This article examines the public reporting of impact, defined as progress towards a charity’s mission and long-term objectives, by Canadian charities through their annual reports. The public reporting behaviour of those accredited under Imagine Canada’s Standards Program is compared with a matched sample of charities that have not sought accreditation. The objective is to explore whether trust-building activities like public disclosures of impact and third-party accreditation are convergent. The study finds that accreditation status correlates with impact measurement and reporting; both trends are linked to organizational size, and accreditation does not appear to be causing charities to increase their disclosures of impact, which suggests that there may be underlying factors driving both behaviours. These findings generally affirm earlier research that correlates organizational size with impact measurement, adding that the effect is weak.Cet article examine comment les associations caritatives canadiennes, dans leurs rapports annuels, rendent compte de leur impact, c’est-à-dire de leur progrès par rapport à leur mission et à leurs objectifs à long terme. Cette étude compare les comptes rendus d’associations accréditées par le Programme de normes d’Imagine Canada avec un échantillon apparié d’associations qui n’ont pas été accréditées. L’objectif est de déterminer s’il y a convergence parmi les démarches entreprises pour gagner la confiance du public telles que l’accréditation par un tiers et la divulgation d’impact. Cette étude observe que les associations accréditées sont plus enclines à mesurer et à divulguer leur impact; que ces deux pratiques sont plus communes dans les grandes associations; et que l’accréditation à elle seule n’entraîne pas forcément les associations caritatives à divulguer leur impact, ce qui suggère que des facteurs sous-jacents sont peut-être responsables pour les deux pratiques. En général, ces conclusions confirment des recherches antérieures trouvant une corrélation entre la grandeur d’un organisme et le désir de mesurer son impact, bien que ce lien semble être faible.

Fundraisers, managers, and boards in the charitable sector are faced with an ongoing concern: how do they produce sustainable, predictable financial returns for their causes while minimizing the cost of fundraising? One way to address this is to improve the measurement of fundraising activities and this study asks how fundraising results should be communicated within organizations to support sustainability. This case study focuses on the fundraising program from one Canadian charity with a large, diversified fundraising program to examine how fundraisers can move beyond simple end‐of‐year financial ratios and implement one managerial technique, leading and lagging indicators, to improve long‐term financial performance. A literature review, internal interviews, and internal document review are used to identify 81 potential leading and lagging indicators that fundraisers can use to develop a suite of indicators that fit their context, activities, and goals and to identify potential challenges with implementing indicators. The role of organizational context and characteristics in selecting an appropriate suite of indicators is also discussed.

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Celebrity is a form of policy influence that can occur under distinctive circumstances. This paper draws on the regulatory/policy capture literature to develop a model of celebrity capture that explains how interest groups can affect policy in the absence of economic clout or constituency mobilization. We posit that the likelihood of celebrity capture increases when several factors align: (1) a context open to change; (2) reduced oversight in decisionmaking processes; (3) organizations that have credibility and a halo effect due to their celebrity status; and (4) an uncoordinated sector with weak intermediary organizations. The analysis applies process tracing to account for the success of one celebrity‐founded and celebrity‐led organization, WE Charity, in shaping the design and being awarded sole‐source implementation of the CAD $543 million Canada Student Service Grant (CSSG) program during COVID‐19. The CSSG, which proposed to pay up to 100,000 students to “volunteer” in nonprofits over the course of a summer, quickly failed and became a public ethical scandal.