Helping purpose driven businesses respond to world events safely
GivingForce’s Charity Due Diligence Team Manager Shriya Mahatma talks about the practicalities of helping businesses and employees respond to crises such as the war in Ukraine.
Doing good is something most of us are keen to encourage. But when an employee wants to do a good deed, such as volunteering or donating to a charity or nonprofit via one of their employers’ charitable giving programmes, they’re unlikely to consider potential negative ramifications.
Naturally, most of us wouldn’t expect doing something charitable to prove controversial. But when socially-minded employees are keen to respond to and give generously towards developing world events via their payroll their employers need to have all the information.
Let’s consider for a moment the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There’s been a huge emotional response to a fast-moving set of events with a huge humanitarian impact.
Understandably, people want to donate and try to make a difference straight away. The charities and nonprofits operating on the ground might be global and well-established humanitarian aid organisations.
But numerous new organisations will have also sprung up in response to the crisis and socially engaged employees will be keen to donate to them. While this should be encouraged, there are also precautions to take. The last thing your employee or the wider business will want is for their well-intentioned charitable giving efforts to cause regulatory or reputational damage to your company.
Proper due diligence is fundamentally important at all times, but especially in regard to fast-moving situations such as these. We try to think on our feet and get ahead of developments, but it can take weeks to get vital information from war-torn countries amid developing crises.
There are lots of different checks to be performed by the due diligence team before money can be safely donated. One of the key areas we check for is whether a charity or nonprofit or any of the employees who work there are subject to sanctions. Sanctions might be placed on an organisation or country for lots of reasons, such as for breaching human rights, terrorist activity or to signal disapproval for another reason.
Wherever a charity or nonprofit recipient is located in the world, it’s important to make sure they operate in line with laws and regulations in the country they’re headquartered in.
Charity due diligence checks at GivingForce
At GivingForce, we give our clients access to a database of 55,000+ of charities and nonprofits located around the world.
Every approved organisation on our database has undergone rigorous due diligence checks by our team of skilled researchers. This means funds can then be donated quickly and easily via our systems from our clients’ instructions.
At GivingForce our Charity Due Diligence Team goes through the rigorous checks for each recipient organisation. While the steps we take vary, the most essential checks are:
Existence check - we check that the charity or nonprofit organisation actually exists and that it is based at the address it claims to at. We check its digital footprint and sometimes request further documentation to clarify.
Charitable status - we make sure it is a registered charity, nonprofit or tax-exempt entity in the country/countries that it’s registered in.
Sanctions check - we make sure the organisation isn’t under any international sanctions by checking against the global sanctions list.
Reputation check - we check a variety of sources for any adverse news or information as working with disreputable organisations has a knock on effect on our client’s reputations.
When a client is keen to donate to an organisation in Ukraine, for example, and we’re not able to perform one or more of these basic checks, we have to go the extra mile and request additional information to ensure our vetting criteria is met.
Often we’ll call the charity to get a faster response. Bearing in mind when these huge global issues arise there can be lots of people calling these charities at once. We have to be patient sometimes and our clients understand this. They even help us by sharing their contacts to help speed up the process sometimes.
Unfortunately, sometimes we won’t be able to approve an organisation to receive donations. It’s never nice to turn down a charity or nonprofit. But our clients and their employees do understand and they seem to really respect the work we do.
We do our best to find an alternative list of approved charities operating in the same sector, and our clients seem to appreciate that. It is very rewarding to see donations starting to flow through to organisations and causes that need it.
Read more about our Charity Due Diligence Service and our database of over 55,000 charities and nonprofit organisations.
Shriya Mahatma, Charity Due Diligence Team Manager
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