Charities speak: Mapping arts and cultural charities …...ACHS charities, and delve deeper to...

1

Charities speak Mapping arts and cultural charities in England and Wales using data scienceRaphael Leung [email protected]

March 2020

Summary

This report analyses the activities and objectives of registered charities in England and Wales involved in ‘arts, culture, heritage or science’ (ACHS) with a particular focus on arts and culture. The analysis applies natural language processing and clustering techniques to the information that charities provide when they register. This allows for a more detailed understanding of what charities are doing, and what they are trying to achieve, than is available from existing classifications. The work produces an automatically-generated taxonomy of keywords used by ACHS charities. The taxonomy is then applied to create the first systematic mapping of the different activities that charities are supporting and the groups they engage with, for example, the number of performing arts charities working to engage women or specific ethnic minorities. Future work can extend these methods to map other parts of the charitable sector or build recommendation engines to allow funders and charity workers to find others promoting similar causes.

mailto:[email protected]

Charities speak: Mapping arts and cultural charities in England and Wales using data science

2

Contents

Introduction 3

1.1 Why study charitable missions? 3

1.2 How can existing classifications of charities be improved? 4

1.3 Why study change in the charitable sector? 5

1.4 Objectives of the report 6

Data 7

Methodology 8

3.1 Data preprocessing 9

3.2 Using part-of-speech analysis and pattern-based matching to identify 9 useful phrases

3.3 Using the existing classification to validate our features 10

3.4 Creating a taxonomy of the keywords that arts and cultural charities 12 use to describe themselves

3.5 Identifying relevant charities using the taxonomy 13

3.6 Using dependency parsing to extract charitable missions 13

3.7 Limitations of our method 14

Findings 15

4.1 A taxonomy of keywords 15

4.2 Developing a vocabulary for tagging charities activities and goals 17

4.3 Applications of the taxonomy 19

Applications of this research 25

Glossary 26

Appendix 27

7.1 Major existing charity classifications for charities in England and Wales 27

7.2 Historical change in the broader charitable sector 28

7.3 Additional information on the taxonomy of keywords 30

References 31

2

1

3

4

5

6

7

8


3

Introduction

Charities affect all walks of life – they care for underprivileged people; they provide spaces for communities both urban and rural; they fundraise for, and invest in, causes; they support interests both general and specialist. They range from large foundations to small meeting groups.

Charities are a core part of our society and economy. The annual income of the charities sector in England and Wales was an estimated £113.1 billion.i According to surveys conducted in 2018, almost 3 per cent of the total UK workforce work in the voluntary sectorii and one-in-five people volunteer at least once a month.iii Charities are also an important part of the arts and cultural sector with many venues, groups, and institutions organised on a charitable basis. In one way or another, we all interact with charities.

But how well do we understand what these charities do, and what they are trying to achieve? In this paper, we use data science methods to map the charitable sector at scale, focusing on the activities that charities advancing arts and cultural causes are undertaking and the objectives that they are trying to fulfill.

1.1 Why study charitable missions?

There is widely considered to be a growing role for charities in so-called mission-driven policies to tackle society’s grand challenges. A challenge is ‘a broadly defined area which a nation may identify as a priority (whether through political leadership, or the outcome of a movement in civil society).’iv, v The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) set out the first four Grand Challenges in 2019 in the Industrial Strategy – artificial intelligence and data, ageing society, clean growth, and the future of mobility.

Using data science techniques to extract and identify missions may allow policymakers to track and monitor the charitable ecosystem. If systematic data is collected over time, it may inform the development of areas for support of the sector. Mapping missions across existing data sources, like the charitable sector, can help policymakers understand how charities are engaging with particular issues.

The systematic mapping of missions also has benefits for accountability and advocacy. While grand challenges focus ‘on the global trends which will transform our future,’vi challenges identified on the grassroots level by charities may reflect different priorities and be phrased using different language. Being able to identify missions that have emerged on the ground, from charities documentation or elsewhere, has promising applications for policymakers and those in civil society: from tracking the role that charities are playing to enabling greater transparency for causes that have been funded and are yet to be funded.

1


4

Impact investors may find that better data on missions helps with due diligence, landscaping/scoping, and impact assessment.vii In particular, the practice of impact investment puts emphasis on quantifying the amount of social or environmental impact that is being delivered via investments, either directly or indirectly. A data-driven approach to missions tracking will help expand the evidence toolkit for impact investors.

1.2 How can existing classifications of charities be improved?

There are two main systems that have been used to classify charities in England and Wales – one from the Charity Commission of England and Wales (CCEW) and one from the United Nations (UN) called the International Classification of Non-profit and Third Sector Organizations (ICNP/TSO). We explain these in greater depth in the Appendix.

The existing classifications are useful but have limitations. There is potential scope to make our understanding of charities more granular, flexible and timely.

1. More granular

The existing categories are broad. For example, in accordance with the official charitable purposes, all of ‘arts, cultural, heritage, or science’ (ACHS) is covered by one umbrella term that is not broken down further.

The categories often combine activities that are relatively distinct. For example, museums and historic sites are grouped together in ICNP/TSO.

2. More flexible

It is difficult to explore sub-categories of charitable activity. For example, we may want to know how many charities promote exercise for the elderly through dance, or the location of community centres promoting integration of refugees through sports or performance arts. The existing CCEW classification does not allow for this functionality.1

We show that a taxonomy created using data science techniques can help contribute to a better understanding of the sector.

3. More timely

Other granular classifications like the UN’s are manually curated. Updating them requires expert knowledge which can be labour-intensive.

Such classifications can therefore be slow in reflecting societal change. For example, ICNP/TSO was updated to have more subdivision codes in December 2017, but it takes time for users to adopt updated versions.ii In contrast, we show that data science methods can be used to create a taxonomy both efficiently and quickly.

1. It is also not possible to discover charitable areas if the user does not already know what terms to search for, or have sufficient knowledge of the domain to search for related concepts that can return more useful results.


5

Source: The Charity Commission for England and Wales.

1.3 Why study change in the charitable sector?

The charitable sector is not static and undergoes constant change. For example, from 2010-2016, 469 charities were registered on average every month in England and Wales (and with an average of 425 charities removed every month as well, owing to reasons such as the charity no longer existing, it being amalgamated, or its funds being transferred).

As charitable objects are written at the point of registration, and are not edited since, we use registration and removal rates to show why registration texts are a reflection of society at various points in time. The monthly charity registration and removal rates are shown in Figure 1, with spikes representing bulk registrations and removals.2,

Figure 1: Charities registration and removal rates in England and Wales (1962-2018)

A classification that is more adaptable to reflect changes should allow us to have a more up-to-date understanding of the sector, enabling emerging or declining trends in charitable work to be identified more easily.

2. There are some spikes in the data for both charity registration and removal. 4963 and 2948 charities were registered in September 1962 and November 1963 respectively. Those months were historically the highest. A variety of charities were registered in both of those months. While there were small groups of charities registered in September 1962 that shared the same name – 20 charities registered under ‘Unknown Donor’ and 18 under ‘Fuel Allotment’ – they only accounted for 0.4% and 0.3% of that month’s registrations. The spikes in registration were driven by many charities using the newly implemented registration process. The historical highs for charity removals came in September 2009 and February 2000, with 4687 and 3445 charities removed respectively. ‘Does not operate’ was cited as the most common removal reason in both cases, accounting for 92% and 84% of removals of that month respectively. Across the entire dataset, ‘Does not operate’ usually only accounts for 16% of removals (‘Ceased to exist’ is the most common reason generally, cited by 51% of all removals from 1961 to 2018). As such, the removal spikes may be explained by the Commission removing non-operational charities from the register in batches.

Registered Removed

1962

1964

1966

1968

1970

1972

1974

1976

1978

1980

1982

1984

1986

1988

1990

1992

1994

1996

1998

2000

2002

2004

2006

2008

2010

2012

2014

2016

2018

0k

1k

2k

3k

4k

5k

Cha

ritie

s (e

very

mon

th)


6

1.4 Objectives of the report

This applies data science methods to charities’ data to enhance our understanding of charities operating in the arts and culture in England and Wales. It has two specific aims:

1. To produce a detailed picture of arts and cultural charities using automated techniques, going beyond existing static classifications, and

2. To better understand what charities (say they) do and what they are trying to achieve.

Officially, as in other jurisdictions, to be registered in England and Wales charities must have ‘charitable purposes’ that help the public (known as being ‘for public benefit’). Both are legal definitions under charity law and charities are also subject to regulations.3 However, there are also non-registered charities (excepted or exempt charities),4 unincorporated charitable associations, charitable trusts, charitable companies, community interest companies, and industrial and provident societies. Significant voluntary and charitable work happens outside of registered charities. In this paper, we look at registered charities only.

In this report, we restrict our analysis to a charity’s ‘aims and activities’ and ‘charitable objects’, as described in text provided in two fields when a charity in England or Wales registers. For active ACHS charities where websites are available, we also include text scraped from charities’ websites.

3. There are three charity regulators in the UK. The largest one, in terms of charities regulated, is the Charity Commission for England and Wales (CCEW). It started registering charities in 1961 and that register currently has over 160,000 charities. Anyone can look up the charity register on their website: https://beta.charitycommission.gov.uk

4. Certain churches, scout and guide groups, and student unions are excepted charities, whereas some universities and museums are exempt charities. See the official guidance for the definitions of ‘exempt’ and ‘except’.viii, iv

https://beta.charitycommission.gov.uk


7

Data

We collect official charities data from the CCEW website via web-scraping in September 2018 (n=359,245). This includes all charities ever registered, including charities that are ‘linked’.5 The charity numbers at the time of data access are:

Table 1: Data from CCEW

2

Register Data source(s) Total entries Active charities6 ACHS charities maintained by (as a % of all (as a % of entries) active charities)

England and Charity CCEW 359,245 208,057 30,418 Wales Commission for (57.9%) (14.6%) England and Wales (CCEW)

For active ACHS charities where websites are listed on the register (n=19,916), we also include text scraped from their website main page.

5. Linked charities are closely connected charities that prepare only one set of aggregated annual accounts.

6. For CCEW, active was defined as all charities that were not listed as removed. This includes four other categories (up-to-date, out-of-date, recently registered and linked charities).


8

3

Methodology

We summarise and explain the motivation for the research methods used in this section. The analysis involves:

• Data preprocessing.

• Using part-of-speech analysis and pattern-based matching to identify relevant phrases.

• Using the existing classification to validate our features.

• Creating a taxonomy of arts and cultural charitable terms.

• Identifying relevant charities using the taxonomy.

• Using dependency parsing to extract charitable missions.

Figure 2 sets out the different stages and the different techniques, which are then discussed in more detail below.

Figure 2: Methodological pipeline

Data collectionand preprocessing

Data scraped fromCommission

Combine useful text

Regular expressionrules to remove

numerical list headings,dates and time

Future extraction Taxonomy construction Document retrieval Mission extraction

Part-of-speech tagging Cluster terms andlabel clusters

Generate seedsearch terms of

interest (manual)

Query expansion

Retrieve matchesfrom all charities

in the register

Estimation of charities in differentareas and their top missions

Dependencyparsing

Get top missionsby tf-idf

Cluster auto-labelsto create

nested structure

Manual review andlabel highest tier

Taxonomy

Convert features toembedding vectors,

hierarchicalagglomerative

clustering, knee-pointdetection,

auto labelling

Pattern-basedmatching

Nounchunks

Matches Matches

Verb + nounchunks

Validate features byevaluating against

‘ground-truth’(existing classification)


9

3.1 Data preprocessing

For each charity, we select two text fields - a charity’s ‘aims and activities’ and its ‘charitable objects’. While objects are more formal and sometimes contain legalese, they are the only text available for removed charities.

