Introduction

The behaviour of voluntary organisations, and their willingness to be accountable, is a pressing policy issue around the world. In the UK, for example, legitimacy and public trust are under threat, due to a recent spate of high-profile voluntary sector crises and scandals, including concerns about large-scale and pervasive instances of financial mismanagement, intrusive and potentially harmful fundraising practices and the abuse of vulnerable beneficiaries. Concurrently, charity regulators are in a state of flux, dealing with declining or stagnating budgets and grappling with new strategic priorities to become data-led organisations. Understanding the nature, extent and impact of risk is therefore of considerable importance for the field, sector, public and policy practitioners.

This chapter reflects on the methodological implications and challenges associated with using regulatory data to study risk in the voluntary sector. In particular we describe collecting, operationalising and analysing the large-scale, often complex, administrative data held by regulators that are necessary to study this topic. Drawing on numerous examples from a multi-year programme of research on the UK charity sector, we outline both the promise and the perils for researchers embarking on their own research.

The challenges and opportunities of regulatory data in measuring risk

The nature of risk in the voluntary sector is broad, and derived from the panoply of operational areas and decisions inherent in running organisations: ‘Financial, personnel, programme and capital expenditure decisions all entail risk because they involve interactions with changing, complex, volatile or intrinsically stochastic economic, political and social environments’ (Young, 2009: 33). In some areas our understanding of risk is good, and backed by strong empirical evidence, in particular organisational failure (Helmig et al, 2014) and financial vulnerability (see Dayson, 2013). There are some areas where there is a burgeoning set of empirical work being conducted, like organisational fraud (Archambeault et al, 2015) and non-financial disclosures. But there remain topics that are under-theorised or lacking in robust or plentiful empirical examination, such as mission completion (Helmig et al, 2014), ethical fundraising practice and safeguarding of vulnerable beneficiaries. What unifies many attempts at examining risk is the use of data held by bodies with responsibility for overseeing voluntary organisations, in particular the various charity regulators.