What is a “vetting framework”?
To vet, a term that you’ll often run into in the charitable sector lingo, essentially means to carefully examine something. In our case, vetting means gathering information on charitable organisations to evaluate their accountability, and that’s exactly what our vetting framework is designed to do.
Vetting can be quite complex in certain contexts, but for us, it’s important to keep it accessible so that everyone who is interested in the process itself and the results can comfortably contribute. For this exact reason, we have developed a bespoke vetting framework with the help of researchers from Impact Centre Erasmus that is elegant yet simple. Our analysis of organisations is based on publicly available information on these organisations’ websites. We’ve analysed over 2000 charitable organisations so far thanks to our research department and a dedicated team of 63 vetting volunteers. Essentially, we would like our vetting process to become open source so everyone from all over the world can contribute to the improvement of the charitable sector.
The current framework we use is the third iteration, but definitely not the last. We periodically reflect on our own plans, programmes, and actions and adjust accordingly. We advocate for continuous self-evaluation and progress, how hypocritical would it be if we didn’t perform it ourselves?
How does it work?
Our vetting consists of four stages, Basic Analysis, In-depth Analysis, Intervention Effectiveness and Cause Area Analysis. Each stage has several sub-categories and numerous yes or no questions such as “Does the organisation publish their financial statements?” We only use the information on organisations’ websites to answer these questions because we believe everyone, researcher or not, should have access to the answers. Currently, our vetting team analyses organisations based on the first two stages.
Stage 1: Basic Analysis
This stage, as its name suggests, focuses on five basic requirements that we believe show an organisation is accountable and transparent. These requirements are:
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Being easily reachable
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Providing information about the organisation’s board members and key staff
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Publishing financial statements
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Making the organisation’s strategic plans public
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Dealing with controversy appropriately (if applicable)
It might seem like these five requirements are not much to ask, and they aren’t, yet as we were developing our framework we’ve discovered that a sizeable amount of organisations fail this stage. This is where the consultancy elements of Kinder comes in, based on these results we give organisations custom advice so they can start making the required information public and pass our stages.
Stage 2: In-depth Analysis
We believe every organization should have the capacity to reflect on past mistakes, plan well for the future, monitor and evaluate their own programs closely, engage with research, and strive to act ethically and with integrity.
Organisations that are competent in terms of planning and execution of programs while interacting with research are more likely to get things done effectively. In this stage, we have 41 questions in the four areas below.
1) Strategy
2) Programs
3) Research
4) Responsibility
Stage 1 and 2 are our currently active vetting stages. Do you work for an organisation and want to be vetted? Send us an email and we’ll add you to our list. Are you not a part of an organisation but still want to be involved? Check our vacancies and see if anything piques your interest