 2023 at 17.00 GMT