How are donors responding to the pandemic? What should they be doing? What will the long-term effects be on #philanthropy?
Giving Evidence’s Director Caroline Fiennes discussed all this with The Business Of Giving in this interview.
We also discussed Giving Evidence’s research about the effect of various ‘ways of giving’: a long-standing interest (see article in the scientific journal Nature and our ground-breaking research)
New project!
Much attention is paid to what donors fund, but very little is paid to how they fund. Questions about how to fund include whether/when to give with restrictions, whether to give a few large grants vs. many smaller ones, what application and reporting processes to have, how to make the decisions about what to fund. The lack of attention to these ‘how to fund’ questions is despite the facts that (i) they evidently affect funders’ effectiveness, and (ii) they can be investigated empirically. We have written about this in the top scientific journal Nature, and with the University of Chicago.
Weirdly, the COVID19 crisis creates a (rather morbid) opportunity to investigate empirically the effects of some funder behaviours.
Giving Evidence is starting a new project to do this empirical research. Continue reading
Clearly, communities and charities are
under great strain at the moment. A vast number of people in the UK have less than one week’s savings. Charities are doing all manner of work, and the crisis is expected to cost them at least £4 billion(!)
Please give. Continue reading
Many people believe that charities waste money on ‘administration’, and 
hence that the best charities spend little on administration. A strong form of this view is that the best charities are by definition those which spend little on administration, i.e., you can tell how good a charity is just by looking at their admin costs: one sometimes hears this view.
It’s nonsense. The amount that charities spend on administration is (probably) totally unrelated to whether they’re intervention is any good. If I have an intervention which, to take a real example, is supposed to decrease the number of vulnerable teenagers who get pregnant, but in fact does the opposite and increases it, then it doesn’t matter how low the administrative costs are: the fact is that the intervention doesn’t work. As Michael Green, co-author of Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save The World says: ‘A bad charity with low administration costs is still a bad charity’. Continue reading
I know. You’ve never heard of the Flemish Red Cross. You realise that such a thing probably must exist but you’d never hitherto realised it, right?
Well, you should know about it because it’s amazing. Of all the operational charities I’ve encountered, it is easily the most sophisticated in terms of use and production of decent evidence – and seeing as I’ve been in this sector now for >18 years, I’ve seen a lot. A clue is that it has 12 post-doctoral researchers on payroll, most of whose output goes into the peer-reviewed academic literature. Continue reading
Apparently ~3000 organisations have Royal patrons. About 200 have this week lost their 
relationship with Prince Andrew. Securing and maintaining a relationship with a Royal is work, and is it worth it? It seems that nobody knows. Giving Evidence is going to investigate.
This is a question about donor effectiveness: the patrons probably think that they are helping the charities, but donors are often rather less helpful than they think they are. It’s reasonable – and possible – to assess the effectiveness of donors, as we have said elsewhere. It is also a question about charity effectiveness: how should charities best allocate their scarce resources? We will specifically be looking at whether & how much & when Royals patrons – and with luck other celeb patrons – help charities. Continue reading
{Warning: this post has nothing to do with philanthropy. It’s to do with science. Sort of.}
As widely discussed in the press (i.e., written about by me on Twitter), I
recently ran a little trial to see whether people (specifically myself and some friends and family) could distinguish between posh champagne and much cheaper cava.
In short, we couldn’t. Well, *I* could, and my family could, but on aggregate the answers were barely better than random.
Because this is *science*, and not just a random drinking game, I’ve written it up. Not in the Journal of Champagne-ology, which surprisingly doesn’t exist, but below. Continue reading
This article first published in the British Medical Journal.
My mum died in 2016, a more decorous and peaceful end of life would be hard to imagine. That she died well is a huge blessing: not everybody gets that privilege. I gather that there is discussion in medical circles about how to improve and de-medicalise ends of lives. In case it is useful to anybody, here is my mum’s story. 
This article first published in MoneyWise magazine.
MacKenzie Bezos, who recently divorced the world’s richest person, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has pledged to give away at least half of her $37billion fortune. To whom should she give it?
I’ve advised charitable donors for many years and they’re often surprised to learn that the principles of giving well are the same, whether you’re giving a massive sum or your hard-saved £20.
This article first published in the Financial Times in May 2018
Donors can encourage charities to seek feedback
Oxfam’s UK chief executive announced his resignation last week, after a spate of damaging allegations of abuse by the charity’s frontline staff in Haiti. But would the whole issue have been avoided if Oxfam had had a decent and open process for hearing from the people it seeks to serve? Continue reading
Videos of other talks: www.giving-evidence.com/video
