About Us
The Foundation Practice Rating (FPR) is led by Friends Provident Foundation and supported by other funders.
The Foundation Practice Rating (FPR) is a project initiated by diverse UK foundations to enhance practices of all UK charitable foundations in terms of diversity, accountability, and transparency.
Each year, the FPR assesses 100 UK foundations on their practices on diversity, accountability, and transparency. The project outsources the evaluation to Giving Evidence—an independent research organisation, who have defined the criteria and created the system.
Data collection and analysis, for the assessment, is entirely through publicly accessible information present in their annual reports and websites.
The results are published annually.
Why we do what we do
The Foundation Practice Rating was developed to encourage improvement in funding practices amongst UK charitable foundations, specifically in the three domains of diversity, accountability, and transparency. It looks at how funders operate but does not look at what they fund. It aims for impartiality, using existing standards instead of making subjective value judgements, and relies on data to minimise bias.
The Foundation Practice Rating is not:
- a ranking. In a ranking, foundations are ranked from best to worst. In our rating, we report the results by letter grade, A, B, C or D and as such all foundations could be in the A category or all could be in the D category. We do not differentiate between different As, an A is an A in our rating;
- an attempt to name and shame trusts;
- designed to “catch out” foundations with poor practice. You can refer to our how to do well document to help improve your practice.