ACNC Commissioner the Hon Dr Gary Johns tabled the following in Senate Estimates on 27 October 2021
I commend the ACNC Annual Report to Senators, and I note that the sector continues to grow. In 2018 there were 55,000 charities on the register; today there are nearly 60,000. For several years there were about 4,000 applications for registration per year. In the last two years these have risen to 6,000 applications per year, partly driven by DGR (Deductible Gift Recipient) reforms and Men’s Sheds reforms.
We have approximately the same number of staff to service 60,000 charities, the greater number of new applications, and all our other work, and yet we have registered more charities than last year, about 2,500. You would appreciate that my staff, one hundred officers, reside in Melbourne and have been locked down for nearly 12 months. Despite this, as I have shown they have performed extremely well. However, we have not been able to achieve all our service standards, but we decided to hold on to the standards assuming that next year we will be able to achieve them.
Just to give Senators a final picture of the growth of our work, our main way of informing the public of the work of the sector, and helping charities through advice and education, is our website.
- In 2018 we had one million searches of the register.
- In the last 12 months we had five million searches of the register.
- In 2018 we had five million hits on the website.
- In the last 12 months we had 11 million hits on the website.
We are servicing more charities and reaching out to a much larger public than has ever been the case and we have done this in trying circumstances.
Next month, we will be very proud to launch the ‘charity marketplace’ which will allow the public to search for a charity program by using common descriptive terms, without knowing the name of a charity. This will be a significant tool to increase the visibility of the work of the sector, and will no doubt drive increased traffic to the website.
I thank Senators.