We carry out preprocessing to get the text into a useful format. The main reason for doing this is that certain terms are commonly used in charities’ objectives, but are not relevant to understanding a charity’s thematic area or mission, so we want to discard them. We take out phrases that commonly appear in charities’ objectives but are not informative for our purposes, such as ‘at the discretion of the trustees’, ‘articles of association’ and ‘the generality of the foregoing.’7 We also remove the headings of numerical lists, dates and times.

3.2 Using part-of-speech analysis and pattern-based matching to identify useful phrases

Next, we programmatically parse out the most important pieces of information for each charity. The goal of this step is to extract the words and phrases that are the most informative and most able to capture the essence of each charity’s self-described activities and objectives.

We use common techniques in natural language processing (NLP) to represent each charity’s text as a vector. Tokens are single words or group of words that make up each sentence. In count-based models, each charity is then represented as a sequence of numbers that indicate how many times those tokens featured in each document. Tokens can be extracted with a sliding window, e.g. in a tri-gram model, we go through each three-word combination in the text information and keep recording the frequencies. Tokens frequently appearing in many documents like ‘the’ are weighed down. This is commonly called ‘term frequency-inverse document frequency’ (tf-idf). Using a sliding window the size of n-grams to extract tokens mixes up several distinct aspects of charities: it was difficult to distinguish between what charities are doing from where and how they were doing it. Therefore, we instead use part-of-speech analysis combined with pattern-based matching to identify relevant phrases.

Including part-of-speech tags helps us pick better text tokens by making use of morphology. In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. English has a relatively simple morphological system. Computational linguists have created models that are trained on patterns of parts of speech in different contexts (e.g. the word following the word ‘the’ frequently is a noun in English) to predict and generalise across other examples. We used a pre-trained model to identify the parts of speech that are used in the charities text. The part-of-speech tagger was trained on the OntoNotes 5 version of the Penn Treebank tag set, which is a dataset of sentences annotated with syntactic or semantic sentence structures.x

7. To do this, we used a combination of techniques – including regular expressions, fuzzy matching with Levenshtein distances, and spell-checkers.


10

Obtaining tokens’ parts of speech allows us to use rule-based matching, i.e. creating particular part-of-speech tag patterns to match tokens across the charities text. Part-of-speech tagging and rule-based matching allows us to use particular morphological patterns to isolate terms that answer different questions. In the charities text corpus, noun phrases may be better at capturing thematic areas, whereas verbs may shed light on the motivation of their work.

3.3 Using the existing classification to validate our features

We validated that our extracted noun phrase features were of sufficient quality by using information from existing manually-selected categories provided by the Charities Commission.

To validate that our extracted phrases are a meaningful way to identify what large numbers of charities are trying to achieve, we compared our method against official charitable purposes: the legal categories that charities choose for themselves when they register. Treating those manually-selected categories as ground truth labels, we generate subsets of charities, half of which are ‘arts, culture, heritage, or science’ charities and the other half from another charitable purpose (but not both).

First, we created a tf-idf representation of all charities’ descriptions of their activities using the extracted features.8 Next, we converted the features to pre-trained GloVe word embedding vectors, taking the average of the token vectors for multi-word features. We multiplied the resulting matrix of token vectors by the matrix of tf-idf weights to get a tf-idf weighted representation of each document. Since these vectors live in a 300-dimensional space, which is too high to visualise, we reduce the dimensions from 300 to eight by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and then use t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbour Embedding (t-SNE) to further reduce the dimensions to two, in order to plot the results. Each point in the resulting chart represents the text information that we are using to summarise a charity in two dimensions, with points that are closer together being charities that have text information with similar meaning.

Figure 3 shows that across all subsets of data tested, the features can be used to create visually separate clusters for charities in yellow (ACHS) and purple (another purpose). Some charities, e.g. animal charities, are very well separated from ACHS charities, meaning the words used to self-describe their activities and objectives are semantically very different for the two groups. The opposite is true for ‘other charitable purposes’ and ‘recreation’, meaning those charities use words that occupy a very similar semantic space as words used by ACHS charities. This is unsurprising as the activities of many ACHS charities relate to leisure.

Overall, this shows that using our extracted features to represent charities can successfully parse out meaningful differences at scale, which are validated by comparing to the ground-truth categories that were manually labelled when charities register.

8. Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe), developed by Stanford researchers, is an unsupervised learning algorithm for obtaining vector representations for words. Vectors were trained on Common Crawl, a web archive.xi


11

Figure 3: The extent to which the features can distinguish ACHS charities from other charities

Separating charities by their noun phase features

Component 2

Com

pon

ent

1


12

3.4 Creating a taxonomy of the keywords that arts and cultural charities use to describe themselves

We include ACHS charities in England and Wales where we can find at least some official text describing their activities and goals. We used pattern-based matching, as explained above, to extract terms to build a taxonomy. The pattern used are noun chunks: these are base noun phrases or flat phrases that have a noun as their head. The noun chunk pattern picks up terms like ‘suitable premises’, ‘elderly luncheon’, and ‘United Kingdom’. It also captures hyphenated phrases (like ‘multi-sensory show’ and ‘inter-cultural community’) as well as multiple adjectives (like ‘periodic financial assistance’, ‘good mental health’ and ‘inclusive amateur dance’). For simplicity we refer to these extracted phrases in this report as noun phrase features.

As charities engage in a wide range of activities, creating a clustering where each charity only belongs to one group misses important nuances. In the taxonomy approach, charities that undertake multiple activities, reflected in the text information they submit when registering, are catered for more comprehensively.9 This reflects the reality of the sector’s complexity.

To identify terms that are distinct, but have a similar meaning, we clustered the extracted noun phrase features using hierarchical agglomerative clustering and estimated an optimal number of clusters to group the terms using an algorithm for knee-point detection.xii This generated groups of words with similar meaning, often sharing an identical word. It may be an adjective, e.g. a cluster may contain many variations of ‘creative writing, creative work’, etc. It may be the noun, e.g. a cluster may contain many variations of ‘interactive theatre, live theatre’, etc.

We generate automatic labels for these clusters of terms, using a combination of the most frequently occurring terms and their part-of-speech to produce a coherent phrase that, in most cases, summarises the cluster of phrases.

We then convert the automatically generated labels to embedding vectors for another round of clustering with the same method. The successive clustering allows us to provide structure to our taxonomy, making it easier to extract higher level meaning from, and interpret, the thousands of automatically-labelled clusters. We apply lemmatisation to the automatic labels so clusters with very similar labels are combined (e.g. ‘events’ and ‘event’ appear as event).

Finally, we review the most aggregated level of clusters and manually assign labels to the 92 clusters in the top tier. The labels attempt to summarise the majority of the terms. While the automatic labelling may miss out on important distinctions, the manual annotation process is more accurate but laborious. This produces a four-level taxonomy of keywords used by arts and cultural charities in England and Wales.

9. For example, an arts youth charity may mention terms like ‘young composers’ and ‘musical resources’, which signals that the charity may belong in clusters working with young artists and musical education respectively.


13

3.5 Identifying relevant charities using the taxonomy

Methods in information retrieval such as semantic matching and query expansion, as well as other implementations like knowledge graphs, allow us to pass in queries and receive matches based on similarity. To demonstrate how the taxonomy of keywords can be useful, we use a simple implementation of query expansion to search for and quantify a diverse range of over 100 terms. The search terms range from art forms (‘ballet’, ‘poems’) to adjectives (‘creative’, ‘innovative’, ‘virtual’), and were manually chosen to cover a range of domains in the taxonomy.

Query expansion allows the search query to be ‘enriched’ by semantically similar phrases. For example, if the original search query is ‘artistic’, the expanded query would also include ‘artistic merit’, ‘artistic heritage’, ‘musical works’ and other related terms in the taxonomy. Finally, the expanded queries were used to match charities in the register that mentioned any of the matching terms.

As with most search implementations, this method only provides an estimate of charities engaging in various areas. Charities may be omitted if they use terms too dissimilar to the matching terms, and charities captured may not be exclusively focused on the area either. For example, a charity which ‘helps the men and women’ may not be a women’s charity in the conventional sense. Still, the approach allows for estimates to be made of previously uncaptured categories.

3.6 Using dependency parsing to extract charitable missions

When charities fill out their aims and activities/charitable objects, they tend to be blending together multiple distinct questions:

• What they do (e.g. ‘run a theatre’).

• Why they do it (e.g. ‘to promote the arts’).

• Who they do it for (e.g. ‘the elderly’).

• How they do it (e.g. ‘by running workshops’).

• And where they do it (e.g. ‘in Bristol and surrounding areas’).

Computationally distinguishing all these different pieces of information with accuracy is a complex task. Charitable missions are often not explicitly stated, and are tied up with descriptions of activities, beneficiaries and locations. It is labour-intensive to adapt current machine reading comprehension datasets for complex reasoning.xiii


14

We therefore use dependency parsing to extract the form of the charitable mission. First, using an extended verb phrase pattern with pattern-based matching, we extract candidates of long phrases which may contain charitable missions. Predeterminers and postmodifiers10 are included where possible to capture more complete phrases. The pattern consists of verb(s) followed by a noun phrase. We cater for consecutive verbs which are common in charities text (e.g. ‘to advance, promote, and foster…’). Second, we apply dependency parsing to the extracted candidates to produce a tree showing the syntactic dependencies of its tokens. As with part-of-speech analysis, the dependency parsing uses a pre-trained model trained on OntoNotes. We identify the root and iterate through its descendents to collect mission candidates. For example, if the input is ‘(C) to employ, retain and pay designers and others whose services are required...’, the output is ‘employ designers’, ‘retain designers’ and ‘pay designers’.

While there are idiosyncratic ways of phrasing similar goals, which can be addressed by clustering, dependency parsing alone does return coherent results that can be aggregated and compared. For each of the groups of charities returned from the document retrieval, we ranked their top missions by their tf-idf score. This allows us to indicate the most popular goals among a group of charities returned from a search query. Future work can generate annotated datasets as benchmarks to evaluate the accuracy of different extraction techniques.

3.7 Limitations of our method

While our method can extract and parse charitable activities and goals at scale, there are limitations. First, the method relies on charitable missions being explicitly stated, but this is not always the case. While the motivations for charitable work usually involve tangible benefits – e.g. helping a specific group of people, cultivating awareness or a particular craft, improving wellbeing – they can be intrinsic in some cases, such as ‘no reason’ or ‘the act is worthwhile itself’.

Second, when put into words, charitable missions are frequently entangled with the target population and locations, as well as the activities carried out to achieve those goals. The extent to which they can be unpacked with machine learning is the key technical issue this report tackles.

Third, charitable missions evolve over time to reflect changes in priorities and circumstances. Text mining enables useful social inquiries using novel data (ranging from annual reports to websites and social media accounts). However, there may be potential biases arising from stylistic writing choices, frequency of updates, as well as data availability and retention.

10. As an example, in the phrase ‘all the residents living in the area’, ‘all the’ are the predeterminers and ‘living in…’ are the postmodifiers.


15

4

Findings

4.1 A taxonomy of keywords

The taxonomy of keywords used by charities in England and Wales that promote arts, cultural, heritage or science (ACHS) has four levels. The taxonomy unsurprisingly includes many art and cultural domains, like performing, visual, dramatic, and literary arts etc, but also include the wider number of domains where ACHS charities operate. This is evidenced by subcategories of terms in the taxonomy that concern religions, ethnic groups, disabilities, age groups, the environment, flowers and plants, the military and transportation, etc.

