Category Archives: Effective giving

How to give it: Why charity should begin in the science lab

Posted on April 3, 2016 by

This article first published in the Financial Times. Not all charities are good causes. This may sound surprising, because we’re used to thinking of them all as being somehow virtuous, but they vary in their effectiveness. Smart donors know that … Continue reading →

Posted in Donor behaviour & giving stats, Effective giving, Impact & evaluation | 3 Comments

Oops: we made the non-profit impact revolution go wrong

Posted on March 7, 2016 by

By Caroline Fiennes and Ken Berger, managing director of Algorhythm.  The non-profit ‘impact revolution’ – over a decade’s work to increase the impact of non-profits – has gone in the wrong direction. As veterans and cheerleaders of the revolution, we are both … Continue reading →

Posted in Donor behaviour & giving stats, Effective giving, Impact & evaluation | Leave a comment

Making charity & philanthropy more evidence-based

Posted on February 18, 2016 by

Giving Evidence’s purpose is improving the effectiveness of charitable giving and charitable work by improving the quality of evidence on which they are based. The changes that we need are very analogous to changes which happened in medicine, in terms of … Continue reading →

Posted in Analysing giving, Donor behaviour & giving stats, Effective giving | Leave a comment

What makes a helpful reporting & evaluation system? Learning from an outlier

Posted on January 27, 2016 by

Funders’ reporting and evaluation systems are rarely loved: they are more often regarded as compliance or ‘policing’. But not so for the Inter-American Foundation apparently: IAF received better feedback from its grantees on its reporting and evaluation system than have … Continue reading →

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The Magic Impact Fairy will ensure that your research really changes something

Posted on January 21, 2016 by

Many charities’ theory of change is: ‘here’s that document you didn’t ask for’ I want to introduce you to someone: the Magic Impact Fairy. Her job is to take all the research that people do and the reports they write, … Continue reading →

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The charity sector should use more systematic reviews to leverage what’s already known

Posted on October 22, 2015 by

Any single piece of evaluation research, designed to understand the effect of an intervention, has limitations. It will examine the effect of a particular intervention on some particular outcomes in a particular group of people (‘population’), at a particular time. That’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Effective giving, Impact & evaluation | 1 Comment

How come this foundation’s grantees love its reporting process so much?

Posted on July 31, 2015 by

Most charities hate the reporting which funders make them do. Notionally a learning process, it’s often just compliance, box-ticking and a dead-weight cost. But not so apparently for the Inter-American Foundation, an independent US government agency which grant-funds citizen-led community … Continue reading →

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Deworming: problems under re-analysis

Posted on July 24, 2015 by

A flawed study on deworming children—and new studies that expose its errors—reveal why activists and philanthropists alike need safeguards. The book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, of all things, offers a critically important message for people who work … Continue reading →

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Is grantee / beneficiary feedback a substitute for RCTs?

Posted on June 2, 2015 by

The short answer is no. At first sight, it seems that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and Constituent Voice (CV: a good way of gathering feedback from programme beneficiaries or grantees) could substitute for each other because they both seek to … Continue reading →

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The key barriers to strategic philanthropy are practical

Posted on May 6, 2015 by

This was published by Stanford Social Innovation Review in a series about strategic philanthropy. Encouraging more strategic philanthropy is a behavior change exercise. Paul Brest and I are fellow travellers and co-conspirators in that mission. But his article implies that … Continue reading →

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