Jake Hayman was right in his recent blog Not Fit For Purpose: Why I’m Done With the Foundation World – there are major problems with charitable funding.

We can see this just from the fact that charities normally pay between 20p and 40p to raise £1, whereas companies pay between 3p and 5p. We can tell, too, from the remarkable unpopularity of many grant-makers in comparison to most people who hand out money.

But what do you do about it? This isn’t a rhetorical question: I’m asking for actual examples. What have you – you! – done in the past when you’ve felt badly treated by a foundation? Do you write to the chief executive? To the chair? Rant on Twitter? Just bitch about them privately? And what happened as a result? If we collectively had more stories and examples (evidence, of a sort) about what works and what doesn’t in terms of influencing donor behaviour, perhaps we could solve much of this. Continue reading →

Well done Malcolm Gladwell. On Wednesday this week, Harvard announced its biggest gift ever, $400m from the American hedge fund manager John Paulson for its school of engineering and applied sciences. Gladwell ridiculed it: ‘It came down to helping the poor or giving the world’s richest university $400 mil it doesn’t need. Wise choice John!’ Various other financial overlords sprang to Paulson’s defence: ‘My first thought was: ‘Wait a minute, pal, how much have you given?’’ said one; ‘Would they criticize him if he just sat on his wealth and ‘compounded it’ like certain others?’ said another; and a third said ‘Who the f— can criticize a guy who donated $400 million to his alma mater?!”… What’s to criticize? Extremely generous and he is to be applauded.’

Opportunity cost, that’s what to – well not criticize but to question – and effectiveness along with it. Charities vary wildly in how effective they are: with the same amount of resource, some achieve results, some achieve nothing, some achieve masses, some make things worse. The choices which donors make – like the one Gladwell is calling out – are highly consequential. Continue reading →

This article first published in Third Sector Magazine.

It’s June, which brings the Queen’s official birthday, and perhaps this year you – like many charity sector people before you – will get lucky and appear in the Birthday Honours list. If so, arise, Sir or Dame Reader, for I have an important task for you.

This auspicious occasion presents an opportunity to find out whether Her Majesty’s gongs actually make any difference. We currently don’t know, despite all the sound and fury about them.  Continue reading →

This article was first published by The Life You Can Save.

Alessandro Liberato was suffering from multiple myeloma and trying to decide whether to go through the trauma – for the second time – of a bone marrow transplant.

“There were four [clinical] trials that might have answered my questions, but I was forced to make my decision without knowing the results because, although the trials had been completed, they had not been published,” he said.

Alessandro’s predicament isn’t unique. Millions of patients like Liberato and their doctors are avoidably in the dark. Amazingly, fully half of all clinical trials are unpublished.

“As a result, the effects of most medicines are effectively unknown,” says Dr. Ben Goldacre, who has studied the problem of why clinical trials often go unpublished. Continue reading →