The charts that you see on this site show a charity’s state funding relative to the threshold of 10% or £1 million.

When the level of state funding is above either of those thresholds, the charity is marked Fake. If it is below both thresholds, the charity is marked Genuine. To understand the charts in more detail, read on.

The 10% threshold

Suppose you are on the Board of Directors of a charity, and you get just 5% of your funding from one donor. Here is what 5% looks like on a pie chart.

The whole circle represents all the charity’s income. The green sector represents the 5%.

If that donor starts to makes demands, you are very likely to resist them. Even if you lose the funding, it is only 5% — a twentieth of your income.

Now suppose you get 15% of your funding from that one donor. Here is what 15% looks like on the pie chart.

If that donor starts to makes demands, you are much less likely to resist them. You might lose 15% of your funding — nearly a sixth of your income.

So somewhere between 5% and 15% there is a threshold proportion of income that makes your charity vulnerable to undue influence from a single donor. This site takes 10% to be the threshold. It’s a little arbitrary, but even so it has some reasoning behind it.

For many charities that single donor who can exert undue influence is the state, even when the money is laundered through a variety of different bodies before being donated.

On this site the charts only show the 10% threshold without the other funding.

State funding is shown in red over the top of the threshold. For example, a genuine charity that gets only 5% state funding has a chart looking like this.

A fake charity that gets 15% state funding has a chart looking like this.

The £1 million threshold

Even a charity that gets less than 10% state funding might get more than £1 million from the state. In a case like this the charity’s state funding is shown on a bar chart.

The blue bar at the left shows the £1m threshold. The red bar at the right shows the charity’s state funding.

For example, a fake charity that gets £2 million state funding (which is less than 10% of its total funding) has a chart looking like this.