Giving Evidence

Giving  Evidence and think-tank Charity Futures break new ground in researching what matters to charities and donors

Charity Futures, the new sector think tank led by Sir Stephen Bubb, is launching a major consultation to find out the topics on which donors and charity leaders most want more research to help them in their vital work.  Clearly this is essential for ensuring that charitable activity and giving can be based on sound evidence.

Giving Evidence will run the consultation, which invite input from any charity, foundation, public or private donor in the United Kingdom. Through an open ‘crowd-sourcing’ process, including a series of focus groups across the country (do join! see below) and a couple of rounds of public, open, online survey, the project will invite charities, private donors and institutional funders to say where more research would be of most use. The project is supported by a distinguished advisory group of funders, private donors, researchers, charity leaders and umbrella bodies. Continue reading →

How can you tell if a charity is effective, when there is little independent analysis?

This article first published in the Financial Times

Judging by my inbox, there seems to be huge demand for advice about which charities to support. As donors have followed the turmoil around Oxfam, Save the Children, Kids Company and others before them, they want decent independent analysis along the lines of the data that rating agencies provide for bonds or Which? does for fridges.

There isn’t any.

It doesn’t exist, because of costs, incentives and the genuine challenges involved in nailing it down. Continue reading →

VIDEO: Watch Caroline’s new lesson with the Fitzroy Academy!

Full lesson here.

Making a big gift to draw other donors is only useful if the charity is highly effective

This article first published in the Financial Times

The practice of donors offering to “match” gifts made to charities they support has become common in the charity world. In the run-up to Christmas, many have been offering to double donations. In the recent Challenge Campaign, for instance, money given to selected charities was doubled by the Big Give, set up by Sir Alec Reed, founder of Reed, the recruitment firm.

Others schemes propose different deals: one donor was offering to give $2 for every $1 given on Friday to Charity Navigator, a charity rating agency; while PayPal will add 1 per cent to all donations made through its platform until New Year.

The UK’s Department for International Development does it too. Its UK Aid Match offered up to £5m from the UK aid budget to eight charities.

The theory is that the match attracts new donations. If your aim is helping your chosen charity to raise money, is it a good idea to offer to match other people’s contributions? The rigorous evidence suggests that it is.  Continue reading →

This article first published in Alliance Magazine.

The first president of eBay, Jeff Skoll, set up his Global Threats Fund in 2010 to ‘make  progress against five of the gravest threats to humanity’: climate change, pandemics, water security, nuclear proliferation, and conflict in the Middle East. It closes this month having spent its $100 million, and this week published a report about “what worked, what didn’t work, and what we learned about philanthropy’s role in reducing global threats”. As more foundations ‘spend out’ and publish their learning, we will probably see more such documents. This one is a weird read. Continue reading →

If you, like millions of people, want to give this Christmas / holiday season, the following are all good bets, in our view:

Medicins Sans Frontieres: They always seem to be to be where the sh*t is worst, e.g., Yemen, Rakhine province in Myanmar (where the Rohinga live/lived). We’ve never formally analysed them but all our contact with them and literature we’ve seen from them implies that they have their act together. Continue reading →

This article first published in the Financial Times.

Malala Yousafzai starts at Oxford university next week. The Nobel Peace Prize, which she shared at the age of 17, was for her work promoting the right of all children to education. Many people give money in pursuit of that aim, so it’s reasonable to ask what we know about improving education, particularly in less developed countries.

The answer is surprisingly little. Rigorous evidence about both primary and secondary education is rather sparse, though primary education is better studied. Very few programmes have been tested often enough, and in enough places, to give confidence about their effectiveness. Continue reading →

This article first published in the Financial Times.

Established fundraisers dominate — but they don’t have a monopoly on good ideas

Death comes rarely to big charities. The Charity 100 Index lists the largest charities in the UK, and of the 100 which it listed last year, 94 have reappeared this year. (For context, the UK has more than 200,000 charities.) The top 10 biggest charities were exactly the same as the top 10 last year, though the order has re-shuffled a bit. The top three — Nuffield Health, Cancer Research UK and the National Trust — were not only the same last year but have been the top three now for 13 years consecutively.

This is a global pattern. In Australia, half of the list of the top 20 charities in 2014 were on that same list 20 years earlier, according to research by wealth manager JB Were. In New Zealand, the 40 largest charities are on average 75 years old, and 80 per cent of them are more than 20 years old. In the US, none of the 25 biggest charities as listed by the Chronicle of Philanthropy was founded within the past 13 years. Continue reading →