At the very top, there are seven main areas which break down to 92 large clusters of charitable terms, each breaking down to one or two further levels. The seven main areas of charitable terms generated by clustering the manually-assigned labels can be loosely interpreted as the:

1. People and identities charities work with.

2. Religions charities are associated with.

3. Descriptions of arts and cultural activities.

4. Descriptions about logistical operations of charities.

5. Geographies charities are associated with.

6. Formats and genres of arts and culture.

7. Descriptions about buildings and the environment.

Not all of the seven areas are relevant for each charity. The 92 manually-assigned labels are shown in Figure 12 in the Appendix.11

We show three examples of the taxonomy subcategories from the 92 clusters in the second level: 1) creative arts, 2) digital technology, and 3) disability.12 Each one breaks down into 2-3 more levels. Each box is labelled with the automatically generated text, and a maximum of five noun phrase features that belong in each cluster. The accuracy of the cluster automatic labelling is not perfect: for example, in one instance, aikido classes and upholstery classes are grouped together, but visual inspection suggests they are overall sensible. To achieve highest coherence, the clustering approach can be combined with manual curation. Newer encoding techniques can also improve performance.

11. There are altogether 2747 ‘end clusters’ which are groups of terms sufficiently similar for automatic labelling. There are 92 clusters in the second level. All of them can be broken down further. On average the 2nd level clusters have 11 child clusters that sit beneath them (number of children vary from 3-104). There’re 1665 clusters in the third level. Out of those, 354 (21.3%) could be further broken down to a 4th level whereas the remaining 1311 are sufficiently broken down. There are 1436 clusters in the fourth and last level where there is the most detail.

12. The others can be viewed at https://charitiestaxonomy.azurewebsites.net/taxonomy

https://charitiestaxonomy.azurewebsites.net/taxonomy


16

Painting

photogaphic paintingsuch paintingsother paintings

numerous paintingsvaluable paintings

Sculpture

iconic sculpturemural decoration

monumental sculpturesuch sculpture

figurative sculpture

Porcelain

nantgarw porcelainroyal porcelain

worcester porcelainarmour porcelainfrench porcelain

Fine/decorative art

decorative designfine decorative artsdecorative crafts

decorative artdecorative arts

Ceramic

ceramic educationceramic arts

ceramic manufactureceramic artist

ceramic department

Mosaic

mosaic artmosaic initiative

mosaic commissionsmosaic sundialmosaic exists

Glass

ancient glassbroken glassbritish glassstained glasssuch glass

Silk

whitchurch silkembroidered hanging

ceremonial silkembroidered panels

Fabric

social fabricstructural fabricexternal fabric

Aikido/upholstery class

upholstery classaikido classesaikido class

upholstery classes

Traditional material

modern materialsnatural materialsmuch materials

additional materialssurplus materials

Material

Oral material

oral tapesoral materialsoral materialoral researchoral memories

Other/relevant material

relevant materialssuch material appropriate historical material

related materialslocal materialmaterial aid

Musical/archival material

scholarly materialarchival material

material photographsmaterial musical appreciation

contemporary material

Recycled

Creative arts

Online

online versiononline publicationonline magazineonline edition

online publisher

Digital archive/online

online digital libraryonline archivesdigital archivedigital archives

online photographic archive

UK/online resource

credible online presenceonline exhibition

online webonline networksonline museum

Website

an educational websiteupdated website

new websiteown website

upgraded website

Electronic

Electronic music/recording

electronic artselectronic art

public electronic musicbritish electronic music

electronic recording

Medium/electronic mean

electronic messagingelectronic com

online communicationelectronic information

electronic versions

Digital

Digital content/broadcasting

digital videodigital cinemadigital music

digital broadcastingdigital recording

Digital art/photography

digital designdigital art

digital photographdigital traditional photography

digital humanities

Digital technology/resource

digital softwaredigital skills

digital meansdigital facilitiesdigital resource

Interactive

interactive appinteractive programmesinteractive exhibitions for

interactive mediainteractive entertainment

Interactive workshop/educational

interactive scienceinteractive groups

interactive musical concertsinteractive danceinteractive drama

Theatrical/musical entertainment

local entertainmenttheatrical entertainment

light entertainmentmusical entertainmentpublic entertainment

Content

educational contentand factual content

artistic contentdramatic contentscripted content

Programming

religious programmingsocial programmingartistic programming

ambitious programminginnovative programming

Computer

public computersfree computerlocal computertop computers

english computer

Accessible format

fun accessible formatattractive format

large formatother formatscurrent format

Medium/audio recording

monthly audio tapeaudio records

audio recordingsaudio visual material

cornish audio

Digital and technology

Impaired child/adult

visual impaired childrenimpaired individualsimpaired inhabitants

impaired peopleimpaired adults

Limited disability

limited disabilitieslimited disability

special disabilitiesabove disabilitiesmixed disabilities

Disability

2nd disabilitypractical disability

public disabilityinformal disabilityelderly disability

Visual impairment

visual impairmentphysical impairments

additional impairmentsvisual impairmentsmental impairment

Deaf

deaf and harddeaf community

non vocational deaf

Deaf community/people

deaf peopledeaf community

deaf adultsdeaf group

deaf students

Blind

blind awarenessblind summitblind grants

blind advancementdeaf awareness

Disabled

Disabled access/facility

disabled accessdisabled association

disabled theatreinterested disabled anglers

disabled transitional advocate

Disadvantaged/disabled people

elderly disabled peopledisabled individuals

disabled communitiesdisabled people

disabled residents

Disabled musician/artist

disabled musiciansdisabled performers

disabled actorsdisabled artists

experienced disabled artists

Disabled group/non-disabled

non-disabled membersnon-disabled personsnon disabled groups

disabled groupsnon-disabled dancers

Visual handicap

blindness visual handicapssocial handicap

physical handicapvisual handicap

mental handicap

Disability

Figure 4: Example of the taxonomy – creative arts

Figure 5: Example of the taxonomy – digital and technology

Figure 6: Example of the taxonomy – disability


17

4.2 Developing a vocabulary for tagging charities activities and goals

The iterative clustering creates a prototype of a vocabulary, which can be applied to index the activities and goals of charities in a semantically meaningful way. It can be helpful to think of the cluster assignments as suggested tags: if a charity mentions at least one of the terms in a cluster, the charity is tagged with the cluster label. So a charity mentioning ‘young violinist’ may be tagged as ‘young musician’, which is nested under ‘young people’ and may also be tagged in one of the music clusters, etc. Each tag represents a group of charitable terms that are similar enough that they can be given a name automatically.13

We clustered the noun phrase features (converted to word embeddings, so that semantically similar phrases would be closer to each other) successively until they can be represented in a four-tier structure which we loosely call a ‘taxonomy’. We found 2747 groups of terms that are semantically similar enough and can be automatically labelled. In Figure 7, each cluster of terms is a circle, with size corresponding to an ACHS focus weight.14 This weighting surfaces keywords that ACHS charities are more likely than non-ACHS charities to use when describing their activities and goals. A single charity will often be counted in multiple circles in this diagram.

13. 92% (n=154,974) of charities received at least 1 tag, where the base is all CCEW charities that were not removed or linked at the time of the web-scrape. On average each charity is assigned 4 tags and each tag is assigned to 55 charities.

14. If X is equal to the percentage of ACHS charities that described their activities using terms within that cluster, and Y is the percentage of all charities that described their activities using terms within that cluster, the ACHS focus weight is simply X divided by Y.


18

Figure 7: The taxonomy flattened and visualised, with some clusters in creative domains highlighted

