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
This article first published in the Financial Times in {January, 2018}
A growing number of funds take a shorter-term approach
Having spent its entire war chest of $100m, the Skoll Global Threats Fund closed last month. Jeff Skoll, eBay’s first employee and first president, created the fund to “make progress against five of the gravest threats to humanity” — climate change, pandemics, water security, nuclear proliferation and conflict in the Middle East — and gave it eight years.
It is one of a growing number of foundations which are “spending down” and disbanding. Atlantic Philanthropies, set up by Chuck Feeney, co-founder of Duty Free shops, finished spending its $8bn in 2016 and will close in 2020. A foundation created with public donations after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, closed in 2012. Continue reading
With Charity Futures, Giving Evidence has run two projects which combine to identify priority areas for new academic research into charities and philanthropy. These studies are prompted by the growing amount of academic research activity around charities and philanthropy, including Charity Futures’ announced intention to establish an Institute of Charity at Oxford University.
Our two studies were about:
Combined, the two sets of results form a ‘gap analysis’ and show major areas where more research would be valued by charities and donors, who are among its intended users.
There were some surprises in terms of issues/questions that did arise, and some that didn’t arise. Continue reading
This article first published in Charity Finance magazine. A PDF copy is here.
Esmee Fairbairn Foundation released a report about its experience of providing core 
funding. Entitled Insights on Core Funding, one of its aims is to “provide the organisations doing the work [with] the ammunition to continue to make the case for what they need to thrive” – in other words, to encourage other funders (and presumably also non-institutional donors such as wealthy individuals) to give better.
This joins many other reports and documents that have made that case – including my own book, It Ain’t What You Give, It’s The Way That You Give It and the 2009 Institute of Philanthropy report Supportive to the Core: Why Unrestricted Funding Matters. Yet, if we are really to reduce the harmful practice of restricted funding, we need to be more sophisticated than simply producing reports about not doing it. Reducing restricted funding involves an exercise in behaviour change, and we should treat it as such. Continue reading
This article first published in the Financial Times in February 2018. Much the same issues apply now to organisations declining funds from the Sackler Trust.
Among the many issues to have arisen from the FT’s exposé of the Presidents Club is whether charities that received donations from the controversial event did the right thing by returning the money.
Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity was one of the first to announce it would return funds promised to it from this year’s dinner, as well as previous years, citing the “wholly unacceptable nature of the event”. The charity said it was “shocked to hear of the behaviour” and would “never knowingly accept donations raised in this way”. Continue reading
A version of this article published in the Financial Times in January 2019
My financial resolution for this year – as flagged by FT Money earlier this month – is to review the charities in my will. 
I wrote my will a while ago in some haste, and chose the charities in the way that I suspect many people do: I listed the causes that I care about, then wrote down the first charities working on those issues that came to mind.
This is a pretty rubbish process, as we shall see. Continue reading
With Keystone Accountability, we recently worked for a funder who was relatively new to knowledge management. We created for them a ‘primer’ to introduce some of the key concepts, and are publishing it because we feel, and hope, that the material is useful for a wider audience of funders and implementers.
We also published an introduction to monitoring & evaluation: downloadable here.
New report! 
Giving Evidence has been mapping the existing research around strategic and operational management of charitable and philanthropic activities. We are today (2nd July 2019) launching a ‘review copy’ of the findings, which you can download here.
This sits alongside a separate project which we have done to understand ‘demand’ for further research into charities and philanthropy: that was a large-scale consultation exercise, detailed here, asking charities and donors to list and prioritise the topics on which they would like more research (/ evidence / data). The results of that ‘demand’ study are here.
The press release summarises the findings of the two studies. Continue reading
Videos of other talks: www.giving-evidence.com/video
