| FY24 | From 1 July 2024 |
From 1 January 2025 |
|
| Tied Funding |
7% |
12% |
|
| Semi-tied Funding |
20% |
25% |
|
| Untied Funding |
20% |
25% |
Our Commitment to Transparency
The NORTH Foundation has a strong commitment to transparency and the communities we support, our clinicians, researchers, donors and other stakeholders can trust us to act ethically and wisely while maximising funds for our beneficiaries. On this page, we want to highlight some recent changes to our budget model, our Deductible Gift Recipient status and our ABN 15 652 292 423.
The NORTH Foundation is committed to:
- Being transparent, informative and professional when soliciting gifts from donors;
- Respecting donors’ privacy (including not selling or exchanging the personal details of donors) and having protocols for dealing with donor requests for anonymity and confidentiality;
- Using gifts effectively, ethically and where possible in line with donor wishes; and
- Acknowledging and recognising donors’ contributions by celebrating philanthropy.
DGR status
Australian charities can be registered as Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) entities that are further endorsed with DGR1 or DGR2 status. The DGR status of charities determines the various tax rules applicable to them including from which entities they can accept donations.
From July 2021, The NORTH Foundation was endorsed as a DGR1.
Foundation allocation model
We are dedicated to achieving transformative change by empowering healthcare staff to deliver lifechanging outcomes for patients. To support this vision, the NSLHD Executive and NORTH Foundation Board endorsed the practice of receiving an allocation from each donation. This approach, standard among charities, is crucial for ensuring accountability, sustainability and operational excellence.
This allocation enables us to invest in the infrastructure, resources and talent needed to support the impactful work of our clinicians. By investing in areas like donor engagement, innovative technology and strategic oversight, we can amplify the impact of every dollar raised. This allows us to take on ambitious projects, build stronger connections with donors, and create a more sustainable foundation for healthcare innovation and improvement.
Ultimately, this allocation ensures that the NORTH Foundation can not only meet the needs of the district today but can also grow and evolve to meet the challenges of tomorrow.
Benchmarking performance
Despite the NORTH Foundation being a relatively small charitable organisation, we are responsible for multiple beneficiaries across the NSLHD. We are also proud to say that we strive to maintain industry best practices. As we are unique in our remit and operations, it is difficult to make like-for-like comparisons.
To address this, we have benchmarked ourselves against three types of similar organisations:
- NSW hospital foundations
- NSW research institute foundations
- NSW-based charities focused on a single medical/health issue (e.g. cancer, mental health, cardiology, etc)
To help you better understand how we perform against industry standards we have compared our performance against similar organisations using relevant fundraising metrics like Cost Revenue Ratio and Fundraising Efficiency Ratio.
As can be seen from the snapshot, the NORTH Foundation compares favourably in industry benchmarks when measuring both metrics. For more information about our benchmarking, budget model and finances please read our Annual Report.
*Source: KPMG 2024.
The health foundation sector data presented above is a population of 17 similar sized hospital foundation or health foundation entities operating in NSW, VIC, QLD, WA and SA.
Gift acceptance
The NORTH Foundation accepts philanthropic funding from a wide variety of public and private sector sources who are interested in supporting the NORTH Foundation and its beneficiaries to achieve our goals and vision.
The NORTH Foundation takes all reasonable steps to ensure that the NORTH Foundation Board can be made aware of the source of funding for any gift. Where necessary the Chief Executive Officer can refer gifts to the NORTH Foundation Board for review and to decide whether a gift can be accepted. The Board also can review any concerns raised about an existing gift and decide whether to return the gift to the donor (where possible by law) or refuse additional gifts.
The NORTH Foundation will not accept gifts that may:
- Contravene state and/or federal laws in Australia;
- Create unacceptable conflicts of interest;
- Expose the NORTH Foundation or its beneficiaries to undue adverse publicity or reputational risk;
- Cause any other damage, including financial damage, deterring other donors from associating with the NORTH Foundation or its beneficiaries; or
- Conflict with the values and aims of the NORTH Foundation or its beneficiaries in any other way.
This is determined at the absolute discretion of the NORTH Foundation CEO and Board.
Gift purposes
When a donor wishes for the gift to be used for a specific purpose – where it is possible to do so the NORTH Foundation will honour these wishes. If the donation is to establish an endowment for an ongoing purpose, that purpose should be defined as broadly as possible, to prevent difficulty in allocating the gift to the donor’s intended purpose.
Should it become impractical or impossible to carry out the donation’s expressed purpose(s), or where the NORTH Foundation or the relevant beneficiary reasonably believes that the original expressed wishes are no longer a suitable and effective means of using the gift, the NORTH Foundation, where possible will communicate with the donor or the donor’s nominated representative in order to review/change the purpose or will allocate the donation to an area that most closely aligns with the donors originally intended purposes.
Undesignated gifts not subject to specific terms may be used to advance the NORTH Foundation and its beneficiaries’ mission and priorities as determined by the NORTH Foundation Chief Executive Officer, NORTH Foundation Board and NSLHD Board or the appropriate delegate.
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