official

public/currentaffair

representativeorganisation/

bodycouncil

blackafrican/

community

africancaribbean/community

west/east

african

centralafrican/culture

africanfrancophone

africanorigin/descent

africandance/

art

africanrefugee

africancommunity/

school

africandevelopment/

health

indian/africancultural

western/southern

africa

somalifamily/origin

somali

congolesecommunity

sudanesecommunitycaribbean

culture/heritage

caribbean

caribbeanpeople/origin

vessel

fishing

canal

victorianvictorian

edwardian/music

originalvictorian/

school

rurallandscape

architectural

historicalarchitectural/

heritage

architectural/historicinterest

architecture

design

oldchurch/building

important/historicbuilding

ancientwoodland/building

georgiansociety/building

historicalbuilding/

work

building

good/suitablebuilding

religious/traditionalbuilding

adjacentbuilding

publicbuilding/

place

mainbuilding/

area

observational antiquarianinterest

horticulturalannual/

horticulturalshow

publiclibrary library

specialistlibrary/museum

newcastlecastle/library

archivecollection

archiveservice

archaeologicalexcavation/

site

archaeologicaljournal/research

archaeologicalproject/

investigation

numismatic

archaeology

artefact

centreislamic/religiouscentre

disadvantaged/residential

centre

new/onlinecentre

historical/irish

centre

creativehub

uniquefacility/

only

special/educational

facility

other/local

facilityexcellent/good

facility

facility

indoor/recreational

facilitydelivery

area swindonarea/

stockport

outside/samearea

key/subject

area

place

location

castle castlecary

house local/publichouse

road

street

square

valley

bridge

hill

royalgreenwich/

people

mill

lane

ancient/historic

site

site

stoke

manchester greatmanchester

southampton

stainton

vale

wardsouthward/east

heath

moor

leith

cecilsharp/

preston

potter

loughborough

wolverhampton

nottingham

cheltenham

lambeth

newham

guildhall

oxford

authentic

creativeparticipation/organisation

educational/creativeactivity

creativeindustry/

technology

creativewriting/

work

creativeproject/

collaboration

creativeway/

people

creativeability/

technique

artistic

artisticproject/

community

artisticsubject/traditionartistic

experience/talent

musical/artisticwork

aestheticvalue

artistic/creative

expression

creativity

harmony

harmoniousrelationship/community

socialcohesion

communalfacility/

relationship

collectiveworship

vibrant

impulse

genuine

inexperienced

skilled

public/good

citizenship greatgreatplace/

success

little/great

bardfield

goodwork/waypersonal

personalsocial/service

appreciation

great/public

appreciation

educational/cultural

awarenessawareness

skill

basic/keyskill

occupational/socialskill

cultural/educationalopportunity

creative/participatoryopportunity

other/educationalopportunity

unique/equal

opportunity

lifelong

correct/good

understanding

knowledge

keyrole

active/responsible

role

stage

key/earlystage progression

maturity

unique uniquecollection

collectionlarge

collection/archive

informative/educational

display

graphicart/

design

feature

exceptional

own/present

performance

good/vocal

performance

dramaticperformance/

work

aerial

classicwork/

literature

sequence

change

photographicwork/record

occasionalvisit/guest

occasionalworkshop/

concert

otheroccasional/publication

photograph

qualityhigh

qualityhigh/good

quality

experience experienced

immersiveexperience

playing

original/shortplay

singh

indianlanguage/

culture

indiancommunity/

people

indianart/fine

indianclassical/

music

bangladeshinepalese

ucl/external

body

other/corporate

bodybody

londonborough

london

londoncolney

southlondon/

east

central/great

london

londonhospital/charity

londonart/

dance

unitedkingdom

greatbritain

uknational/

scout

ukcommunity/

city

ukcharity/provide

ukorganise/

practitioneruktour/work

britishcomposer/

music

britishmaritime/

history

britishfashion

britishsilver/brass

public/british

community

british

britishlegion

royal

royalmail/court

royalpalace/hospital

royalphilharmonic

royalschool/college

royalacademy/institute

westengland/

south

southwale/west

wellington

ireland

irishmusic/

art

irishtraveller/people

celticpeople

traditionalscottish/country

welsh

widearea

wideperformance/

world

public/widest

possible

broad/possible

range

small/widerange

widerange/

community

spectrum

broadarea/range

metropolitandistrict city

great/majorcity

centralarea/hallsouth

bank

capital

polling

electoralward/area

national/local

election

support

formerparish/church

former

movement

political/social

character

strongvalue

strongcommunity/educational

prominent

independenttheatre/museum

independentlife/body

democraticprocess

thirdparty

private/interested

party

involvement

historicalinvestigation/

document

economic/social

activity

other/more

activity

organise/own

activity

extra/regularactivity

accessible/relevantactivity

recreative/rehabilitative

activity

healthy/meaningful

activity

relatedperformance/

artrelatedservice/

educational

relatedactivity/

issueresponsibilityresponsiblemember/individual

demonstration

anti-violence

non-commercial

nonjudgemental/

support

non-violent

non-sectarian

widespreadperformance

social socialwelfare/leisure

socialproblem/

circumstance

socialexperience/

context

socialgathering

monthly/social

meeting

socialscience/scientific

different/socialgroup

socialworker/woman

socialoutlet/centre

socialaction/contact

potential/social

opportunity

socialclub/

sporting

culturalsocial/activity

other/socialevent

gainfulemployment

possible/future

employment

welfare

public/social

welfare

occasional/private

hire

public/good

relation

friendlyvenue/society

peacefulsociety

dialogue

occasional/historical

talk

main/small

meeting

public/other

meeting

strategicpartnership/

alliance

jointperformance/

action

law

regulated

civilparish

representative/legal

charity

constitutional

public/humanright

human

humantrafficking/

right

citizen

socialinclusion

status

qualifiedtutor/

teacher

membership

member

fellowman

group

other/smallgroup

non-political/political

organisation

other/small

organisation

youth

campaign

digitalplatform

ownfundraising/

fundraise

civicresponsibility/

amenity

civicsociety/

hall

greencommunity/

area

stroud/high

green

golden

silver

nationalco-operative

archive/work

oxfordshiremuseum/

uk

northamptonshire

derby

norfolk

suffolk

countyhistoric/scottishcounty

royal/formercounty

painting sculpture

fine/decorative

art

ceramic

mosaic

traditionalmaterial

other/relevantmaterial

historyoral

history/tradition

socialhistory

historic historicvessel

historicmachinery

historiccollection/

book

historicorgan/

significance

historicpark/

garden

historictown/

vehicle

heritageunique/culturalheritage

public/religiousheritage

technical/industrialheritage

maritimeheritage

historicculture/heritage

culturalcentre

culturalidentity/origin

richcultural/

life

culturalculturalshow/

festival

culturalart/

theatre

culturaltradition

culturalexperience/

life

subject/differentcultural

culturalknowledge/

diversity

culturaladvancement

culturalproject/

programmeculturalservice/

link

recreationalcultural/facility

culturalworkshop/destination

monthly/culturalactivity

culturalorganisation/

group

unique/visual

culture

persian/islamicculture

culture

public/polishculture

ethiopianculture

cross-cultural

historicalhistoricalresearch/

study

historicalvalue/topic

historicalmaterial/

paper

localhistorical/

link

18th/21st

century

20thcentury/

earlyancient

ancienttradition/

right

medievalmediaeval/medieval

rural

medievalenglish/music

14th

vedicvalue/history

early

secondold

collaborativework/

theatrework

wise/suitable

work

innovativeperformance/

way

development

moral/intellectual

developmentown/

economicdevelopment

ambitious

activeparticipation/

life

dedicated

projectsmall/other

project

appropriateproject

current/major

project

initial/ongoingproject

digitalarchive/online

uk/online

resource

electronicmusic/

recording

medium/electronic

mean

digitalcontent/

broadcasting

digitalart/

photography

digitaltechnology/

resource

interactiveinteractiveworkshop/educational

theatrical/musical

entertainment

content

programming

accessibleformat

eastsurrey/

west

eastend/side

eastanglian/region

east

southwest/area

south

southkerrier/cowton

southwest/east

southasian/music

southamerica/

view

north

west westhorsley

region

southern

westernsociety/

seaboard

eastern

northernarea

regionalseminar/authority

regionaltheatre/

art

disadvantaged/disabledpeople

disabledmusician/

artist

disabledgroup/

non-disabled

vulnerablegroup

vulnerablechild/people

disadvantagedcommunity/

area

disadvantagedyouth/section

underprivileged

sensitiveservice

homelesscharity

elderly/local

population

elderlyperson/

handicapped

elderlyluncheon/

frail

local/elderlypeople

elderlyproject/service

asianelder

old

oldtown

oldage/

people

oldtime

oldmaster

oldschool

thirdage

young/old

adult

renewableenergy

wind

relate/scientific

fieldagricultural

society

internalexternal/

organisation

structural internalimprovement

technical technology

mechanical

security publicsafety

protection

advancedstudent/training

specialneed/

projectspecial

specialevent/

exhibition

estate

personalproperty

land

affordable/social

housing

residentialfacility/camp

residentialvisit/trip

non-residential/residential

school

floor

small/common

room

kitchen

premise

own/dedicated

space

space

blackbritish/history

black/ethnic

minority

asian/ethnic

minority

other/ethnic

minority

ethnicorigin/

minority

multi-ethniccommunityethnic

group/community

racial

racialminority/harmony

different/racialgroup

multi-racial

humanrace

multiculturalcommunity/

diversitymulti-cultural

frenchclass/way

braziliancommunity

spanishportuguese/

speaker

italian

ancient/greek

language

turkish/cypriot

community

cypriot/turkishdescent

polish

slovak

albanian

russian

russia

grandtheatre game

openevening

openstudio/

rehearsal

openexhibition/

art

openday

openaccess/

use

public/openspace

secular/religious

event

other/relatedevent

educational/culturaleventartistic/

musicalevent

indoor

outdoor/indoor

exercise

outdoor/indoor

meeting

indoor/outdooractivity

outdoor

first/thirdworld

competitive

social/economic

deprivation

social/economicexclusion

isolation

financialhardshippermanent

collection/museum

permanenthome/display

family

woman

public/large

womanimmigrant/

chinesewoman

wiorganisation/

group

childunderprivileged/

poorchild

female

malechoir/chorus

female/malevoice

iconicliveperformance/

quality

livetheatre/music musical/

goodlife

own/personal

life

furniture

coffee

item

active/healthylifestyle

healthyeating

healthyliving/

life

whistdrive

agm

fete

celebratoryparticipative

participatoryart/

activityparticipatory

activite

educative

workspace

unrivalled

letting

constructionalbme

unestablished

chattel

anniversary

diwali

puja

celebrationprivate/public

celebration

visitforeigntour/

overseas

tripeducational/

regularouting

booking

evening

daytime

walking

aesthetic/artistictaste

mediumsized/

evening

highcalibre

primary/widegoal

annualseries

second/thirdweek

secondpart/first

season

local/publicrecord

record

basicschool/

requirement

principleactivity

gooduse use

common

commongood/effort

new/otherform

simple techniquepractice

highstandard

artistic/high

standardinspirational

friendly/social

atmosphere

informative

playful

exciting

wonderful

wide/geographical

area

geologicalscientific/interest

culturalbackground

nature

parental

consent

subject

matter

policy

relevantpublication/

art

relevantvisit/

document

informationfree/

publicinformation

advice

idea

other/relevantsubject

aspect

issuecurrent/socialissue

detailed detail

overseasaid/

assistance

humanitarianwork/

support

widerelief

worthy/needycause

hospital

good/mentalhealth

weekly/goodhealth

mental/ill

health

medicalsupply/mission

medicaltreatment/condition

medicalpractice/training

suitable/other

training

educational/vocational

training

physicaleducation/

development

physicalmental/training

physicalart/

archivephysicalactivity/

environment

mental/physicaldisability

emotionalsupport/stability

mental

physical/mental

capacity

physical/mentalillness

gentle/healthyexercise

therapeuticactivity/group

therapeuticworkshop/

art

generic

different/diversesection

seniorsection

wholetown

entire/whole

community

part

mainconcert

mainprogramme/

target

main

principal/main

activity

valuable

critical

need importance

principalaim/

office

majorconcert/

exhibition

majorwork

keydecision/

aim

vital

main/focalpoint

importantaspect

laterdate/

remain

inclusivetheatre/

art

inclusiveenvironment/community

comprehensive

broadaim

sustainabledevelopment/

economic

sustainablewaste/

use

inter-generational

inter

inter-cultural

availablematerial

universalservice

alternativetherapy/

form

freeuse/

service

freeperformance/

concert freepublic/event

freewalk/place

freecopy/book

originalartwork/

pieceversion

model

affordablestudio/

art

affordableactivity/space

clear/additional

income

reasonablerent/cost

lowcost/

income

revenue

taylortrust

portfolio

additionalfund/

money

mutualinterest

asset

goodmanagement

investment

mining

socialenterprise

cultural/social

enterprise

financial

non/financialsupport

financialassistance/

grantfinancial

statement/mean

fiscal/financial

year

educational/culturalsectorindustrial

engineering

textileart

limitedcompany/subsidiary

commercialsector/

practice

domesticviolence

englishdomestic/

architecture

own/small

business

smallcompany/

corporation

economicsocial

economic/community

economicgrowth

economicdisadvantage/

situation

vibrant/local

economy foundation

structure

free/musicaltuition

occasional/smallgrant

prize

unsolicitedrequest/

approach

personal/private

donation

charityunique/differentcharity

other/small

charity

worthycharity

cultural/educational

charity

science medicalresearch/

studyresearch

investigative/musicological

research

study

recentgraduate/teacher

college

university

accreditedmuseum

nonaccredit/

accredited

subject/specialistteacher

institution

affiliateclub/

organisation

institute institutes

united elderly/asian

woman

south/asian

community

south/asianart

japanese

chinesewushu/

calligraphy

traditional/chineseculture

traditional/chinese

art

chinese

chinesepeople/

population

vietnamese/chinese

community

chinesecourse

latinamerican/

people

europeanunion/culture

northern/eastern

european

foreignnational/country

internationalfestival

internationalcharity/

organisation

international

internationalstudy/society

internationalhumanitarian/

disaster

internationalrelation/exchangeinternational

volunteer/woman

internationalcompetition

internationalconference

internationalcentre/

art

internationalmusic/dance

internationalfilm/

theatre

internationalpiano/

pianoforte

globalconcern/citizen

worldwide

other/europeancountry

islamic

islamictradition/

belief

religious/islamic

education

islamicsociety/youth

islamicstudy/

museumarab

community/state

muslimfaith/

religion

indonesian/muslim

community

muslimwelfare/

way

traditional/english

folk

englishcomposer

englishclass/course

english

arabicart/

classarabic

language

other/europeanlanguage

languagethai/

chineselanguage

original/english

language

public/turkish

language

bengali/hindi

language

mandarin

bengali

punjabi

orientalculture/

