How We Work

Every financial figure comes from the T3010 return each charity files with the CRA, read with the same rules for every charity. That is what makes the comparison fair: each charity is measured the same way as its peers, from the same public source.

• No adjustments. Tideline never adjusts one charity's figures to match its own statements, and subscribing doesn't change how any charity is measured.
• Size groups, not league tables. Charities are compared with others of similar size, using the median and the typical range rather than rankings.
• A defined peer set. In International Aid, 85 charities with at least $1 million in revenue and three years of returns, all listed in every brief.

Audited statements follow accounting standards and each charity's own categories, so they won't always match T3010 figures. To test the method, Tideline compared its figures with the published audited statements of 15 charities, about one in six in the International Aid peer set, from every size group and for each study year.

• Six were chosen to test different funding models: child sponsorship, government funding, partner funding and donated goods, from Major to Medium charities.
• Nine more were reviewed because their two-year figures stood out. This is also how leaders are screened: growth from a one-time event, such as a windfall gift or an accounting change, isn't presented as a leader's success.
• What we found: total spending and its split among programs, fundraising and administration matched closely; most differences were in how revenue is split by source.

Each brief keeps three kinds of statement apart:

• Figures from the T3010 and other named sources.
• Interpretation, labelled as Tideline's reading.
• Questions for your leadership team and board.

Where the numbers show a pattern but not its cause, the brief says so. Leaders are identified by what they have in common, not by claims about why they grew; Peer Profiles then looks at what they are doing. Tideline doesn't tell charities what to do: your leadership knows its context better than the data does.

• Q4, Peer Landscape: where your charity sits, and which peers grew what they put into the field fastest.
• Q1, Peer Profiles: a closer look at the Landscape's leaders and other notable peers, from their annual reports.
• Q2, Giving Market Outlook: whether a charity's giving trend reflects the wider market, from Statistics Canada data on Canadian donors and donations.
• Q3, Donor Motivation Index: which motivations each charity leads with, scored from its own website and annual report and building on the Peer Profiles, and how charities with similar motivations fared with donors.
• The next Q4: the Landscape refreshed with a new year of returns, so the record of where your charity has stood lengthens with each edition.

• The current year. T3010 returns are filed up to six months after year-end, so the Peer Landscape describes the last full year.
• Unrestricted reserves. Program cost coverage measures cash and investments against program spending; it is a measure of liquidity, and only a charity's own statements show how much is unrestricted.
• Donor data. The T3010 doesn't report donor numbers, retention, monthly giving or fundraising channels, so fundraising measures describe cost and income only.
• The whole market. Shares are of the peer set, not of all Canadian giving to the cause.
• Inflation. Growth is shown in current dollars, with growth after inflation where it changes the story.

• Commentary about your charity appears only in your own package.
• Other charities are named only when they lead, such as the largest or fastest growing, never to single out weak results.
• No named charity's pay figures are ever shown; compensation appears only as ranges and group medians.
• Charities set aside from the leaders analysis are never named, and neither are the reasons.