The free Charity Excellence quality for charities, requires no additional workload and provides assurance to funders and other stakeholders of your commitment to excellence.

Most charity quality systems apply a one-size-fits all approach to a hugely varied sector, assessments are every few years and often time consuming, so qualifying can take time and be expensive. The CEF creates a unique framework to meet your specific needs, the assessment is automatic, so involves no additional work, is ongoing and it requires no support, training or paperwork.

"We are really pleased to have achieved this quality mark and thank you for the ease of which we were able to assess our effectiveness….. The framework clarified our achievements and made them quantifiable, but also helped to highlight where we want to improve further".

The Living Room Herts

It provides demonstrable evidence to stakeholders and funders, of your commitment to excellence, reassurance for trustees that your charity is well run and recognition for staff and volunteers for what they are achieving.

Performance areas assessed

Your assessment covers every area of activity: promoting good governance, effective strategy, leading and managing people well, effective delivery of operations, efficient use of finance and resources, maximising income generation and effective communications.

The system also assesses key crisis health check indicators, including maximising impact, short-term resilience, longer-term sustainability, how good you are at getting funding to front line activities, legal & compliance and how well everyone is kept safe from harm.

Performance in each of these areas is continuously updated on your dashboard.

“more thought-provoking than other Quality Mark systems that I have seen and/or used”. 4Sight Vision Support

Quality Mark qualifying criteria

The criteria match your annual planning cycle, with each questionnaire to be completed at least once within the previous 12 month period. There’s an anti-gaming system and, additionally, algorithms track users’ scoring patterns, which is reported as your scoring quality.

It is only awarded once these criteria have been met and is automatically withdrawn, if any are not. Your quality mark progress is reported on your dashboard, with traffic light indicators warning when any questionnaires need to be rescored. Once qualified, you will be sent the Charity Excellence Quality Mark logo.

It is awarded at the sole discretion of Charity Excellence, which reserves the right to withhold or withdraw this, if in the view of Charity Excellence, a voluntary organisation falls below the standards expected of a well-run not for profit. This may include, but is not restricted to, any attempt to ‘game’ the system, behaviour or standards that fall below the professionalism expected of a well-run charity, being subject to censure by the Charity Commission, or other regulatory authority, or an adverse audit or other report, the disqualification of directors, or being found against in legal proceedings.

In the event that a Quality Mark award is withheld or withdrawn, the charity will be advised and may appeal the decision in writing, within one calendar month, stating the grounds on which the appeal is based. The appeal will be considered and the charity advised of the outcome, the decision of which will be final.