Transcript

Karl

We primarily collect data about charities. We collect data from about 10,000 charities every year from their annual reports. And we collect data about their finances, but also about how many people they employ. And we collect a few other things that you would find in the annual reports. We collect data from other sources as well.

So there is a very large annual survey called the Labour Force Survey where we collect data in there about how many people work for charities, and how much they’re paid, and where they work, and so on. And then, we try and supplement that with qualitative data from interviews, and there are a small number of sort of surveys that come along from time to time. And we try and mesh those together.

If this was any other sector of the economy, the Office for National Statistics would presumably have an army of statisticians doing stuff on this. But the problem with the voluntary sector, or the third sector if that’s what you prefer, is that people tend to forget about it. When you see these big discussions in the media about sectors, it tends to be the public sector do this, and the private sector do that. Nobody talks about our sector.

And one of the reasons for that is because there isn’t a huge amount of data on it. Because a lot of people can’t actually agree on what it is that we’re talking about. So is it the voluntary sector? Is it the third sector? Is it NGOs? Is it social enterprise? What on earth is social enterprise? How do we collect data on that when we can’t even agree what it is?

So we’re trying to do something that informs public policy debates and helps politicians and policymakers design and then implement policy, because they don’t want to do that unless they can see that something is changing. And if they don’t have data about what is changing, they don’t want to design policy for it. Why make the effort?

But also, if you’re working in a charity, I think you need to understand your context. You need to understand why you’re different or you are unique. You might need to understand why you’re the same as everyone else. And you can’t do that without data.