Author Archives: carolinefiennes

How much churn is there amongst the largest UK grant-making foundations (by giving budget)? One might expect basically none, because huge foundations don’t get created very often, and foundations don’t compete for resources. Giving Evidence looks at these data each … Continue reading →

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 →