Are you a registered charity?
What charities and nonprofits need to publish
They are checking you are real before giving money to a name they may not have heard of. Charity fraud is common enough that careful donors verify, and the ones who verify are often the ones who give most.
How customers actually ask it
The same intent arrives in wording your page probably does not use. All of these mean the same thing:
- “Are you a registered charity?”
- “charity number”
- “are you regulated”
- “is this legitimate”
- “who oversees you”
What a complete answer contains
For charities and nonprofits specifically, an answer is only complete when it covers all 5:
- 1
The registered charity number, as a number on the page
- 2
The registering body and country, since these differ across jurisdictions
- 3
The registered legal name if it differs from the trading name, which trips up donors checking the register
- 4
A link to the public register entry, so verification takes one click
- 5
Where the annual accounts can be read
A worked example
Illustrative — not a real business
Yes — we are registered charity number 1123456, registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales. Our registered name is The Riverside Trust, which is what appears on the register; we operate as Riverside. You can see our entry, including our filed accounts, on the Commission's register.
Which page should own it
About us or footer, and repeated on the donation page
What silence costs
A cautious donor who cannot verify you in thirty seconds gives to a charity they already know instead.
More questions charities and nonprofits get
Related
industry
AI customer support for charities and nonprofits
Charities field questions from three different audiences — donors, volunteers and the people they exist to help — usually with no support team at all. All three sets of answers are somewhere on the website, and RubyRep answers from them at any hour, which matters most for the audience least able to wait.
term
What is AI customer service?
AI customer service means answering customer questions with a language model rather than a person. The useful implementations are grounded in a specific business's own content; the poor ones let a general model improvise, which produces confident answers that are wrong.
term
What is a knowledge base?
Traditionally a knowledge base is a help centre humans read. For AI support it is the source material a representative answers from — which means an ordinary website, well written, can serve as one without a separate help centre.
Does your site answer this already?
Point RubyRep at your website and ask it this exact question. If it cannot answer, neither can your customers.