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Systematic review of evidence to inform funding practice: outdoor learning

Posted on March 30, 2015 by carolinefiennes

“What is known about what works and what doesn’t? What can we learn from the existing literature and experience of other organisations about what works and what doesn’t – and for whom and in what circumstances – which can help us make better funding decisions?”

These questions prompted a study of outdoor education for 8-25 year olds commissioned by the Blagrave Trust, a family foundation which supports disadvantaged young people in southern England. Giving Evidence worked with the EPPI Centre (Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre) at UCL, which routinely does systematic reviews of literature in particular areas to inform decision-makers. The full report is here and a summary is here. The material is summarised in a book by some Swiss academics, published in 2022, here. Continue reading →

Posted in Effective giving, Great charities, Impact & evaluation | Leave a comment

Don’t wish for a giving culture like the US

Posted on March 4, 2015 by carolinefiennes

This In February, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, made the largest- ever single gift to a US hospital – $75m (£49m) to a San Francisco institution. We often hear that the charitable sector in the UK should emulate the giving culture in the US. Well, we should be careful what we wish for: it’s far from clear that this would be of any help at all.

Most obviously, the UK and the US are very different countries. Perhaps the comparison arises only because we more or less share a latitude and more or less share a language. Although US giving per capita looks higher, it’s counting something completely different.

Continue reading →

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Kids Company shows a general problem

Posted on February 12, 2015 by carolinefiennes

Dreadful practice at the well-known charity Kids Company – around services, governance and evaluation – are exposed in The Spectator and by Genevieve Maitland Hudson here.

Evaluations of a charity’s work are the main tool by which public donors and taxpayers can know if a charity is doing a good job. But these are normally conducted and/or funded by the charity itself which creates two major problems: first, charities have an obvious incentive to present themselves favourably; and second, most charities lack the research skills to run evaluations well.

This matters. The ‘answer’ from an evaluation depends markedly on how well the research was done. A National Audit Office study found that positive claims about government programmes often come from ropey evaluations whereas robust evaluations only allow for modest claims. And good evaluations usually cost more than bad ones. So it’s hardly surprising that one of the few reviews of the reliability of charities’ evaluations – by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation – found that 70% are not ‘good’. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged charity evaluations, evaluations, Kids Company | 2 Comments

Non-publication of charities’ research: groundbreaking new project!

Posted on February 2, 2015 by carolinefiennes

This was first published by our friends at Evidence Matters.

It’s hard to make evidence-based decisions if much of the evidence is missing, ropey, unclear or you can’t find it. Charities produce masses of evidence about their effectiveness but Giving Evidence suspects that much of it is wasted because of these four problems.

Research that is poor or hidden damages beneficiaries in two ways. First, donors and other operational charities can’t see what works and therefore what to fund or replicate, so may implement something avoidably suboptimal. And second, the research consumes resources, which could perhaps be better spent on delivering something that does work.

Hence Giving Evidence is this very week starting to study non-publication of research by charities. We aim to understand the extent and causes of non-publication, in order to see what might fix it. Though non-publication of research is a known and major problem in science and in medical research, our project is, to our knowledge, the first ever study of non-publication of charities’ research. Continue reading →

Posted in Effective giving, Fundraising, Impact & evaluation, meta-research | 1 Comment

Donors don’t care much about impact! (say the data)

Posted on January 30, 2015 by carolinefiennes

This article first published in Third Sector.

There has been a huge rise in interest recently in the impact charities have, so it’s remarkable that only now are we seeing rigorous evidence emerging about whether donors actually care. It’s a mixed picture.

A paper published last year reported on an experiment with a US charity, Freedom From Hunger. It divided its donor list into two random groups. Those in one group received a conventional solicitation with an emotional appeal and a personal story of a beneficiary, with a final paragraph suggesting that FFH had helped that beneficiary. Those in the other group received a letter identical in all respects – except that the final paragraph stated (truthfully) that “rigorous scientific methodologies” had shown the positive impact of FFH’s work.

Donations were barely affected. The mention or omission of scientific rigour had no effect at all on whether someone donated. It also had only a tiny effect on the total amount raised. People who had supported that charity infrequently were not swayed. However, people who had previously given ‘a lot’ – more than $100 – were prompted by the material on effectiveness to increase their gifts by an average of $12.98 more than those in the control group. On the downside, people who had previously made frequent gifts of less than $100 became less likely to give and also shrank their average gifts by $0.81 – all told, the net effect was about nil. But on the upside, this implies that more serious donors will give more if they are presented with decent evidence of effectiveness. Continue reading →

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

Enabling Make Better Decisions: Meta-Research to the Rescue!

