New report!

Giving Evidence has been consulting with UK charities and donors to identify the topics in which they would like further research (/ evidence / data) into charities and philanthropy. This was a large-scale and ground-breaking exercise, using a (variant of a) consultation method developed in medical / health research for eliciting from patients and their carers where they would like researchers to focus.  We are today (2nd July 2019) launching the findings, which you can download here. 

This sits alongside a separate project which we have done to map the existing research around strategic and operational management of charitable and philanthropic activities. A ‘review’ version of the findings and method of that ‘supply’ study are here.

The press release summarises the findings of the two studies.

What we did

We invited input from any charity, foundation, public or private donor in the UK. Through an open ‘crowd-sourcing’ process, including (1) a series of focus groups across the country, (2) two rounds of public, open, online survey, and (3) a workshop, we invited charities, private donors and institutional funders to say where more research would be of most use. The project took over 15 months, and was supported by a distinguished advisory group of funders, private donors, researchers, charity leaders and umbrella bodies (listed below).

What we found

The process produced a list of 24 priority topics, each of which was suggested by a charity or donor, and the list was prioritised by charities and donors. We took fundraising off the table, simply because nobody needs reminding that it exists.

The biggest finding was probably how disengaged charities and donors are from academic research. Half of our survey respondents said that they use academic journal articles ‘never’ or ‘hardly ever’, and we heard many views such as “I find that most of the research is very academic and doesn’t reflect the reality of charities”. “It [academic literature] is cleverly written and that language is putting me off right away”.

Impact dominates the list. The top 24 questions are dominated by questions about how to measure impact (i.e., research methods), use impact measurement data to improve effectiveness, and communicate better about impact with external audiences, notably funders. Impact accounts for all of the top seven questions; eight of the top 10 questions; and 14 of the top 24.

Beneficiaries feature directly in three questions. One might have expected more.

There were some requests for things that already exist, such as specific evaluations of specific organisations, and for methods to identify the impact of interventions in people’s complex lives.

Surprising omissions included anything directly about:

• HR management: recruitment, structuring compensation, retention, managing performance. Neither relating to staff, volunteers or trustees.
• Finance: nothing related to (for example) whether and when to take on debt or how to manage it, managing allocation of risk in contracts, nothing about social impact bonds, calculating the full cost of work, negotiating contracts, whether / when to walk away from contracts (e.g., if the funding is inadequate). This omission is particularly remarkable given how many charities are involved in commissioning processes, which involve determining prices for services and negotiating contracts.
• Ethics of research, e.g., around human subjects. This is surprising in view of requirements of the new GDPR, and that most charities’ monitoring and evaluation is research on people.
• Understanding the location, nature and cause of need.
• Environmental issues.
• Influencing policy.

Surprisingly few questions concerned running the charity / internal issues: most of the list is about communicating with outsiders, notably funders. Governance only occupied two questions of the top 24.

There was nothing about whether / when to collaborate. Collaboration is on the list of 24 questions only (i) about what aids and hinders it (which is a good question, but not about whether to do it) and (ii) about collaborating to demonstrate impact.

The list of 24 questions is below.

What happens next

Both studies were funded by, and in partnership with, Charity Futures, which has announced plans to create an Institute of Charity at the University of Oxford.

The combination of these maps of the ‘supply’ of existing research and ‘demand’ reveal some priority gaps. The Institute can perhaps produce research to fill those priority gaps, and we hope that other academics will do to. We are well aware that there are other pressures on academics’ resources: we do not think that this list should dictate a research agenda, but do think that it should be an input into a research agenda.

More background

Caroline Fiennes, Director of Giving Evidence, gave a talk recently which describes the background and logic for both studies.

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The protocol (details of the research method) for the consultation is published, here.  It was amended in July 2018: the new version is here.

The questions that emerged as top priority

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The Advisory Group comprised (in random sequence):