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 FPR has been 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.
Our Philosophy
The FPR aims for impartiality, using existing standards instead of making subjective value judgments.
Our methodology assesses participants:
- All funders of this initiative are evaluated.
- Approximately 300 UK foundations from UK Grantmaking produced by 360Giving are included in the sample.
- UK community foundations are part of the assessment.
- 100 are selected randomly
Our approach is carefully designed:
- The benchmarks we’ve designed see the potential for improvement in every organisation.
- We focus on driving change, not inducing guilt or shame.
- Reliance on data minimises bias.
- We highlight examples of good practice to illustrate attainable standards.
We keep the assessment realistic and fair:
- If a researcher can’t find the data within 90 minutes, it’s treated as non-existent.
- We understand, “one size doesn’t fit all”. Not all criteria apply to every foundation, and we adjust accordingly.
Through these principles, we hope to stimulate new discussions about diversity, accountability, and transparency within UK philanthropy.
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.