Giving Evidence

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 →

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. Continue reading →