Winners of Charities Online Accounts Awards announced
Howard Lake | 29 November 2006 | News
Plan International UK, the Citizens Advice Bureau, Charity Finance Directors’ Group, The Parish Church of St Luke, Great Ilford, A-CET and Chesterfield Philharmonic Choir have all won awards in the 2006 Charities Online Accounts Awards.
At today’s awards ceremony at Chartered Accountants Hall in London, Chairman of the Judges Graham Ward CBE and Institute President Ian Morris, presented the charities with their cash prizes for the most effective online annual report and accounts.
The awards, sponsored by CAF (Charities Aid Foundation) and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales (ICAEW), recognise excellence in financial reporting and encourage best practice in online financial accounts.
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Graham Ward, Chairman of the Judging Panel commented: “High quality financial reporting is as much of an imperative for the charitable sector as it is for the commercial world. Charities depend on donors in the same way that businesses depend on investors and both of these communities depend on high quality financial information when making decisions about whether to provide funding.
“The best reports can communicate to potential donors the spirit of the charities themselves and can really help to cement trust between charitable organisations and their donors. This is why we recommend that any future Statement of Recommended Practice should include better ./guidance on how to create transparent online financial reports.”
The awards were divided into different categories:
- Plan International UK won in the top 100 fundraising charities category. The website scored very high technical marks and was one of the few to have hyperlinked content in HTML as well as a downloadable PDF.
- The Citizens Advice Bureau took first place in the category for charities with an income over £2 million. The judges felt that the layout and design were clear and accessible. Imaginative pull out sections, combined with a clear articulation of achievements, also impressed.
- Winners of the £500,000 to £2 million income category, Charity Finance Directors’ Group, impressed the judges with their properly navigable website. The option of online and downloadable versions of the report was also a positive.
- The Parish Church of St Luke, Great Ilford was considered “a model for best practice” for charities with an income between £100,000 and £500,000. The judges deemed that, for a charity with a turnover of less than £130,000, St Luke’s demonstrated “excellent use of web technology providing clear and simple financial information to donors”.
- The joint winners of the final category, charities with an income of less than £100,000, A-CET and the Chesterfield Philharmonic Choir, were both commended by the judges for demonstrating that limited resource was no barrier to high quality financial reporting on-line. The judges felt that a number of the larger charities could learn from these smaller entrants.
Graham Ullett, Head of Marketing at CAF commented: “CAF’s sponsorship of these Awards alongside the ICAEW forms part of our objective to raise standards of online reporting to aid donors and, in so doing, assist charities.”
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.