Judging Process

Assessment and review procedures for the Charity Governance Awards

The Charity Governance Awards will be judged via a two-stage process.

First Assessment: All entries are evaluated and scored by at least two volunteer judges. The scores are independently reviewed and all entries ranked to create a longlist of charities that advance to the next stage. Where there is a discrepancy in scores or the scores are otherwise inadequate for ranking, entries may be reviewed by an additional volunteer judge.

Due to the volume of awards and limited staff capacity, we are unable to offer individual feedback to charities on the results of the first assessment. However, the Entry Guidance Document that we provide each year details not only the criteria and questions in each category, but also allows charities to preview the rubric used by our judges to evaluate and score each entry. This allows all entrants to read and understand exactly what the judges are looking for and what needs to be included to ensure a competitive entry.

Second Assessment: The longlist (top-rated entries in each category) is not made public. However, the charities that are included on the longlist are evaluated by a second round of Professional Judges, made up of experts from across the charity sector who are recruited by our awards partners. The Professional Judges meet to discuss and debate the long-listed charities as a panel, and their job is to determine the shortlist. The shortlist is made public before the awards ceremony.

During the awards ceremony (June 2025), the shortlisted charities are celebrated and the Winners (and by default, the runners-up) are announced.

Due to the volume of awards and limited staff capacity, we are unable to offer individual feedback to charities following the announcement of the shortlist. However, we do publish case studies on the website highlighting the stand-out factors of each shortlisted charity (both the runners-up and the winners).

Judging questions

We are always looking for ways to improve the awards, which sometimes means we add or change the categories, or edit the questions we ask on the entry form in each category. However, an Entry Guidance Document is updated before the awards go live each year and published for all charities who are considering entering the awards. The document explains the short set of criteria that applies to all applicants across all categories, and the document also details the questions – and how each question will be assessed – for every category.

Conflict of interest

There are no barriers to entry for any charity (as long as it meets the criteria). Before the judging process commences, all judges will be asked to declare any conflicts of interest with the entries they have been assigned to review, and steps are taken to reassign the judges or mitigate the conflict of interest throughout the assessment process.