Charity Essentials is a free online tool designed especially for charities as a way to do a basic health check on how your organisation is performing, identifying strengths and areas for development.

This bilingual version of the Charity Essentials tool has been created in partnership with our sister council in England, NCVO.

This cost free tool benchmarks your work in 10 key areas – it will help assess the impact you have on the ground and whether you are making the best use of your resources.

Each question has a brief explanation to support your discussions and asks you to rate how fully your group or charity is addressing each question. Where you identify areas for development you will then develop an action plan in order to address the areas for improvement.

Charity Essentials can be used:

  • as a way to do a basic ‘health check’ on how your organisation is performing and achieving your mission.
  • as a tool to engage everyone in your organisation in discussions about your work.
  • as a way to engage a range of important stakeholders with your work.
  • if you want to move on to use the full Trusted Charity quality standard in the future.