art

creativesession

past/poor

student

bengaliclass/

punjabiclass

educationalclass

public/primaryschool

primaryschool/newton

school

several/specialschool

supplementaryschool/class

main/secondary

school

grade

course

highclass

exam

bilingual

educationalsocial/

development

educational

educationalcourse/school

standard/high

educational

educationalmaterial/

equipment

educationalneed/

practiceeducational

value/interest

educationalexperience/achievement

educationalliterature

educationalwork/

session

musical/educational

play

other/educational

activity

local/other

educational

educationalvisit

educationalworkshop/

presentation

religious/educational

project

educationalprogramme

sound/musical

education

broad/wide

education

literacy

vocationalnon-vocational/

vocationalopportunity

tutor

interdisciplinarywork/

character

practitioner

holisticservice/

approach

scientificmeeting/society

scientificresearch

subject/scientific

work

academic/educational

study

academicdebate/

conference

academicyear/work

academicjournal/

scholarly

educationaldiscipline/

related

instructional

creativeworkshop

practicalworkshop/bespoke

non-anglican/redundant

church

lawfulthing/

activity

odd

deed

voluntaryorganistation

voluntaryorganisation/organization

other/voluntary

organisationvoluntary

sector

voluntaryservice/effort

statutoryprovision/

modification

local/statutoryauthority

low upper

highstreet

high

abovearea/

activity

grassrootslevel

multiple/highlevel

absolute

greatpublic/

understanding fullfull

sized/stage

fulltime/

member

improvement

overallaim

substantial

regular/weeklybasis

basis

short/longterm

term

total

considerablesum/

amount

districtadministrative

area/support

metropolitanborough/gateshead

borough

neighbourhood

locality

endeavour

refurbishment

restoration

maintenance

permanent/memorialservice

memorial

memorialhall/

ceiriog

memorialhall

hallsmall/mainhall

yemeni

iranianorigin/

language

kurdishcultural/

communityafghan

refugee/community

pakistanimuslim/

community

israeli

seeker

custom

immigration

nationality

citizenship

culturalbarrier

resident

young/old

people

indigenousculture

indigenouscornish/history

diaspora

descent

origin

chineseorigin

small/different

community

community

broad/wide

community

small/major

community

goodcommunity

ugandan/somali

community

open/special

air

navalmuseum

appurtenance/marine

life

maritimeskill/

nature militaryunit/

aviationmilitarymuseum

militaryparade/conflict

wargreat/civilwar

cultural/public

engagement

battle

other/ally

activity

private/public

engagement

multi-disciplinaryperformance/

research

multi

multi-media/multi

medium

differentkind/

differentway

diverseculture/

conducting

diverseorganisation/

group

varied/diverse

community

diversecultural/heritage

varied

separate/multiple

disadvantaged

sound

soundequipment/installation

unifiedvoice

creative/newvoice

interesting/monthlyspeaker

brass

traditional/scottish

pipe

organ

orchestralinstrument/repertoire

musicalinstrument

same/suitable

instrumentclassical

instrument

song

traditional/asianmusic

music

public/earlymusic

creative/innovative

music

wide/classical

music

ensemble/vocalmusic

musicalother/

musicalgroup

musicaltalent/ability

musicaltraining/

study

musicaldirector/direction

musicalexperience/opportunity

musicalknowledge/

trust

musicalcomedy

musicalperformance/presentation

musicalcomposition

musicaltradition/

theory

musical/artisticinterest

soloperformance

singingbig

sing/singing

musician

artist

band

local/publicband

vocalinstrumental/

vocalskill

instrumentalwork

original/musical

composition

recording

chorister

other/smallchoir

choir

organist

ensembleperformance/

practice

michael

wittongilbert/sullivan

david

william

gordonpowell/anthony

samuel

allan

graham

dorothy

kate

fosterpublic/

understanding

margaret

elizabeth

1st 2nd

3rd

expedient

proactive

supplementary

remit

capacity

otherancillary/activity

commission

ownownwork

newcross/project

directdonation/christian

link

connection

mean

deepreal

need/change

more

little

littleangel

indoor/shortmat

run

timesame/firsttime

ground

way

same

other

otherway/thing

other/specialist

group

smallnumber

possibleperson

kind

respective

legalentity

annual/bursaryscheme

lishi

publicmankind

artistic/creative

endeavour

moral/spiritual

wellbeing

physical/emotionalwellbeing

enjoyment

pursuit

educationalattainment/relationship

social/environmentalregeneration

regeneration

stewardship

individualpublic

individual/work

individualstudent/school

shakespeare

symphonic/orchestral

societyorchestralworkshop/

course

new/orchestral

player

religious/secularchoral

regularchoral/concert

choral/orchestral

concert

orchestral/publicchoral

orchestral/choral

performance

orchestral/choralgroup

operatic/choralsociety choral

great/choral

tradition

professionalchoral/union

classical/choralmusic

newchoral/music

new/mixed

chamber

philharmonicsociety/

orchestra

orchestrafull

symphony/orchestra

sullivanopera

public/professional

opera

classicalopera

operaticperformance/

production

dramatic/operatic

artwide/

musicalrepertoire

interactive/participatory

theatre

littletheatre/myrtle

musicaltheatre

original/new

theatre

professional/amateurtheatre

musical/repertorytheatre

good/youngtheatre

theatricalexperience/

work

theatricalproduction/

company

theatricalperformance/presentation

studio

cinema

other/professional

theatre

sound/musical

production

varied/small

production

cultural/musical

production

local/classicaldrama

documentary

cinematographicfilm

public/shortfilm

several/small

concert

concert

recital

only/suitablevenue

other/different

venue

costume

entertainment

pantomime

circus

dance

classicalballet

carnival

publicdance

europeanbaroque/

renaissance

traditionalcraft/way

traditionaldance/

meditationtraditional

form/culture

modern

traditional/oldfolk

tradition

contemporarysculpture/

art

contemporarywork/issue

historicalcontemporary/

theme

public/classical

musicclassical

classicaltradition/

dance

popularsong/music

styledifferent/musical

style

diverseaudience

global/potentialaudience

wide/public

audience

major/nepalesefestival

festival

national/publicfestival

musical/literaryfestival

competitive/short

festival

cheltenhamfestival/petworth

villagesmall/

traditionalvillage

town

inhabitant

rurallife/

youth

ruralcommunity/

area

ruralvillage/town

traditional/ruralcraft

urbandistrict/

regenerationurban

environment/area

newmalden/

buckenham

newhorizon/comer

newwriting/

work

new

newvenue/activity

newproject/

organisation

newus/

opportunity

newplay/show

newway/life

newarrival/

york

newpark

newartwork/

artist

chinese/newyear

debate

immediateneighbourhood/

family

extensivecollection

ongoing

full/musicalpotential

futuregood

future/work

problem

challenge

goodpossible/education

creativeprocess

currentyear/

resident

present/politicalsituation

professionaladjudicator/experience

professionalplayer/

footballer

professionaltraining/

programme

professionaltuition/

qualification

high/professional

standard

professionaldevelopment/environment

good/professional

practice

professionalstaff/

research

professionaldance/

performance

professionalorchestra/conductor

professionalart

publicprofessional/

concert

creative/musicalcareer

junior/seniorband

local/seniorcitizen

senior

juniorstring/choir

juniorschool/theatre

dramatic/local

amateuramateur/musicaltalent

amateur/professionalproduction

amateurdramatic/

performance

amateur/dramaticsociety

amateurchoir/

orchestra

amateurmusician/

singerlocal

amateur/singer

non-professionalorchestra/

theatre

standard/high

possiblehighlevel

topical

annual/monthly

programme

own/major

programme

extensive/attractive

programme

creative/innovative

programme

interesting/varied

programme

programme

promotion commemorativeevent

ticket

nationaltour/

touring

nationaltheatre/

orchestra

nationalmuseum/collection

nationalmonument/memorial

nationaltrust/origin

nationalcharity/

fundraising

nationalorganisation/

group

nationalcurriculum/

school

nationalagency/

level

public

publicart

publicexhibition/

gallery

publicevent

educational/publiclecture

musical/public

performance

regularpublic/

performance

several/public

concert

publicopen/easter

publicroom/facility

publicinterest/concern

publicutility/sector

broad/wide

public

wide/publicbenefit

publicenjoyment/

taste

publicquestion/

matterpublictalk/

meeting

publichealth/hospital

publiceducation/resource

publicgood/

lifepublicwork/use

national/public

programme

publicgroup/

organisation

publichall

localcelebration/ceremony

localstudy/

research

localorganisation/

group

small/local

charity

localissue

localneed/

support

localradio/

newspaper

localindustry/

food

localchild/adult

localpeople/resident

localcommunity/

village

localarchive/museum

localcraft/

art

localhistory/nature

localschool/

university

localactivity/

pub

localyouth/scout

localclub

public/localvenue

localcouncillor

localsoloist/

orchestra

localtalent/show

localtheatre/

production

creative/digital

medium

visual/social

medium

radio

power

private

authority

national/local

government

public/local

authority

minehead

educationalestablishment

recreational

recreationalactivity/

use

recreationalgroup/event

artistic/recreational

pursuit

healthyrecreation

other/public

amenity

amenity

regular

regularprogramme/

use

regularrehearsal/

play

regularworkshop/gathering

arrangement

informalperformance/

discussion

informaleducational/environment

normalhour/

openingcasual

intergenerationalproject/group

civilisation

goodrelationship

interaction

intercultural

parish dentonparish

parishcommunity

parishchurch/priest

worcestercathedral/

service

cathedralchoir/music

priory

churchyard

st

stmatthew/gabriel

scriptural

philosophical

moral

denominational

ecclesiasticalcharity

liturgicalmusic

sikhreligious

tibetancommunity/

medicine

hinduhindu

temple/deity

hindureligious

hindureligion/worship

bengali/hindu

language

hinducommunity/organisation

hindufestival

potential spiritual

mental/spiritualcapacity

moral/spiritual

value

non-spiritual/spiritual

issue

spiritualpotential/

need

romanromanempire/

army

christianfaith/

tradition

other/religious

faith

political/religiousopinion

religiousopinion

religiousopion

religious

religiousprovision/meeting

differentreligious/

group

religiousissue/

interest

religiousvoluntary/education

cultural/religiousactivity

religiousfestival

material/jewish

heritage

multi-faith/multi

community

shree

siriguru

yoga

vedicdharma

international/wide

church

germanevangelical/

church

different/local

church

appropriateway/part

appropriatemethod

proper

other/suitablelocation

viableuse/

community

safeplace/venue

fitexercise/

class

contemporary/visual

artaudiovisual/

art

visualwork/

materialdimensional

art

vision

dynamic

public/private

function

other/local

function

religious/social

function

educational/social

service

directservice

free/publicaccess

easy/wide

access

local/publicservice

moreuser

other/regular

user

mobilephone/clinic

accessiblevenue/service

accessibleart

network

sex newton/parish

sexintercourse

sexualorientation/

identity

abuse

large/smallscale

small

largelarge

collection/provider

hellenic

local/close

associationcultural

association

federation

other/local

association

kathleenferri/

societysociety

muslim/historicalsociety

royal/photographic

society

inclusivesociety

horticulturalsociety

dramaticsociety/uplift

theatrical/musicalsociety

archaeological/historicalsociety

other/local

society

indoor/outdoor

sportsport

local/disabled

sport

clubsocial/weekly

club

player

coach

great/artisticteam

wednesday day

year

next/subsequent

year

late

september

march

pre-1974

subsequent

post

earlypart/

wednesday

last

modernperiod/early

pastyear/life

previousyear/

owner

weeklymeeting/session

weeklyactivity/

workshopweekly

swimming

weeklymusic/dance

weeklyrehearsal

annualprize/award annual

annualprom/

pantomime

annualart/

exhibition

annualconcert/music

annualshow/

production

annualholiday

annual/memorial

lecture

major/annualevent

annualcompetitive/competition

annualmeeting/

conference

organiseannual/staging

annualresidential/

trip

annualdonation/

scholarship

annualinternational/

history

annualfestival

small/archaeological

survey

dailydailylife/

service

quarterlypublication/newsletter

regular/monthlylecture

monthlymember/woman

monthlymeeting/

talk

biennialfestival/

conference

craftartistic/

contemporarycraft

museum industrialmuseum

ipswichmuseum

gallery

fine

visual/fineart

regular/temporaryexhibition

art brazilian/martial

art

small/traditional

art

innovative/creative

art

dramatic/theatrical

art

multi-art

innovative/theatrical

art

traditionalart/

apply

great/westernrailway

railway

joint/old

railway

locomotive

electric

interestedperson

effectiveway/

leadership

beneficialclass

meaningful

encourage

practicalway/

support

approach

intelligent

exchange

culturalexchange

interestcompetitive/affordable

price

artistic/culturalvalue

positiveimage

positiveexperience/

activity

positivevalue/

outcomemixed

mixedvoice/age

effect

result

meritoriouswork/

studentoutstanding

public/work

naval/architectural

merit

high/artisticmerit

distinguished/eminentmusician

significant/valuable

contribution

eisteddfodinternational/

musicaleisteddfod

specimenenvironmentalproject/charity

environmentalwork/matter

environmentalstudy/

science

environmentalresource

conservation

ecological

naturalnatural

disaster/manmade

naturalhistory/beauty

naturalresource/science

naturalenvironment/

landscape

unique/educational

resource

resourcerecreational/educational

resource

flower

tree

forest

botanical/botanicgarden

garden

parkhanworth/

skatepark

localbranch

circumstance

economic/financial

circumstance

favourable

conditionrelevant/

socialcondition

seasonal

winter

financialclimate

historical/historic

environment

local/social

environment

safe/supervised

environment

safe/supportive

environment

financialaward

newwriters

guild

actor

annual/scholarlyjournal

magazine

print

publication

book

literarywork/

art

literarymerit/prize

public/contemporary

poetry

story

personal/traditional

story

essay

novel

boy girl

youngyoung/muslimpeople

minded/youngpeople

poor/young

inhabitant

disadvantaged/youngpeople

young/unemployed

people

new/youngtalent

australian/youngbritish

musician/local

young

youngpoet/

journalist

contemporary/youngartist

talented/young

student

youngstring/soloist

talented/young

musician

musician/talentedyoung

youngpeople

youngman

youngperson/

child

talented/youngperson

elderly/youngwoman

futuregeneration

vulnerable/youngadult

young/africanpeople

young/somaliwoman

young/bangladeshicommunity

young/contemporary

composer

young/classicalmusician

youngaudience

musician/young

professional

talented/youngplayer

youngsingle/parent

publicyoung/people

youngvolunteer

professional/young

director

youngfarmer/farming

male/young

member

young/national

day

young/international

artist

teenageinfant

Music and sound

Performing arts

Cultural heritage

Architecture and landscapes

Traditional and fine art

Creative arts

Writing and publications

Archives Artistic and creative

Professional and amateur


19

Among registered 'ACHS' charities in England and Wales that were active in Sept 2018. Highest values for each subset are in red, zero matches are greyed out.

