About this site

Charities in the UK play a vital role in society – they make a difference to millions of lives in our country and across the world.

Charities want to make sure that their supporters and the public have complete confidence in what they do, because ultimately charities can only do what they do thanks to you – whether you’re volunteering, donating or telling people about the issues they’re working on.

That’s why we’ve created this site to answer some of the common questions people have about charities.

Wherever possible we have tried to link to sources of further or more detailed information.

The site is run by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO). We are an organisation that represents and supports charities.

Data on this website

Charity finance figures on this website come from NCVO’s UK Civil Society Almanac. The Almanac is the authoritative source of financial data on the charity sector.

The Almanac data is derived using a large sample of charities’ annual accounts, as submitted to the Charity Commission, and weighting it to the profile of the sector. The Almanac excludes certain types of organisations that may be registered charities but are not generally thought of as charities, in order to provide the clearest possible picture of the finances of organisations that most people think of as charities. Read more about the Almanac methodology.

Sharing and intellectual property

Content of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.

We want the information on How Charities Work to be used widely, so we’ve chosen to make it available under a Creative Commons licence – which is less restrictive than a traditional, ‘all rights reserved’ approach.

Contact us

Please get in touch with NCVO if you have any ideas for, or questions about, this website.

If you are a journalist and would like further information on charities, please contact the NCVO press office.