The High-Impact Philanthropy Methodology

Circle Acts focuses on promoting High Impact and Transparent charities, and we provide the impact-focuses charity opportunities to reach more donors and focus their energies on impacting their causes. We have limited resources and we have high standards on what is considered a High Impact and Transparent Charity.

Our Canadian Donation Marketplace allows Canadian donors to pick and choose Canadian charities to donate to in Canada, and we have a high standard process for donors and industry experts to nominate charities to be included. In this article, you will learn:

• What is the Circle Acts High Impact Philanthropy Framework?
• High Impact Philanthropy Definition
• What is the Canadian charity nomination and selection process to be included in the High Impact Canadian Charity Donation marketplace?
• High Impact Philanthropy Rating Process
• How to help?

The Circle Acts High Impact Philanthropy Methodology

The Circle Acts High-Impact Philanthropy Framework is our standard to determine the quality rating of charity, nonprofit organizations, and Non-Government Organizations. We do not rank charitable organizations against other organizations to compare them against each other. On the other hand, we want to promote all charities that are doing great work. If there are 20,000 high-impact organizations, they will all be included in our donation marketplace.

The framework consists of three areas:

1. Quantitative analysis of publicly available information
2. Committee-scoring from donors and volunteers,
3. Reputation Industrial Rating (if available), and/or
4. Organization provided information (if available)

1. Quantitative Analysis of Public Available Information

This includes their financial statements, annual reports, CRA T3010 filings, and websites. Each charity is consistently rated given the standards based on a weighted process with a statistical model.

2. Committee-Scoring from industry stakeholders

This includes community scoring from our community rater committee which consists of donors, fundraisers, journalists, industry experts of all levels. We routinely send out surveys to a randomly selected group of committee members along with available information on charities. The survey includes a continuous list of qualitative questions for a randomly selected group of committee members to score.

Here are some example of the questions from the scoring:

• Are you clear about the goals of the charity or nonprofit organizations?
• What impact will be delivered for each CAD $1000 donation? e.g. How many meals vs amount go to research projects. Every cause has different programs.
• Do you think the organization provide transparent and accurate financial information? why or why not?
• Do you know about the performance objectives of the charitable organization?
• Do you know about the governance structure of the charitable organization?
• Do you think the charitable organization is delivering the impact that they promise?
• What do you like about the charitable organization?
• Do you think the charitable organization is allocating enough donations to the causes? or You don’t know.
• Would you want to volunteer at this charitable organization?
• Would you consider donating to the charitable organization?
• Can you list the major program of the charitable organization?

and many more.

3. Reputable industrial ratings

If available, we will consider reputable industrial ratings from peer charity watchdog organizations, such as Imagine Canada, or Charity Intelligence Canada.

These great organization have also done high quality due diligence on large group of charities, we would consider and take their rating into accounts to provide a well around evaluation of each organization.

4. Organization provided information

We may also reach out to the charitable organization and request or inquire for additional information that’s not provided publicly or available from other channels. We also invite the charitable organization to help us identify new programs and verify the information to improve the accuracy and quality of our ratings.

How to nominate a charitable organization and request a rating score?

It is very easy to nominate a charitable organization. You can simply fill out our charitable organization nomination form, and we will kick off our nomination process.

We are highly selective and we don’t include charities we don’t believe in, nor we won’t make up the list because we need a bigger list. You can look at our current list of Circle Acts Canada High Impact 400 for the top charities in Canada.