The SoGood Lens: Level up charity funding

Charities tackling some of the most pressing needs of people living in poverty are seriously underfunded in the UK — especially when compared to the most popular and well-known third sector organisations. Our focus is on making this problem visible and creating a simple, all-encompassing model by which any charity in the UK can be placed. That’s why we’ve created the SoGood Lens.

The problem with charity funding

There remains a significant disparity in funding across UK charities. Essentially: it’s the same handful of well-known charities that receive the majority of the funding (eg, MacMillan, Cancer Research UK, the RSPCA and the RNLI).

Though these are excellent charities doing essential work, charitable organisations working directly to solve destitution (aka, a lack of money, food, shelter or possessions) do not receive the same level of funding. Despite the severity and urgency of the help they provide in society.

The need for visibility

In our view, it’s a visibility problem. There’s no clear way for people to see and understand which charities are getting the higher proportion of funding, and that there are bigger problems and causes being neglected.

Our solution: The SoGood Lens

We’ve developed the SoGood Lens to focus and prioritise our efforts. It shows three rings:

• The inner band reflects destitution needs. That includes charities working in food (eg, Trussell Trust), energy (eg, National Energy Foundation), clothes (eg, Clothes Aid) and shelter (eg, Shelter).
• The middle band reflects wellbeing needs. That includes charities working in health (eg, MacMillan and Cancer Research) and finance (eg, The Money Charity).
• The outer band reflects societal needs. That includes charities working across emergency services (eg, Air Ambulance), animals and wildlife (eg, RSPB), sport (eg, Youth Sport Trust), the planet (eg, Friends of the Earth) and charitable trusts (eg, Charitable Aids Foundations).

How the lens guides our work

1. It keeps our focus on tackling destitution. From the outset, SoGood has taken a human-centric perspective — to address the needs of charities directly involved in alleviating poverty and destitution. That’s why destitution is at the centre of our lens.
2. It clarifies the disparity. Our own preliminary research indicates a disproportionate amount of third sector funding goes towards the outer ring of our lens — to emergency service charities like the RNLI, animal and wildlife charities like the RSPB, and advisory health charities like MacMillan.
3. It will help us qualify charities to work with. The lens allows us to prioritise and focus our efforts — ensuring we don’t lose sight of our focus whilst being able to qualify opportunities that fall outside the destitution band.

Read the full article on our website here.