Perf

orm

ing

arts

Lite

rary

and

dra

mat

ic a

rts

Vis

ual a

rts

and

desi

gn

People Some ethnic groups Some religions

15

131

25

6

18

1

58

41

8

10

9

11

6

9

68

24

8

2

2

2

20

561

69

192

556

127

139

57

461

548

11

91

80

1

2

9

57

384

3

11

2

18

7

62

47

11

3

2

455

3

1

34

68

82

368

3

13

3

4

2

87

6

5

19

9

12

2

150

22

254

27

1

2

2

10

1

2

2

6

104

6

1

421508

1

8

2

7

20

6

1

25

4

6

LGBT

QYo

uth

Elde

rlyW

omen

/girl

sM

en/b

oys

Disabl

edRe

fuge

es

MusicJazz

BrassInstruments

Choir/singingDanceBallet

OrchestraConcert/recital

OperaFilm/TV

ActingTheatreDrama

ComedyMime/pantomime

21

5

1

10

3

1

4

4

3

14

15

3

2

2

2

3

18

3

27

3

1

8

1

56

1

29

10

2

6

1

7

2

7

3

1

50

46

6

4

1

3

3

16

3

1

1

11

1

38

Afro

-Car

ibbe

anIn

dian

Paki

stan

iBa

ngla

desh

iChi

nese

Inte

r/mul

ti

cultu

ral

3

2

1

1

2

1

1

1

1

32

3

3

25

2

2

14

1

31

43

5

11 11

1

3

4

2

3

1

3

4

4

47

1

1

9

2

4

1

1

3

2

4

8

13

1

2

2

1

1

2

1

4

3

2

31

141

10

54

1

Christ

iani

tyJu

daism

Islam

Hind

uism

Sikh

ismBu

ddhi

smIn

ter/m

ulti

faith

LGBT

QYo

uth

Elde

rlyW

omen

/girl

sM

en/b

oys

Disabl

edRe

fuge

es

Afro

-Car

ibbe

anIn

dian

Paki

stan

iBa

ngla

desh

iChi

nese

Inte

r/mul

ti

cultu

ral

Christ

iani

tyJu

daism

Islam

Hind

uism

Sikh

ismBu

ddhi

smIn

ter/m

ulti

faith

LGBT

QYo

uth

Elde

rlyW

omen

/girl

sM

en/b

oys

Disabl

edRe

fuge

es

Afro

-Car

ibbe

anIn

dian

Paki

stan

iBa

ngla

desh

iChi

nese

Inte

r/mul

ti

cultu

ral

Christ

iani

tyJu

daism

Islam

Hind

uism

Sikh

ismBu

ddhi

smIn

ter/m

ulti

faith

1

1

78

206

50

4

6

23

32

28

647

32

1

364

15

9

8

20

6

70 5

1

1

3

1

2

2

8

11

3

1

2

6283

2

58

9

2

13

3

5

18

8

1

3

1

61

6

2

25

1

6

14

9

2

34

4

16

18

10

1

4

141

17

6

19

61

4

4

2

2

Writing

Literature

Poetry

Documentary

Animation

Circus

Radio

Sports

Games

Bingo

Scrabble

Heritage

Archive

Monument

1

1

4

2

7

9

1

3

2

14

1

8

1

3

9

1

13

1

3

1

1

1

2

17

1

3

47

1

2

4

31

1

3

12

9

1

2

8 5

3

1

1

21

1

4

2

1

46

3

38

2

24

1

1

36

17

4

11

41

7

1

2

42

1

36

1

14

2

1

1

3

52

1

5

1

1

7

1

1

13

3

26

27

1

1

17

1

16

18

1

2

5

1

2

8

2

6

2

19

2

54

14

2

1

47

346

67

50

30

72

1

117

186

545

102

61

35

56

78

38

5

36

248

7

3

10

10

4

4 56

1

3

6

2

2

2

8

1

2

2

4

16

2

3

4

2

12

8

18

10

2

1

4

21

10

10

1

10

10

4

2

13

24

11

47

10

8

4

1

3

2

5

461

10

5

7

10

6

28

24

81

21

1

8

20

PhotographyCrafts

PaintingSculpture

Fashion/textilesDesign

ArchitectureFestival

ExhibitionWorkshop

MuseumGallery

CinemaStudio

WorkspaceHub

MusicJazz

BrassInstruments



OperaFilm/TV

ActingTheatreDrama


Writing

Literature

Poetry

Documentary

Animation

Circus

Radio

Sports

Games

Bingo

Scrabble

Heritage

Archive

Monument

PhotographyCrafts

PaintingSculpture



ExhibitionWorkshop

MuseumGallery

CinemaStudio

WorkspaceHub

MusicJazz

BrassInstruments



OperaFilm/TV

ActingTheatreDrama


Writing

Literature

Poetry

Documentary

Animation

Circus

Radio

Sports

Games

Bingo

Scrabble

Heritage

Archive

Monument

PhotographyCrafts

PaintingSculpture



ExhibitionWorkshop

MuseumGallery

CinemaStudio

WorkspaceHub

2

13

5

9

1

1

2

1

1

5

1

2

1

1

1

2

4

3

9

14

1

2

2

7

4

14

1

2

1

6

1

1

1

4

2

4

76

12

15

2

6

4

4

6

15

5

6

17

7

16

1

1

2

1

1

1

2

7

1

1

1

2

1

1

1

1

7

3

2

3

9

1

1

1

2

4

4

7

2

1

2

1

1

9 3

2

4

11

9

43

7

1

1

2

9

1

1

1

2

2

24

1

5

2

3

5

5

3

8

43

23

33

22

4

5

4

6

20

2

2

53

5

5

2

4.3 Applications of the taxonomy

4.3.1 Artforms and beneficiaries

How do arts and cultural charities help people from different demographics? We used the taxonomy to identify this for the arts and cultural charitable sector in England and Wales. Using the query expansion method explained above, we constructed identified charities that were matched from specific search terms relating to artforms and demographics. The motivation for this analysis is to help answer questions like ‘Are there more youth charities promoting dancing than acting?’, ‘are there any charities that engage in Islamic arts and crafts?’, or ‘is there charitable work involving dance and disabled persons?’

Figure 8: What demographics do arts and cultural charities engage with?


20

Figure 8 shows how keywords about people, faiths, and ethnicities interrelate with keywords about arts and culture, via a series of heatmaps with the number of charities labelled. Only active ACHS charities are shown. The cell colouring reflects the number of charities involved, with a red indicating a greater number than green, and grey cells indicating that there are no charities which mention at least one term in either bucket of terms, e.g. there are no charities mentioning Buddhism and opera.

Arts and cultural charities operate across a wide range of disciplines (e.g. performing arts, literary/dramatic arts, visual arts and design, sport) helping a diverse range of demographic groups. For example, the extracted results show 368 active charities mentioning women/girls and drama, 68 charities mentioning disability and dance, eight charities that mention refugees and theatre, and six charities that mention LGBTQ and choir/singing and six that mention Christianity and paintings.

Also, there are over 1,500 active charities that mention youth and music in their description or objectives when registering. As there is research studying why there are not more young people engaged in some arts,xiv identifying charities working in the space can be a helpful step in finding solutions.

There are some terms that are mentioned by charities across all demographic groups: workshop, sports, music, and heritage. Terms associated with dance, drama, theatre, literature, festivals, exhibitions and crafts also had very high coverage, with at least one charity mentioning these terms across nearly all demographic groups.

Our method enables for the first time comparisons across subpopulations and between genres among charities that promote arts and culture. For example, there are gender differences among ACHS charities: among charities mentioning choir/singing, there are more that also mention men/boys (131) than women/girls (47), whereas the opposite is true for dance (62 for women/girls compared with 19 for men/boys). There are also multiple active Indian and Afro-Caribbean music charities and inter/multicultural theatres.

The breakdowns also enable us to identify areas relatively more and less well-covered by ACHS charities, and delve deeper to understand why. For example there are: relatively sizable groups of charities mentioning women/girls and drama (368) and crafts (461), which is partially explained by local chapters of Women’s Institutes. There are more charities mentioning ‘festival’ along with Hinduism (53) compared with other major religions, which can indicate Hindu observances are commonly considered when charities register, whereas for ‘architecture’, Christianity (22) is the religion that is mentioned alongside most frequently, which can indicate a consideration for churches and buildings, and the potential role of church buildings as cultural venues.


21

4.3.2. Historical change

In this part of the analysis, we first verify that almost six decades of charity registration text can be used to evidence historical change. To do this we produce strip plots that visualise high-level trends, as charities across different subdomains were added to the register at various points from 1961. Using query expansion to retrieve matching charities that ever registered, the plots allow us to study charities’ relative age (by registration date of charities) and relative density (by number of charities matching associated terms).

Across the broader charitable sector, we find, e.g., that ballet, mime, and opera are terms used by relatively older charities, whereas documentary, animation, and festivals are terms used by relatively more recent charities. LGBTQ+, refugees and specific ethnic minority groups are relatively recent beneficiaries, whereas men/boys are relatively older beneficiaries, and the data also show a shift in language from charities using terms relating to handicapped to disabled. These verification checks are presented in the Appendix.

Second, we show how the most ‘strongly arts and cultural’ phrases vary for each decade. Using f-regression feature selection (a univariate linear regression test), we test how effectively each of the noun phrase features within the taxonomy predicts whether it identifies an ACHS charity in each of the six decades. The noun phrase features are ranked according to the significance of the regression parameter, with the term at the top the term most likely to be a predictor of ACHS status. We perform the analysis separately for ACHS charities that are more narrowly focussed (defined as having ACHS and at most one other charitable purpose) and those that have a broad remit (having three to eight charitable purposes including ACHS).

Figure 9 shows an interesting range of terms that were popular for each decade, from handbell ringing in the 1980s to literary festivals in 2010s. For ACHS charities that also work on other domains, e.g. health or community development, the more strongly arts and cultural phrases for each decade evolve from memorial halls and indoor bowls in the 1960s to male choral groups in the 1980s and mentions of older people in the 1990s and 2000s.


