Registered Charities
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These notes aim to provide developers and searchers with some understanding of the data that makes up the Charities Register. They are designed to complement the technical notes for developers and the help for the Advanced Search.
Use the standard search and look up a range of charities. Try searching on something simple and broad, e.g. "children" or "church" and look at some results. This will give you a real idea of what fields the Register holds.
Find a charity that has submitted some annual returns and click through to see what financial information is provided.
No separate documents are available through this open data (for example, rules and financial statements), just the structured data that is collected through forms such as registration and annual returns.
Yes, by default deregistered charities will appear in any queries you carry out. Use Registration Status to specify either registered or deregistered if necessary.
Charities choose their financial year and there are registered charities with a year end in each of the 12 months.
At the time of writing a bit over 40% of charities report on the year April — March, almost 25% use July — June, and a bit under 20% use the calendar year January — December.
Charities can change their financial year if they wish to.
Charities have 6 months after the end of their financial year to file an Annual Return.
For example, a charity that reports on a year ended in March must submit a return by the end of September.
Yes, by limiting the results to only those Annual Returns with a particular financial year end. Bear in mind that this will give you a small subset of the published Returns.
Also, since charities have 6 months from their year end to submit a Return, you need to be sure you are reporting on a period that finished at least 6 months ago.
For example, if you are interested in the 2010 calendar year, you would look at returns with a financial year end
greater than 1 January 2010, and less than 31 December 2010.
The December returns are not due until 3 June 2011, so if you search before then you would get an incomplete picture.
A charity's first Annual Return will be due between 12 months and nearly 24 months after they register. It depends on when they were registered and how that registration date relates to their financial year.
As the Commission only began registering organisations a few years ago, and continues to register new organisations, it is expected that there will be thousands of organisations in this category.
At the time of writing approximately 50 groups submit one consolidated Annual Return each, on behalf of their member organisations. These groups have about 650 members between them. For this reason there is an apparent shortfall of about 600 Returns.
Some charities may have not filed their first Annual Return on time.
Charities can say they operate in any or all Activities, Sectors and Beneficiaries.
In Open Data there is one field for each of Sectors, Activities and Beneficiaries, containing all of the chosen values, separated by semi-colons ( ; ).
When filing Annual Returns, Charities provide no weighting or breakdown of resources allocated across Sectors, Activities or Beneficiaries. For example a charity may have identified that they carry out four activities, but it is not possible to determine from the data how much of their total expenditure went towards each activity.
Charities are also asked to choose a Main Sector, Main Activity and Main Beneficiary.
These fields may be cleaner and more useful where Annual Return data is being grouped by one of these fields, e.g. for a graph of donations / koha grouped by Main Sector.
If a charity ticks "Other" for any of Sectors, Activities or Beneficiaries they can also specify in text what "Other" means.
In Open Data this text is included in the relevant field, e.g. the Beneficiaries field might include "Other — Chinese youth".
Keep this in mind when constructing searches where one of these fields contains a word or two. For example, if searching where Sectors contains "health", results will include not only where someone ticked the "Health" box, but also where they ticked "Other" and stated something with the word "health" in it.
It may be desirable to list charities that have an office or other physical presence in a particular town or city. However, the data on the Charities Register has limitations in this regard.
Register addresses are provided for legal correspondence. A charity may provide the address of a trustee company, lawyer or accountant for this purpose.
There are also multiple charities that have the same address on the Register, due to this.
An organisation may operate nationally and have registered once. In this case both street address and postal address on the Charities Register will be for their administrative head office.
To give a typical example, a charity may have its head office in Christchurch but branch offices in Hamilton, Auckland, Tauranga and Rotorua. The address data cannot show this significant presence in the upper North Island.
It would not be possible to reliably identify all charities within a town. For example, it would be possible to search where City contains Hastings or Napier, but it will miss branch offices that are not registered separately, and may have Auckland in the single address. However, if they have branches around the country, then they should have the relevant "areas of operation" selected. If they have an office in Napier, then "area of operation = Hawkes Bay" should find them (but the address may say Auckland).
No, in some cases there will be some small variations in the amount of data available for different charities.
Charities do not have to provide some information, such as their website, email address and phone numbers. There will be fields with a null value (i.e. that do not contain any data).
The Charities Commission can withhold any or all data about a charity at their request, where it's considered in the public interest to do so.
Where particular fields are withheld (for example a street address), then the field appears as null.
The Organisation and Group records in this open data contain current summary data from the Charities Register. This is different from the Register itself, which publishes some historical information in the form of Notices of Change and Annual Returns.
Links to the complete Register summary page for any entity are available through Open Data.
The Charities Register presents documents such as rules, financial statements and Officer Change Forms. Usually these are PDFs. These documents are not available through Open Data.
Links to the complete Register summary page for any entity are available through Open Data.
For more information about Open Data and the Advanced Search functionality, see: