Giving Evidence

Most charities should not evaluate their own impact. Funders should stop asking them to evaluate themselves. For one thing, asking somebody to mark their own homework was never likely to be a good idea.

This article explains the four very good reasons that most charities should not evaluate themselves, and gives new data about how many of them are too small.

Most operational charities should not (be asked to) evaluate themselves because:

1. They have the wrong incentive. Their incentive is (obviously!) to make themselves look as great as possible – evaluations are used to compete for funding – so their incentive is to rig the research to make it flattering and/or bury research that doesn’t flatter them. I say this having been a charity CEO myself and done both.

2. They lack the necessary skills in evaluation. Most operational charities are specialists in, say, supporting victims of domestic violence or delivering first aid training or distributing cash in refugee camps. These are completely different skills to doing causal research, and one would not expect expertise in these unrelated skills to be co-located.

3. They often lack the funding to do evaluation research properly. One major problem is that a good experimental evaluation may involve gathering data about a control group which does not get the programme or which gets a different programme, and few operational charities have access to such a set of people.

A good guide is a mantra from evidence-based medicine, that research should “ask an important question and answer it reliably”. If there not enough money (or sample size) to answer the question reliably, don’t try to answer it at all.

4. They’re too small. Specifically, their programmes are too small: they do not have enough sample size for evaluations of just their programmes to produce statistically meaningful results, i.e., to distinguish the effects of the programme from that of other factors or random chance, i.e., results of self-evaluations by operational charities are quite likely to be just wrong. For example, when the Institute of Fiscal Studies did a rigorous study of the effects of breakfast clubs, it needed 106 schools in the sample: that is way more than most operational charities providing breakfast clubs have.

Giving Evidence has done some proper analysis to corroborate this view that many operational charities’ programmes are too small to reliably evaluate. The UK Ministry of Justice runs a ‘Data Lab’, which any organisation running a programme to reduce re-offending can ask to evaluate that programme: the Justice Data Lab uses the MoJ’s data to compare the re-offending behaviour of participants in the programme with that of a similar (‘propensity score-matched’) set of non-participants. It’s glorious because, for one thing, it shows loads of charities’ programmes all evaluated in the same way, on the same metric (12-month reoffending rate) by the same independent researchers. It is the sole such dataset of which we are aware, anywhere in the world.

In the most recent data (all its analyses up to October 2020), the JDL had analysed 104 programmes run by charities (‘the voluntary and community sector’), of which fully 62 prove too small to produce conclusive results. 60% of the charity-run programmes were too small to evaluate reliably.

The analyses also show the case for reliable intervention and not just guessing which charity-run programmes work or assuming that they all do:

a. Some charity-run programmes create harm: they increase reoffending, and

b. Charity-run programmes vary massively in how effective they are:

Hence most charities should not be PRODUCERS of research. But they should be USERS of rigorous, independent research – about where the problems are, why, what works to solve them, and who is doing what about them.

More about why charities shouldn’t evaluate themselves–>

This article first published in Alliance Magazine.

What aids and impedes donors using evidence to make their giving more effective? This question motivated a two researchers at the University of Birmingham to do a wide search of the academic and non-academic literature to find studies that provide answers. The findings are in a systematic review published last month. It’s remarkable. It finds that we – the human race – don’t really know yet what aids and impedes donors using evidence – because nobody has yet investigated properly.

This matters because some interventions run by charities are harmful. Some produce no benefit at all. And even interventions which do succeed vary hugely in how much good they do. So it can be literally vital that donors choose the right ones. Only sound evidence of effectiveness of giving can reliably guide donors to them.

Giving Evidence today publishes research about Royal patronages of charities: what are they, who gets them, and do they help? This fits within our work of providing robust evidence so that charities and donors can be as effective as possible.

In short, we found that charities should not seek or retain Royal patronages expecting that they will help much. 

74% of charities with Royal patrons did not get any public engagements with them last year. We could not find any evidence that Royal patrons increase a charity’s revenue (there were no other outcomes that we could analyse), nor that Royalty increases generosity more broadly. Giving Evidence takes no view on the value  of the Royal family generally. The findings are summarised in this Twitter thread.

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 →

{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 →