22

Figure 9: Noun phrases most strongly associated with ACHS over the decades

Narrow focus (max 2 purposes)

1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Broad focus (3-8 purposes)

1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Permanent theatre Public promotion Public entertainment Professional Public education Public education adjudicators

Professional Public library High artistic merit Educational drama Musical instruments Public history standards

Good design Educational projects Annual pantomime Public works Related arts Understanding enjoyment

Public advancement Highest quality Choral repertoire Creative projects Cultural activities Educational plays

Musical students Amateur productions Live orchestra French language Educational plays Literary festival

Worldwide public Carol concert Classical choral Educational cultural Public study Musical instruments concerts activities

Diverse groups Creative art Annual concert Regular concerts Professional recitals Related arts

Affordable theatre Good music Handbell ringing Annual competitive Professional Public exhibition music performers

Diverse range Non members Public stage Public exhibitions Public works Cultural events

Common fellowship Foster research Handbell tune Musical organisations Understanding Public display enjoyment

Local community Young agriculture Male choral Older people Best contribution Stained glass

Memorial hall Promote education Social activities Educational Common good Industrial heritage opportunities

Physical mental Local clubs Cultural societies Young agriculture Good citizenship Architectural recreation importance

Mental recreation Cultural societies Spiritual wellbeing New skills Useful results Public heritage

Indoor bowls Open days Social sporting Monthly meeting Effective relationships Understanding enjoyment

Social intercourse Social fundraising Choral work Primary school Recreational Special facilities physical activity

Social activities Local broadcasting Primary school Young women Chinese community Public performing

Local clubs Recreational leisure National trust Scottish country Older people 20th century

Political opinions Voluntary groups Regular basis Wider world Weihai lishi Highest standard

Main hall Reasonable recreation Widespread Traditional Scottish Wider community Creative performing performance country

4.3.3. Charitable missions

Many charities in the arts and culture sector aim to advance similar goals. We explore if we can meaningfully extract and aggregate charitable missions. While there is some noise from the dependency parsing partially retained, in most cases, many of the top missions are sensible. Domain experts may be able to validate and explain the popularity of certain extracted missions. This may have useful applications for charity workers, funders, and researchers.


23

We find, for example, that

• For charities mentioning ‘crafts’ and associated terms, one of the top missions is to ‘advance the education of young members of the public’.

• For charities mentioning ‘LGBTQ’ and associated terms, one of the top missions is around ‘eliminate discrimination’ and for ‘refugees’, it is ‘adapt within a new community’.

• For charities mentioning ‘monuments’ and associated terms, one of the top missions is around ‘reconstructing churches’.

• For charities mentioning ‘diversity’ and associated terms, one of the top missions is around ‘conducting research on equality and diversity issues’.

• For charities mentioning ‘sustainable’ and associated terms, one of the top missions is ‘achieving economic growth and regeneration’.

• For charities mentioning ‘radio’ and associated terms, one of the top missions is ‘providing a local broadcasting service for hospitals’.

4.3.4 Web presence

In 2019, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published a policy paper called ‘Culture is Digital’xv recognising the importance of digital technologies for the sector. We use the websites listed on the Charity Commission’s website, along with the taxonomy, to analyse one dimension of this – the extent to which charities have a web presence.

About two-thirds of active ACHS charities (n=19,916) list a website on the Commission’s website. We visited these websites, scraping some key information from the frontpage and, where available, supplemented the data with basic information from WHOIS, a public lookup of website domain ownership. 95 per cent were valid websites, defined as having a non-expired domain with at least some relevant charities text on the front page.15

Figure 10 shows some arts and cultural charitable domains with relatively high and low web presence. Some groups of ACHS charities, as identified by expanded search terms with the taxonomy, have higher online presence, with charities matched by ‘virtual’, ‘documentary’, ‘studio’, and ‘orchestra’ all having over 85 per cent of functioning websites.

On the other hand, for charities matched by ‘monuments’, ‘sports’, ‘games’ and ‘crafts’ and their associated terms less than 60 per cent have valid websites. Their web presence is generally below the average for ACHS charities (60.4 per cent).

15. We collected the title, headings, meta tags, and all links present on the main pages of all ACHS charities that listed a website on the Charity Commission’s register. Web pages displaying errors or generic messages about expired domains from registrars were counted as invalid. Very minimalist websites are still included as valid.


24

Figure 10: The website presence of ACHS charities

Have a website listed on the register

Have a non-expired and functioning website as of November 2019

How many arts and cultural charities have a functioning website?

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Proportion of active ACHS charities in England and Wales (matched by the query term)

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

VirtualAnimation

CircusDocumentary

StudioOrchestra

ComedyConcert/recital

ArchiveBrass

DesignChoir/singing

OperaJazz

RadioMime/pantomime

PoetryWorkshop

Film/TVSculpture

TheatreCinema

ActingPhotography

FestivalExhibition

MusicWriting

LiteratureFashion/textiles

BalletInstruments

GalleryMuseum

ArchitectureHeritagePainting

DanceDrama

Average ACHSMonument

SportsGamesCrafts

VirtualAnimationCircusDocumentaryStudioOrchestraComedyConcert/recitalArchiveBrassDesignChoir/singingOperaJazzRadioMime/pantomimePoetryWorkshopFilm/TVSculptureTheatreCinemaActingPhotographyFestivalExhibitionMusicWritingLiteratureFashion/ textilesBalletInstrumentsGalleryMuseumArchitectureHeritagePaintingDanceDramaAverage ACHSMonumentSportsGamesCrafts


25

5

Applications of this research

This paper shows that it is feasible to to use natural language processing and machine learning techniques to create a ‘taxonomy’ of keywords used by charities in England and Wales that advance arts, culture, heritage or science (ACHS). We use taxonomy to index charities activities and goals in a semantically meaningful way, allowing us to evidence new insights about the sector.

In the immediate term, these methods can be extended to:

• Carry out additional dimensions of mapping: for example, breaking down charities by more granular areas of focus (identified by text) alongside geography16 and survival rates,17 etc.

• Be updated at regular intervals, allowing us to have a live understanding of the ACHS charitable domain.

• Map other domains and break down other umbrella terms in the charitable sector.

• Track how the language used by charities to describe groups of people, causes and emerging technologies changes.

• Include alternative data sources about charities like annual reports and social media.

• Include additional data sources about voluntary organisations beyond registered charities.

In the longer term, a data science approach as outlined here can be applied to:

• Build a recommendation engine to search for similar charities or charitable causes.18

• Evidence how well-addressed certain goals are by charities, or how crowded certain areas are, by linking to other data sources like funding.

• Make the creation and maintenance of taxonomies of sector activity easier to help improve understanding of what the sector is doing.19

16. See, e.g. Corry 2020, which examines the regional breakdown of charities in England.xvi

17. See, e.g. Clifford 2018, which links neighborhood deprivation with charity dissolution in England.xvii

18. This enables funders to engage with charities that are similar to those that they fund (but who they don’t engage with), and for charities to find similar organisations for collaboration and learning.

19. The NLP and machine learning techniques, like the ones described in this report, have been applied to generate tags in domains from librariesxviii and biotechxix to legal documentsxx and regulatory codes.xxi One reason is that fully controlled vocabularies are expensive to produce manually, but automatically-generated tags can enrich metadata which can lend itself to outcomes like better knowledge organisation and information retrieval.


26

6

Glossary

Charitable objects

‘Objects’ describe and identify the purpose for which a charity has been set up. They are usually set out in a single clause or paragraph (the ‘objects clause’) when registrants write their charity’s governing document. Instead of saying what the charity will do on a daily basis, the objects should accurately express all of the charity’s purposes.

Charitable purpose

The Charities Act 2011 defines a charitable purpose, explicitly, as one that falls within 13 descriptions of purposes and is for the public benefit. Examples are ‘the prevention or relief of poverty’, ‘the advancement of citizenship or community development’, and ‘the advancement of the arts, culture, heritage or science’.

Dependency parsing

The process of analysing the grammatical structure of a sentence, establishing relationships between ‘head’ words (the grammatically most important word in a phrase) and words which affect the interpretation of the head words.

Hierarchical clustering

Clusters are groups of similar objects. Hierarchical clusters are clusters with a nested structure, for example a cluster of music charities, can contain within it clusters of jazz and opera charities. Hierarchical cluster analysis is a method of cluster analysis which seeks clusters with a hierarchical structure.

Noun phrase

A noun phrase in English is a sequence of words surrounding at least one noun, e.g. ‘the cupcake’, ‘an innovation foundation.’

Part-of-speech tagging

The process of assigning parts of speech labels, e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc, to each word of the input text. Note the same word can have a different part of speech depending on its context (the word’s relationship with adjacent and related words in a phrase, sentence, or paragraph). For example, ‘I suspect that is the case’ compared to ‘He was a suspect in the case’.

Pre-training

Training in advance, usually refers to models trained by someone else on a dataset to solve a similar problem. For example, using pre-trained embeddings means the embedding representations we use for input words were learned separately using another algorithm.

Query expansion

A process in Information Retrieval which consists of selecting and adding terms to the user’s query with the goal of returning more relevant matches or search results.

Verb phrase

A verb phrase in English consists of a verb followed by assorted other components; for example, a verb followed by a noun phrase is a kind of verb phrase.

Word embeddings

A vector representation for text where words that have close meaning have a similar representation, as prior context is ‘embedded’. For example, ‘knife’ would be semantically close to ‘fork’. The underlying idea is that ‘a word is characterized by the company it keeps’, which is known as the distributional hypothesis.


27

7

Appendix

7.1 Major existing charity classifications for charities in England and Wales

There are two main systems that have been used to classify UK charities – one from the Charity Commission of England and Wales and one from the United Nations. There is also the NTEE Classification System developed by the National Center for Charitable Statistics in the USxxii but it is not applied to UK charities.

Classifications from the Charity Commission of England and Wales (CCEW)

The CCEW divides charities up in three ways (or classifications).

• C1: What the charity does.

• C2: Who the charity helps.

• C3: How the charity operates.

C1 mostly overlaps with charitable purposes as defined by law. According to the Charities Act 2011, charitable purposes include:xxiii

1. The prevention or relief of poverty.

2. The advancement of education.

3. The advancement of religion.

4. The advancement of health or the saving of lives.

5. The advancement of citizenship or community development.

6. The advancement of the arts, culture, heritage or science.

7. The advancement of amateur sport.

8. The advancement of human rights, conflict resolution or reconciliation or the promotion of religious or racial harmony or equality and diversity.

9. The advancement of environmental protection or improvement.

10. The relief of those in need, by reason of youth, age, ill-health, disability, financial hardship or other disadvantage.

11. The advancement of animal welfare.

12. The promotion of the efficiency of the armed forces of the Crown, or of the efficiency of the police, fire and rescue services or ambulance services.

13. Any other charitable purposes.


28

In addition, the CCEW also includes ‘recreation’, ‘overseas aid/famine relief’, ‘accommodation/housing’, and ‘general charitable purposes’ in the C1 classification. The Charity Commission for Northern Ireland (CCNI) and Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) use similar versions of the above.

Importantly, charities select multiple purposes when they register. In fact, only 10.9 per cent of active ACHS charities only work on that singular purpose. 40 per cent of active ACHS charities work on one to two additional charitable purposes.

The International Classification of Non-profit and Third Sector Organizations (ICNP/TSO)

There are international charity classifications that are also sometimes used. Most notably, there is a classification from the United Nations (UN).20 Its newest version is called the International Classification of Non-profit and Third Sector Organizations (ICNP/TSO) and was last updated in December 2017.xxvi

The UN classification puts activities by arts and cultural non-profit organisations into a section called ‘culture, communications and recreation activities.’ This in turn is broken down into ‘culture and arts’, ‘sports and recreation’ and ‘information and communication services’. Altogether, in the ICNP/TSO, there are ten categories that a non-profit in the arts and cultural sector can fall into, including a few that say ‘not elsewhere classified’.

