Assessing Financial Vulnerability and Risk in the UK’s Charities During and Beyond the Covid Crisis, 2020-2022

We advise that users familiarise themselves with the reporting requirements of the regulators on whose data we have drawn for this work. Some variables are easily understood (headline income and expenditure figures, or dates of registration and dissolution); others less so (e.g. familiarity with definitions of the components of income which charities are required to report would be desirable for work on the exposure of charities to specific income sources). We carried out work on various aspects of the financial vulnerability of charities and charitable companies, as follows: 1. patterns of registration and dissolution, as measured by the dates on which these events are recorded by the regulators. 2. the extent to which organisations held reserves prior to the onset of Covid-19. We used measures of "unrestricted reserves" which are usually provided only for larger organisations and expressed these as a proportion of the organisation's annual expenditures; 3. financial vulnerability, expressed in various ways - substantial (over 25%) fluctuations in incomes, or fluctuations in the excess of expenditure over income; 4. exposure of organisations to particular income streams. We define these in "VariableDescriptions_covid19_project.doc", attached to this deposit. Note that for time series analyses, the Charity Commission website data on the incomes and expenditures of charities only contains data for relatively recent time periods; a longer time series providing charity financials from the late 1990s to 2012 is available in the Third Sector Research Centre data collection at https://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/850933/ and we recommend this is linked to the current data from the Charity Commission. Financial histories are not available for as long a time period for Scottish charities since the regulator was not established until 2006. Other data of relevance to work on this project would be a publicly-available classification of charities at https://charityclassification.org.uk/ Charitable organisations largely fall into a small number of sections of the Standard Industrial Classification and as a result scholars have developed more granular schemas. the data at the above website are publicly-available and can be linked via charity ID numbers. Project papers describing the work in more detail are available at https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/tsrc/research/assessing-financial-vulnerability-and-risk-in-the-uks-charities-during-and-beyond-the-covid-19-crisis.aspx

我们建议用户熟悉本研究数据来源所涉监管机构的报告要求。部分变量易于理解（如总览收支数据、注册与注销日期）；另一些则需相关背景知识（例如，若要研究慈善机构对特定收入来源的依赖程度，需先掌握慈善机构需报告的收入构成部分的定义）。我们针对慈善机构及慈善公司财务脆弱性的多个维度开展了研究，具体如下：1. 注册与注销模式——以监管机构记录的事件日期为衡量标准；2. 新冠疫情暴发前各组织的储备金持有情况——我们采用了“非限定性储备金（unrestricted reserves）”这一指标（通常仅大型组织会披露此数据），并将其表示为组织年度支出的占比；3. 财务脆弱性的多元表征——收入大幅波动（超过25%）或收支差额波动；4. 组织对特定收入流的依赖程度——相关定义详见本数据集附件《VariableDescriptions_covid19_project.doc》。请注意，就时间序列分析而言，慈善委员会网站上的慈善机构收支数据仅涵盖近期时段；1990年代末至2012年的更长时间序列慈善财务数据可在第三部门研究中心（Third Sector Research Centre）的数据集中获取（链接：https://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/850933/），我们建议将此数据与慈善委员会当前数据关联使用。苏格兰地区慈善机构的财务历史数据无法追溯至同等长的时段，因其监管机构直至2006年才成立。与本研究相关的其他公开数据包括慈善机构分类数据集（链接：https://charityclassification.org.uk/）——慈善组织在《标准行业分类（Standard Industrial Classification）》中多集中于少数类别，因此学者们开发了更精细的分类框架。上述网站的数据为公开可用，可通过慈善机构ID编号实现关联。更详细描述本研究的项目论文可在以下链接获取：https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/tsrc/research/assessing-financial-vulnerability-and-risk-in-the-uks-charities-during-and-beyond-the-covid-19-crisis.aspx