Author Archives: carolinefiennes

The system by which charities apply to charitable foundations for funding is dreadful. When I ran anoperational charity, I and the team spent far too long on it – often simply re-writing and re-formatting the same information multiple times into … Continue reading →

How to get research to influence policy Continue reading →

UK charities, including foundations, are unusual organisations in that it is pretty common to have more trustees than staff. The trustees are non-executive directors, they are almost invariably unpaid, and collectively comprise the board. It is rare in businesses and … Continue reading →

A clear finding from the Foundation Practice Rating Year One research – which assessed 100 UK-based charitable grant-making foundations – is that foundations with few trustees, or few staff, tend to perform poorly on diversity, accountability and transparency. This matters … Continue reading →

This article appeared in Alliance Magazine’s special edition about food systems. It shows a powerful approach to using and producing evidence which donors could use an any sector. Moving to a sustainable and fair food system is a giant challenge, … Continue reading →

Giving Evidence is delighted to be studying funders’ application processes – to try to figure out how to reduce the costs that funders create for operational nonprofits. This is a hugely important topic, so we have written about it publicly, … Continue reading →

Giving Evidence’s Director, Caroline Fiennes, has a letter in The Economist this week. Giving Evidence’s existence is about directing philanthropic resources to effective & cost-effective work. So we were horrified by a letter in The Economist two weeks ago which … Continue reading →

UK charitable foundation staff and trustees are very white and very male. They’re also often senior in years, and pretty posh. None of those characteristics is necessarily a problem of itself, but (a) the homogeneity creates risk of lacking diversity … Continue reading →

A Which? Magazine-type reliable rating of a wide range of charities would indeed be helpful. Unfortunately it’s currently impossible. Most months, somebody contacts me saying that they’re setting up some website / app to rate loads of charities – to … Continue reading →

This webinar, given with the Campbell Collaboration and Porticus, is a great introduction to rigorous evidence in general, and specifically the rigorous evidence around ‘what works’ in institutional responses to child abuse. It is part of our work on that … Continue reading →