Posted on January 23, 2015 by carolinefiennes

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

It’s hard to make evidence-based decisions if much of the evidence is missing, ropey, unclear, or you can’t find it. This has become Giving Evidence’s unofficial slogan as we aim for charitable giving to be based on sound evidence.

Charities produce masses of evidence about their effectiveness. Evidence is a key component of how organisations like The Life You Can Save, GiveWell, and foundations assess charities. But much of that research is missing (unpublished), ropey (uses poor research methods), unclear (so you can’t tell whether it’s ropey or not), or is hard to find because it’s only published on the website of an organisation you’ve never heard of. (There are virtually no central indexed repositories.)

This damages beneficiaries in two ways: first, donors and other operational charities can’t see what works and therefore what to fund or replicate, so may implement something avoidably suboptimal; and second, the research consumes resources which could perhaps be better spent on delivering something which does work. Hence Giving Evidence works to increase quality, quantity and availability of research. Continue reading →

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Charities should do much less evaluation

Posted on January 8, 2015 by carolinefiennes

Stand over there, would you, while I throw this wellington boot. I want you to see how well I throw it. Pay attention: you need to judge me on my welly-throwing. Oops, that throw wasn’t very good! Let’s not count that. Ah, the second throw was better. OK, now my assistant will measure how far it went. No – him, not you. It’s actually quite hard to measure it properly – the tape has to be taut, so I have to secure it in the ground here – and I’ve not learnt to do that properly. Anyway, a bit of slack is all to the good! We’ll use this tape-measure which we made: it uses a special unit of distance which we invented.

****

This, I suspect, is uncomfortably close to how charities’ monitoring and evaluation work. Charities get judged on ‘evaluations’ which they themselves produce, for which they design measures, and they decide whether and what to publish. It appears not to help them much. If the aim is to improve decisions – by operating charities, by funders, by policy-makers – by enabling access to reliable evidence about what’s worth doing and what’s worth prioritising, then much of it fails: it’s just too ropey. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

How do you make people give more? Research in the US has some surprising messages

Posted on January 7, 2015 by carolinefiennes

In the US, individual charitable giving is much vaunted, but it’s flat. Once you adjust for inflation, it’s been between 2 per cent and 2.2 per cent of income for more than 30 years. Identifying how to increase giving is the focus of research by the University of Chicago’s economics department; and since it has more Nobel Prizes than any other, it’s worth listening to. I went to hear its findings, and these are some snippets.

Being near the finish line helps. The Center for Environmental Policy Analysis at the University of Central Florida asked 3,000 Florida households for funds for computers. The letters said, variously, that Cepa already had 10 per cent, 33 per cent or 67 per cent of the amount needed. The effect was huge – the “67 per cent” letters raised six times more funds than the “10 per cent” ones, and the former received more than twice as many responses (8.2 per cent) as the latter (3.7 per cent). Continue reading →

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

Charities should do fewer evaluations; those few can be better

Posted on December 8, 2014 by carolinefiennes

It’s hard to make evidence based decisions if much of the evidence is missing, garbage, unclear, or you can’t find it. Talk given in Barcelona (18 mins)

More examples of important evidence being missing or garbage–>

What Giving Evidence is doing to make charities’ evidence clearer and easier to find-->

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Give Your Best, this Giving Tuesday

Posted on December 3, 2014 by carolinefiennes

Caroline Fiennes explains how to maximize the effect of your donation, even if you have no money at all. [This article was first published by GivingTuesday.]

The basics which you must know about charities before you start

Some charities are miles better than others

This sounds rather heretical because we often think that all charities are good. But we also think that teaching is good, and so is providing medical care, and yet we know that some teachers are better than others, some doctors, some treatments. It’s the same with charities, so your choice matters.

For example, in Kenya, where diarrhoea from dirty water is a major problem, delivering chlorine to households can prevent diarrhea for a certain cost, but giving people chlorine at the village water source achieves the same result for less than half that cost. Continue reading →

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Systematic review of evidence to inform funding practice: outdoor learning

Don’t wish for a giving culture like the US

Kids Company shows a general problem

Non-publication of charities’ research: groundbreaking new project!

Donors don’t care much about impact! (say the data)

Enabling Make Better Decisions: Meta-Research to the Rescue!

Charities should do much less evaluation

How do you make people give more? Research in the US has some surprising messages

Charities should do fewer evaluations; those few can be better

Give Your Best, this Giving Tuesday

Buy the book! www.giving-evidence.com/book

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