How it works.

Register sources

• CCEW - Charity Commission England & Wales: ~166,000 active charities. Ingested daily from the Charity Commission XML bulk extract.
• OSCR - Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator: ~25,000 active charities. Ingested daily from the official OSCR CSV download.
• CCNI - Charity Commission for Northern Ireland: ~6,000 active charities. Ingested daily from the CCNI API export.

Combined coverage

200,000+ active charity records under one normalised schema. All three registers are ingested within 24 hours of filing updates, so the dataset reflects the most recently published regulator data.

Entity resolution

Charities with dual registration are matched to Companies House records. Cross-register deduplication removes aliases and split registrations, so each real-world organisation has a single canonical record.

1. Financial signals

Annual accounts, income and expenditure, reserves, fund balances, and filing history from regulator returns. Multi-year data is captured where available, allowing income trajectory analysis across reporting periods.

2. Governance signals

Trustee records, filing compliance, late-return history, disqualification flags, and corporate governance data from Companies House for dual-registered organisations.

3. Narrative signals

Mission statements, objectives, beneficiary descriptions, and programme descriptions from register fields and annual reports. These are the self-reported descriptions of what a charity does and who it serves.

4. Digital signals

Website content, programme pages, outcome statements, and evidence-of-delivery indicators extracted via structured crawl. Available for charities with indexable public websites. Digital signals expand with each crawl run (daily).

5. Network & time signals

360Giving grant data - grant history, funder network, and co-funding patterns. Years active, registration tenure, and income trajectory over time. These contextualise a charity's position within the broader funding landscape.

Trust

Is this charity well-governed and transparent? Depth and consistency of public evidence, governance and transparency standing. Only populated where digital signals confirm active operations (~21% of scored charities). Coverage expands with each crawl run.

Independence

Does this charity depend on a single backer? Funder and grant diversification, freedom from single-backer dependence. Populated where funding structure is reported in the accounts.

Underserved cause

Is the cause under-served rather than saturated? Assessed at cause and area level for classified charities, weighing how much funding and attention the area already receives.

Significance

Does this charity have evidence of real-world impact within its cause area? Scale and reach relative to peers, beneficiary need and cause severity. Calibrated peer-relative within cause areas, so a high score reflects prominence among charities doing similar work, not just absolute size. Populated for 100% of scored charities.

Execution strength

Does this charity show evidence of sustained delivery? Operational and financial delivery capacity, continuity and stability. Requires website evidence to populate, reflecting whether a charity communicates what it actually does, not just what it intends to do. Populated for ~21% of scored charities.

Impact plausibility

Does the stated work credibly turn into delivery? Assesses whether the charity describes a coherent causal link between its activities and the outcomes it claims to pursue. Populated for 100% of scored charities.

Hidden gem

Is this a high-quality charity receiving less funding than comparable organisations? Quality higher than the charity's visibility would suggest. Derived from Significance, Execution strength, and network and time signals. Flags charities whose evidence quality outpaces their funding prominence. Populated for ~21% of scored charities.

Funding efficiency

Is spending deployed well? Deployment quality of spending and directional financial health. Derived from financial filings where accounts are available.

Dashboard

Authenticated web interface with watchlists, score history, and a Discover filter for browsing the full scored dataset by cause area, score band, geography, and other dimensions.

API

REST API at /v1/charities. JSON responses, versioned at v1. Schema stability is guaranteed within the current major version; breaking changes are published 60 days in advance.

CSV export

Bulk download scoped by subscription tier. Column definitions are stable within a major version. Exports include all scored fields and regulator identifiers.

Score versioning

The current scored release is intelligent-metrics-scorecard-v1, last computed May 2026. Scores may change between releases as coverage expands or methodology improves. Release notes are published with each version update.

• Scores are calibrated assessments from available public data - not endorsements, impact certifications, or investment recommendations.
• Coverage gaps: charities without a website presence have lower Trust, Execution Strength, and Hidden Gem scores. This reflects a transparency gap in the available data, not necessarily poor performance.
• Time lag: financial data reflects the most recently filed annual return, which may be 12–18 months old at the point of query.
• Cause classification is probabilistic. High-confidence labels require sufficient narrative evidence; classifications for data-thin charities carry wider uncertainty.
• The dataset covers registered charities only. Informal community groups, Community Interest Companies (CICs), and unregistered bodies are not included.
• Hidden Gem detection is based on funding relative to evidence quality. It is a signal worth investigating - not a recommendation to fund.

The UK has 200,000+ active charities. About 149,000 of them report income under £100k. They are roughly three quarters of the register by number, and about 2% of the more than £100bn the sector moves each year. The 50,000 charities at £100k and above hold the other 98%.

What the 99% means

Coverage is reported by income because that is where funding decisions sit. 99% of charities with over £100k income are fully scored and classified. Of the charities served to customers, 99.91% at £100k and above carry a full intelligent scorecard, and coverage is complete at the top of the register: 100% at £1m and above, and 100% at £10m and above.

The 149,000 charities below £100k are classified with a confidence band, but most file too little public evidence to score on all eight dimensions, and they sit where very little funding is decided. Classification runs daily, so depth on the smaller end of the register expands with each run and the threshold moves down over time.

Figures from the live register, July 2026. Scores are evidence-led proxies, not audited measures.