Editorial policy

What we are not

We are passionate people. We are not experts in everything, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Circle Acts is not a charity evaluator, a rating agency or a watchdog. We do not audit anyone's finances, score organizations, rank them, verify impact claims, or confirm that a registration is current. We have no methodology for any of that, and nobody on staff to do it, because there is no staff.

If you need that kind of assessment, it exists and it is done properly by others. Charity regulators publish filings, and independent evaluators publish analysis. We point you at both below.

What we actually do

We are volunteers who write about causes we think deserve more attention, and about the organizations already working on them. The goal is simple: if you want to give and do not know where to begin, an article here should give you somewhere to start and a direct link to the people doing the work.

We do check the basics before writing. Is the cause real and current? Does the organization actually exist, and is it doing the thing it says it does? A nomination that fails either test does not become an article. That is a sanity check, not an audit, and the difference matters: it means we can tell you an organization is real and active, not that its finances are sound or its programs work.

That is journalism of a modest kind, not certification. Naming an organization means we found it worth telling you about. It is not a guarantee of its conduct, its finances or its results.

How we stay independent

• No organization can pay to appear here. We do not sell listings, features or placement.
• We take no commission. Every link goes directly to the organization. We receive nothing whether you give or not, and we are never told that you did.
• No affiliate links. There are none anywhere on this site.
• Contributions to Circle Acts buy nothing. Supporting us does not get an organization covered and does not change what we write.
• Nobody here is paid. Circle Acts is a collective of volunteers giving back. There are no salaries to protect.

How we choose what to write about

We start from a cause rather than an organization. An article usually begins because:

• a cause is underreported, or people have stopped paying attention to it,
• a reader nominated something, or
• we noticed a gap in what we had already covered.

A "best of" heading is a plain-English way of saying "here are some organizations working on this". It is not a ranking, it is not scored, and a different volunteer might have picked a different set.

Who writes our articles

Circle Acts is run entirely by volunteers, including students who join us over the summer. Articles are published under the Circle Acts name rather than individual bylines. That is deliberate: the organization stands behind what is published, and responsibility for an error sits with us rather than with a volunteer.

Sources and dates

We work from public sources: an organization's own material, annual reports where they publish them, and reputable reporting. We link to the source where we can so you can read it yourself rather than take our word for it.

Every article shows a publish date, and an updated date where one applies. Charity information goes stale quickly. Programs close, registrations lapse, leadership turns over. An article may be out of date by the time you read it.

How to check an organization

Before giving a significant amount, spend five minutes with the official register. It is free and it is the authoritative answer, which is more than we can offer.

• Canada: the CRA List of Charities
• United States: the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search
• United Kingdom: the Charity Commission register, or OSCR in Scotland
• Australia: the ACNC Charity Register
• New Zealand: the Charities Services register

Look for current registration, recent filings, and whether the organization publishes anything about what its programs achieved. If an organization will not tell you where the money goes, that is worth knowing regardless of what any article says.

Corrections

If we get something wrong we fix it. Tell us through the contact form with the article address and what is incorrect.

• Clear factual errors are corrected as soon as a volunteer can get to them.
• Substantive corrections are reflected in the article's updated date.
• Typos and broken links are fixed without a note.
• We do not remove accurate criticism because an organization asks us to.

Advertising

This site carries advertising through Google AdSense. That is how it pays for itself: nobody here takes a salary, but hosting and research tools cost money.

Some rules we hold ourselves to:

• One ad unit per article, never more.
• It is labelled "Advertisement", and it sits after the list of organizations, so it never comes between you and the charity you came here to find.
• No pop-ups, no interstitials, no ads that follow you down the page.
• We do not choose the ads. Google does. An ad appearing here is not a recommendation from us, and advertisers have no say in what we write.
• We block whole categories of advertising. No adult or sexual content, no gambling, no alcohol, no dating, no get-rich schemes, no political ads.
• We block charity and fundraising ads too. An ad for a charity sitting beside an article about charities looks like our recommendation, and it is not. Any organization that reaches you from this site should reach you because a volunteer wrote about it, not because it bought the space.
• No organization can pay us for coverage, with or without ads.

Advertising is a funding stream and nothing more. It pays the hosting bill so the articles can stay free, and it has no bearing on which causes we cover or what we say about them.

AdSense uses cookies. The privacy policy explains what that means and how to opt out of personalised advertising.

Use of AI

AI tools may assist with drafting, editing and background reading.

We are not going to claim more than we do. We do not fact-check every claim in every article. We are a small group of volunteers and there are not enough of us for that.

What we do instead is work from public sources and link to them, so that any claim here can be checked by the person reading it rather than taken on trust. If something is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Circle Acts is responsible for what appears on this site regardless of how it was drafted.

Our French and Chinese articles are machine translated from the English. Each one says so at the top and links to the original. They are not reviewed sentence by sentence, so where a translation and the English disagree, the English is the version we stand behind.