It is common for researchers to classify charities in England and Wales according to the original version of ICNP/TSO. Researchers started doing this in 1996 and the UN classification has remained a common way to understand the UK charitable sector.xxvii

Some researchers have extended the original UN classification. The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) added new subdivision codes such as ‘village halls’ when such subcategories did not exist in the UN classification.21 Sometimes the new subdivision codes were then used by researchers.xxix Some of the techniques have been semi-automated: e.g. researchers have used keyword searches to classify charities.xxx

7.2 Historical change in the broader charitable sector

To verify that the charities data can evidence change across decades, we apply the query expansion method to over 50 search terms, with a focus on types arts and culture, as well as some demographic groups, almost all of which are currently unavailable in official charities data. All charities ever registered with CCEW are included to account for survivorship bias.

If there are ten dots on the strip, there are approximately 100 charities. A solid vertical line is drawn at the date that separates the dots on the strip in half. The dotted line indicates December 1990, which is the median registration date across the full register. For example, a strip that contains a dense area on the left but a sparse area on the right suggests areas where decreasing numbers of charities are being set up over time.

20. The United Nations Statistics Division originally introduced a non-profit classification in 2003,xxiv, xxv with its origins in a 1992 research paper.xxv This classification was eventually expanded in December 2017 to cover the ‘activities of all institutional units potentially falling within the Third, or Social Economy (TSE) sector.’ Many UK charities researchers use the pre-2017 original classification called the International Classification of Non-profit Organizations (ICNPO).

21. In their annual publication the Almanac, the NCVO explained how they classified organisations into categories based on the ICNPO, with examples for the subcategories they created.xxviii


29

Figure 11:

The charts show a high-level trend that ballet, mime, and opera are terms used by relatively older charities, whereas documentary, animation, and festivals are terms used by relatively more recent charities. The charts also show that LGBTQ+, refugees and specific ethnic minority groups are relatively recent beneficiaries, whereas men/boys are relatively older beneficiaries, and the data also show a shift in language from charities using terms relating to handicapped to disabled.

Ballet

Instruments

Opera

Choir/singing

Orchestra

Music

Dance

Concert/recital

Brass

Jazz

Performing arts

19651970 1975 1980

19851990

199520

0020

0520

1020

15

Date registered

Exhibition

Sculpture

Painting

Crafts

Architecture

Fashion/textiles

Design

Photography

Workshop

Festival

Visual arts and design

19651970 1975 1980

19851990

199520

0020

0520

1020

15

Date registered

Mime/pantomime

Drama

Writing

Poetry

Literature

Theatre

Film/TV

Comedy

Acting

Documentary

Literary and dramatic arts

19651970 1975 1980

19851990

199520

0020

0520

1020

15

Date registered

Scrabble

Bingo

Radio

Games

Monument

Sports

Archive

Circus

Animation

Heritage

Games, sport and heritage

19651970 1975 1980

19851990

199520

0020

0520

1020

15

Date registered

Forms of art and culture

Men/boys

Handicapped

Women/girls

Elderly

Disabled

Youth

Refugees/migrants

LGBTQ

People

19651970 1975 1980

19851990

199520

0020

0520

1020

15

Indian

Chinese

Inter/multi cultural

Pakistani

Afro-Caribbean

Bangladeshi

Some ethnic groups

19651970 1975 1980

19851990

199520

0020

0520

1020

15

Date registered

Date registered

Demographics


30

7.3 Additional information on the taxonomy of keywords

Figure 12: 92 manually assigned labels for the taxonomy of keywords

12 10

Distance

8 6 4 2 0

Arts and charitable sector


31

8

References

i. National Audit Office. Regulating charities: a landscape review. Briefing for the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee. National Audit Office; 2012 Jul.

ii. National Council for Voluntary Organisations. UK Civil Society Almanac 2019. National Council for Voluntary Organisations; 2019 Jul.

iii. Hornung L. New volunteering data out today. In: National Council for Voluntary Organisations blog [Internet]. 26 Jul 2018 [cited 22 Aug 2019]. Available: https://blogs.ncvo.org.uk/2018/07/26/new-volunteering-data-out-today

iv. Mazzucato M. Mission-oriented innovation policies: challenges and opportunities. Industrial and Corporate Change. 2018;27: 803–815.

v. Mazzucato M. A mission-oriented approach to building the entrepreneurial state. A ‘Think Piece’for the Innovative UK Technology Strategy Board: London, UK. 2014. Available: https://marianamazzucato.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MAZZUCATO-INNOVATE-UK.pdf

vi. Department for Business E, Strategy I. The Grand Challenge missions. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy; 2019.

vii. Ógáin EN. Impact measurement in impact investing. United Kingdom, Nesta Impact; 2015. Available: https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/impact_measurement_in_impact_investing.pdf

viii. The Charity Commission for England and Wales. Excepted charities. In: GOV.UK Guidance [Internet]. 11 Jun 2014. Available: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/excepted-charities/excepted-charities–2

ix. The Charity Commission for England and Wales. Exempt charities (CC23). In: GOV.UK guidance [Internet]. 9 Aug 2019. Available: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/exempt-charities-cc23/exempt-charities

x. Explosion AI. spaCy annotations: part-of-speech tagging. Available: https://spacy.io/api/annotation#pos-en

xi. Pennington J, Socher R, Manning C. Glove: Global Vectors for Word Representation. Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2014. doi:10.3115/v1/d14-1162

xii. Satopaa V, Albrecht J, Irwin D, Raghavan B. Finding a ‘Kneedle’ in a Haystack: Detecting Knee Points in System Behavior. 2011 31st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops. 2011. doi:10.1109/icdcsw.2011.20

xiii. Sugawara S, Stenetorp P, Inui K, Aizawa A. Assessing the Benchmarking Capacity of Machine Reading Comprehension Datasets. arXiv [cs.CL]. 2019. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.09241

xiv. Tait R, Kail A, Shea J, McLeod R, Pritchard N, Fatima A. How can we engage more young people in arts and culture? A guide to what works for funders and arts organisations. NPC; 2019 Oct. Available: https://www.thinknpc.org/resource-hub/arts

xv. Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. Culture is Digital: June 2019 progress report. 2019 Mar.

xvi. Corry D. Where are England’s charities? Are they in the right places and what can we do if they are not? NPC; 2020 Jan. Available: https://www.thinknpc.org/resource-hub/where-are-englands-charities

xvii. Clifford D. Neighborhood Context and Enduring Differences in the Density of Charitable Organizations: Reinforcing Dynamics of Foundation and Dissolution. Am J Sociol. 2018;123: 1535–1600.

xviii. Golub K, Hagelbäck J, Ardö A. Automatic subject classification of Swedish DDC: Impact of tuning and training data set. TPDL 2019. 2019. Available: https://nkos-eu.github.io/2019/content/NKOS2019-abstract-golub.pdf

xix. Hubain R, De Wilde M, van Hooland S. Automated SKOS Vocabulary Design for the Biopharmaceutical Industry. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. 2016;54: 403–417.

xx. Quaresma P, Gonçalves T. Using Linguistic Information and Machine Learning Techniques to Identify Entities from Juridical Documents. In: Francesconi E, Montemagni S, Peters W, Tiscornia D, editors. Semantic Processing of Legal Texts: Where the Language of Law Meets the Law of Language. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg; 2010. pp. 44–59.

xxi. Casellas N. Linked legal data: a SKOS vocabulary for the code of federal regulations. SWJ, IOS Press Journal. 2012. Available: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/sites/default/files/swj311.pdf

xxii. Lampkin L, Romeo S, Finnin E. Introducing the Nonprofit Program Classification System: The Taxonomy We’ve Been Waiting for. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. 2001. pp. 781–793. doi:10.1177/0899764001304009

xxiii. The Charity Commission for England and Wales. Charitable purposes: Guidance on what purposes can be charitable. The Charity Commission for England and Wales; 2013 Sep.

xxiv. United Nations Statistical Division. Handbook on Non-profit Institutions in the System of National Accounts. United Nations Publications; 2003.

xxv. Salamon LM, Anheier HK. In search of the non-profit sector II: The problem of classification. Voluntas. 1992. pp. 267–309. doi:10.1007/bf01397460

xxvi. United Nations Statistical Division. Satellite Account on Non-profit and Related Institutions and Volunteer Work. United Nations Statistical Division; 2018.

xxvii. Salamon LM, Anheier HK. The Emerging Nonprofit Sector: An Overview. Manchester University Press; 1996.

xxviii. National Council for Voluntary Organisations. Alamanac 2019: Capturing what voluntary organisations do. A reference document on the classification of subsectors (ICNPO) used for voluntary organisations. National Council for Voluntary Organisations; 2019.

xxix. Mohan J, Barnard S. Comparisons between the characteristics of charities in Scotland and those of England and Wales. Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy; 2013 May.

xxx. Third Sector Research Centre. Understanding the UK third sector The work of the Third Sector Research Centre 2008–2013. Third Sector Research Centre; 2013.

https://blogs.ncvo.org.uk/2018/07/26/new-volunteering-data-out-today

https://blogs.ncvo.org.uk/2018/07/26/new-volunteering-data-out-today

https://marianamazzucato.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MAZZUCATO-INNOVATE-UK.pdf

https://marianamazzucato.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MAZZUCATO-INNOVATE-UK.pdf

https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/impact_measurement_in_impact_investing.pdf

https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/impact_measurement_in_impact_investing.pdf

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/excepted-charities/excepted-charities-2

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/excepted-charities/excepted-charities-2

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/exempt-charities-cc23/exempt-charities

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/exempt-charities-cc23/exempt-charities

https://spacy.io/api/annotation#pos-en

http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.09241

http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.09241

https://www.thinknpc.org/resource-hub/arts

https://www.thinknpc.org/resource-hub/where-are-englands-charities

https://www.thinknpc.org/resource-hub/where-are-englands-charities

https://nkos-eu.github.io/2019/content/NKOS2019-abstract-golub.pdf

https://nkos-eu.github.io/2019/content/NKOS2019-abstract-golub.pdf

http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/sites/default/files/swj311.pdf

http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/sites/default/files/swj311.pdf


32

The Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC) works to support the growth of the UK’s Creative Industries through the production of independent and authoritative evidence and policy advice.

Led by Nesta and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy, the Centre comprises of a consortium of universities from across the UK (Birmingham; Cardiff; Edinburgh; Glasgow; Work Foundation at Lancaster University; LSE; Manchester; Newcastle; Sussex; Ulster). The PEC works with a diverse range of industry partners including the Creative Industries Federation.

For more details visit www.pec.ac.uk and @CreativePEC

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following people for taking time to provide useful comments and discuss charities data with us: Margaret Bolton, Martin Brookes, Véronique Jochum, David Kane, Tris Lumley, Rosario Piazza, Mor Rubinstein, Lucy Smith. Thanks also to Andrew Mowlah and colleagues at Arts Council England, Harman Sagger and colleagues at DCMS, Nixi Cura at the Royal Academy of Arts for hosting helpful discussions about this work. Last but not least, thanks to colleagues at both Nesta and the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre: in particular Hasan Bakhshi, Carrie Deacon, Eliza Easton, Trishna Nath, Fran Sanderson, and Melissa Wong. Thanks to Anna Zabow for communications work and John Davies for extensive help with editing throughout.

If you’d like this publication in an alternative format such as Braille, or large print, please contact us at: [email protected]

Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC) 58 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DS

+44 (0)20 7438 2500 [email protected] @CreativePECwww.pec.ac.uk

The Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre is led by Nesta. Nesta is a registered charity in England and Wales with company number 7706036 and charity number 1144091. Registered as a charity in Scotland number SCO42833. Registered office: 58 Victoria Embankment, London, EC4Y 0DS.

Charities speak: Mapping arts and cultural charities …...ACHS charities, and delve deeper to...

Documents

Transcript of Charities speak: Mapping arts and cultural charities …...ACHS charities, and delve deeper to...