Data Sources & Methodology

Where every figure on CharityData NZ comes from.

New Zealand Charities Register

Charities Services, Department of Internal Affairs

Coverage: All ~27,000 registered charities — name, registration number, sector, purposes, status, registered office
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand (CC BY 3.0 NZ)
Refresh: Daily incremental sync via OData API; full reconciliation weekly
Source: Visit primary source

Charity annual returns & financial statements

Charities Services (filed by each charity)

Coverage: Total revenue, total expenses, financial year ends, audit opinion (where filed), per-week paid hours and volunteer headcount. ~405,000 historical financial records. Every annual return links direct to the official PDF on register.charities.govt.nz.
Licence: CC BY 3.0 NZ — same as the parent register
Refresh: Annual return filings ingested as published; backfilled to financial year 2015
Source: Visit primary source

Group consolidated annual returns

Charities Services (filed at parent group level)

Coverage: Consolidated income, expenses, assets, liabilities and surplus filed by ~300 NZ charity groups (Salvation Army, Anglican dioceses, large iwi confederations). 2,100+ historical group filings. Surfaced on subsidiary profiles when the entity itself files empty individual returns because the real figures sit at the group level.
Licence: CC BY 3.0 NZ
Refresh: Weekly via OData /Groups feed; group AR Summary PDFs deep-linked from the official register
Source: Visit primary source

Charity officers & trustees

Charities Services

Coverage: ~242,000 historical officer records — name, role, appointment + resignation dates, charity link
Licence: CC BY 3.0 NZ
Refresh: Daily incremental; deduplicated against shared.people for cross-platform matching
Source: Visit primary source

DIA Class 4 Gaming Trust Grants

Department of Internal Affairs (Gambling Compliance)

Coverage: ~64,000 grant applications since 2021 — applicant, society, region, category, amount granted vs requested, decline reason. 44 trusts, ~$660M of distributed grants.
Licence: NZGOAL — Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
Refresh: Quarterly when DIA publishes new datasets
Source: Visit primary source

NZ Sanctions Register

MFAT (Russia Sanctions Act 2022) + UN Security Council (consolidated list, implemented in NZ via United Nations Act 1946) + NZ Police (Terrorism Suppression Act 2002 designated entities)

Coverage: ~2,875 designated persons + entities across all three regimes (~1,848 Russia, ~1,005 UN, 22 non-UN counter-terrorism). Cross-matched against charity officers + companies. Tier-1 matches (name + birth year for persons, exact name for entities) auto-confirmed; weaker matches sit in an internal review queue with a 5-business-day SLA.
Licence: Public registers — re-publication of fact of designation is permitted; assertion of a match against a specific NZ person carries editorial responsibility (see Disclaimer §7a).
Refresh: Weekly across all three regimes; manual update for the small NZ counter-terrorism list as new designations are published.
Source: Visit primary source

MBIE Insolvency Register

Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (Insolvency and Trustee Service)

Coverage: Bankruptcies, no-asset procedures, summary instalment orders. Cross-matched against charity officers, NZX directors, councillors, MPs. Display follows MBIE Access Agreement clause 4.5–4.6: 4-year limit for bankruptcy / no-asset procedure, 5-year limit for summary instalment, no time limit where 2+ insolvencies recorded.
Licence: MBIE Insolvency Register Access Agreement
Refresh: Weekly cross-match across all platform person records
Source: Visit primary source

Companies Office prohibited-director list

NZ Companies Office (MBIE)

Coverage: Directors prohibited or banned by court order from acting as a company director. Cross-matched against charity officers + NZX directors. Display includes prohibition type, start/end dates, and link to the Companies Office source page.
Licence: Public register
Refresh: Monthly scrape of the prohibited list
Source: Visit primary source

Charities Act 2005 §36B officer self-attestation

Charities Services (filed by each charity in their annual return)

Coverage: Each annual return requires the charity to certify that no officer is disqualified under §36B (not bankrupt, not prohibited from being a director, not under a property order, not under 16, not convicted of dishonesty, not disqualified by board, not disqualified under the charity's own rules). Surfaced on the Officer Integrity panel only for currently-active officers — historical attestations are stored for audit but not displayed (see Disclaimer §7a for the editorial reasoning).
Licence: CC BY 3.0 NZ — same as the parent register
Refresh: Weekly via OData /Officers feed
Source: Visit primary source

Methodology

The financial-health, governance, and transparency scores shown on each charity profile are calculated from the sources above using a documented methodology. Scores are an analytical tool — they are not an official evaluation by Charities Services or the New Zealand Government.

View scoring methodology

Spot an error?

We do not independently verify information that charities file with the Charities Register. If you find data that looks wrong on a charity page, the fastest paths are:

If you are an authorised representative of the charity, claim the profile and submit a correction from the dashboard.
For data sourced from Charities Services, the canonical fix is to update the underlying record at charities.govt.nz. We re-sync daily.
Anything else, email hello@charitydata.co.nz.

Data sourced from Charities Services register and annual returns. Our datasets may not be complete. Automated analysis can produce errors. If you believe any data on this page is incorrect, please contact us at hello@charitydata.co.nz. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice.