google46fd937acf0a523a.html

Posted on January 31, 2012 by carolinefiennes

Please ignore this page: it’s here for a technical reason involving Google!

https://giving-evidence.com/google46fd937acf0a523a.html

google46fd937acf0a523a.html

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Forget business: philanthropy needs to learn from tons of other disciplines

Posted on January 31, 2012 by carolinefiennes

Philanthrocapitalism, social return, social investment, Absolute Return for Kids… Business is the analogy most commonly used for philanthropic activity. Though that’s not wrong, it’s dangerously narrow for solving what Warren Buffett calls ‘problems which have already resisted great intellects and great money’.

Let’s think through some steps which a donor – or a charity, for that matter – might take.

Since the giant array of needs in the world creates a giant array of options for donors (and charities), intelligent donors/charities are selective. Here, a pertinent analogy is the military. Even the Romans found it hard to fend off enemies on numerous fronts, and more recently the Nazis couldn’t deal with challenges on both the Eastern- and Western Fronts. We ourselves would perhaps have done better in Afghanistan if we’d had fewer and clearer
goals. ‘A single, unambiguous aim is the keystone of successful military operations. Selection and maintenance of the aim is regarded as the master principle of war’, as is taught to all officers in the Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and British Army.

Having selected an unambiguous aim, the judicious donor (or charity) will research their starting point. How widespread is poverty? How bad are race relations? Which groups are least well served by formal education? Answering even simple ‘factual’ questions like these is surprisingly difficult, because what we see and experience is heavily influenced by what we’re expecting to see. ‘Observation is theory-laden’ as philosophers of science have found.

So the donor/ charity defines some metrics and attempts to measure the amount of poverty or race relations or whatever. Yet the act of measuring may change the very thing which is being measured: we all behave differently when we’re being watched and the researcher’s questions may focus our latent anger. Any social scientist would have foreseen that, as would any physicist: Heisenberg got a Nobel Prize for the implications of his realisation that ‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning’.

To establish the starting point, the donor or charity commissions a survey which, to minimise the Heisenberg effect, sequences the questions carefully. Psychology has much to contribute: to take just one example, psychologists have found that when young people are asked how happy they are and then asked when they last went on a date, their happiness rates totally differently than if they are asked the exact same questions just in the opposite order! Lawyers could help here too, since they know about (avoiding) leading the witness.

Perhaps the donor /charity navigates all this and is eventually ready to design her ‘intervention’ to get people to do more X or less Y: to drive more safely, to commit fewer crimes, to vote less tribally. She’d do well to engage with the newish field of behaviour economics (‘nudge’). Perhaps the most effective and least laborious ‘interventions’ are simply making it easier to repay loans,  or making it socially normal, or making it somehow fun.

Work begins. After a while, the donor /charity looks for its effect. ‘We did such-and-such and then something-or-other happened’ say many donors / charities, under the mistaken impression that this somehow indicates that the something-or-other was caused by the such-and-such. Any economist or statistician, or scientist, or indeed anybody who understands the difference between causation and correlation (such people are rarer than you might suppose) would raise an eyebrow at that. You can’t claim some God-like control of the solar systems just because the sun comes up every time you eat your Weetabix.

To really understand whether the something-or-other had anything to do with the such-and-such – i.e., whether the donor/charity made any difference – we need a control experiment. A simple one involves sitting around doing nothing to see whether something-or-others happen all the time anyway. Social scientists and physical sciences teach a great deal about constructing good control experiments. (And, by the way, rather more than business does. I’ve yet to see an article in Harvard Business Review about them, though they’re discussed in Nature all the time.)

So what?

Two implications are important for donors and charities.

First, we should open our minds to learning from many disciplines – from any discipline. Donors and charities face some of the most difficult challenges on Earth, and hence need all the wisdom and insight they can get. The observed over-reliance on one discipline is patently insufficient. People involved in these challenges should read and listen widely, for relevant learning lurks in surprising places.

And second, donors and charities should hire staff from a broader pool. Foundations are often particularly narrow, staffed entirely by people with business backgrounds, and perhaps a few aid-wonks. If you have three business people, then you have enough: your next hire should have studied physics or epidemiology or psychology.

A single analogy or skillset – however good – is most unlikely to bring the breakthroughs which the poor, the lonely, the underserved so badly need from us.

_________

Caroline Fiennes has a surprisingly useful degree in Physics and Philosophy.

This article draws on material in her forthcoming book, It Ain’t What You Give, It’s The Way That You Give It: Making charitable donations which get results.

________  

Why is NatWest giving away tax-payers’ money, so amazingly badly? —>

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Kate Middleton’s charities: a curious but quite good set for a beginner

Posted on January 31, 2012 by carolinefiennes

The Duchess Formerly Known as Kate Middleton announced today her first four charity affiliations. It’s a quirky set. If she’s clever, Kate (if we’re still allowed to call her that) can add a load more value to them.

The overriding precept of effective giving is using your resources to their best effect. For Kate, that means using her ability to attract attention. So the National Portrait Gallery is a weird choice since that’s hardly a ‘cause’ or an institution below the radar, and neither does it lack high-profile patrons. (Since she has a degree in History of Art, it presumably arises from long-standing personal interest.) By contrast, the choice of Action on Addiction is a very good one: addiction is a hidden and un-sexy curse, much like HIV was when Diana brought the press into see it.

One resource which could be used better is Kate’s rationale for her selection. She’s clearly pretty switched-on and has some good charity advisors around her, so it might be valuable if she explained why she chose the East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices given that there loads of children’s hospices, and why she chose The Art Room, amongst the numerous charities which work with troubled young people in schools.

The other great insight of effective donors is that charities vary massively in their effectiveness – much as companies do, as teachers do, as sports people do. But not all her quartet seem to pay much attention to results. Action on Addiction does: its annual report begins “This has been another year of great impact”, and goes on to discuss results extensively. It surely gets extra marks for providing the first funds to support a randomised clinical trial in one of its areas of work. The Art Room talks about results a bit but not very convincingly: it cites a some recent observational data, of frankly limited value, and a detailed study which is now seven years old and whose authors recognised that it had insufficient depth (for example, no control group, and the duration was too short for the charity’s effect to be clear). East Anglia’s Children’s Hospices have zero discussion of results either on its website or annual report, as far as I could see. Any donor does well to choose charities which obsess about their effectiveness, and to encourage them to understand it more rigorously – let’s hope she does that.

So, what should she do next? I’d suggest that she publishes her rationale, and pushes all ‘her’ charities to talk clearly and publicly about what they do, why they do it, which bits work and which bits don’t (if they say that everything works, we should suspect their economising on the truth).

As she gets more confident and savvy about charities, it would be just great if she shone the spotlight on important issues that routinely get ignored. Your Royal Highness, here are some ideas for your next selections. Female genital mutilation. Child soldiers. People trafficking. Even prisoners’ families who are routinely ignored, despite reducing re-offending. Corruption and transparency. Or, on a different tack, get interested in charities’ effectiveness and champion the work to test their approaches using proper randomised control trials.

The initial quartet is reasonable start, but, since she’s less than half the age of her father-in-law who’s still waiting for what Diana called “the top job”, there’s plenty of time to be radical.

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Giving a goat (or similar) this Christmas? Get an extra half a goat for free

Posted on January 31, 2012 by carolinefiennes

Oxfam Unwrapped is a kind of gift catalogue from which you can ‘buy a goat’ or various other items as a gift. A goat costs £25: you give Oxfam £25, which it uses to provide a goat to somebody in a less developed country, and in return Oxfam gives you a card picturing a cheery-looking goat to give your friend. Jolly good.

Your £25 appears to be ring-fenced (‘restricted’ as the charity-wonks say) to buying goats. In fact it isn’t, for this good reason. Theoretically, each of the 50m adults in the UK could ‘buy a goat’ tomorrow, and it would be just crazy if Oxfam suddenly rained 50m goats onto the unsuspecting communities it serves. So, sensibly, Oxfam’s small-print says that your £25 will go to ‘either your chosen gift or something else in the same category.’ (Goats are in the ‘livestock’ category whereas ‘training a teacher’, for example, is in the ‘education’ category, amazingly enough.) ‘This kind of flexibility means that poor communities worldwide can get exactly what they need if and when their circumstances change’ Oxfam says.

You can go one better. You can remove the ‘restriction’ altogether by ticking a box at check-out which says: ‘I am happy for Oxfam to use my money to fund any part of its work.’

‘Unrestricted’ donations are almost invariably the best way to give to a charity. They allow responsiveness, allow the people who are actually receiving the money a real-time say in what they get, and can be used by the charity for what is actually needed at the time, rather than what was needed when the goat-catalogue was printed.

Charities say that they’d rather have £660,000 unrestricted than £1m restricted. That is, making the donation unrestricted – ticking that box – magically increases the usefulness of your donation by half. Half a goat for free.

This sounds like some dull technicality. But the difference on the ground is real, normally because restricted donations create complicated accounting and faffing about at headquarters, which itself costs money – eating up roughly the missing £340,000 in the example above.

Some charity ‘gift catalogues’ don’t even offer this option. The Good Gifts Catalogue, for example, says that ‘your money buys the gift described… we guarantee it’. Even if it’s no longer needed or the recipient community has enough of those items already or something else has become more urgent since the catalogue was printed? Isn’t it important to give communities – anybody – the right to some control over their life in real-time? They get that much more if they can influence decisions to respond to changing circumstances.

‘Tis the season to be flexible: always.

(Unfortunately when the FT reported this story, it got it wrong, describing the reduced restriction as ‘marketing bull’. At least it correctly represented my view about it!)

[Source: for the £660k/£1m: Garvey, B., Sutherland, L., 2006, ‘Restricted and project funding survey, nfpSynergy’, p. 7]

How do you find out whether a charity is achieving anything?–>

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How should advice on charitable giving be priced?

Posted on January 31, 2012 by carolinefiennes

Answer: In a way that aligns the advisor’s incentives with those of the beneficiary. But which way does that?

Along with many others, I’m often asked to advise donors about finding good charities to support and/or strategies to make their giving effective. I’m struggling to find a structure which does that.

Time and materials?

Nope. There are two problems here – which are common to any professional service paid for by time. First, it incentivises the advisor to take ages.  Hence some moves to pay lawyers on a piecemeal basis rather than hourly (why do I pay more just because you’re slow?) And second, it encourages the advisor to unnecessarily complicate their work (on the reasonable assumption that fees are deducted from the amount the donor has to give). Yes this arises even in the charitable world: I once saw an advisor claiming that managing a single, existing grant to a perfectly competently and stable organisation took him two days a week and required two foreign trips a year. Monsterous.

But there are two additional twists with charitable giving.

It’s easier (read: cheaper) to find charities in the UK than in, say, in South Sudan. So paying the advisor by time incentives the donor to support readily-findable charities. But you could easily argue that beneficiaries who are difficult to find because they’re cut-off from mainstream markets and funding are precisely where donors should focus.

Donors often achieve most by collaborating: partly because they reduce the number of programmes in existence, which reduces admin for both the donor and charities. They also therefore reduce the need for advisors. So paying advisors on a ‘time and materials’ basis disincentivises the advisors to push for collaboration (they’d put themselves out of a job). Putting that more strongly, ‘time and materials’ encourages advisors to promote fragmentation amongst donors, which is bad for beneficiaries. Furthermore, creating those partnerships can take no time at all. When I put together the one between Eurostar and the Ashden Awards, it only took about half a day, yet created substantial value for beneficiaries.

Percentage of funds managed?

Nope, because this incentives the advisor to advise against giving anything away!

Percentage of funds given away?

Nope, because this simply encourages the advisor to dish it all out at maximum speed, which doesn’t bode well for proper planning and research.

Furthermore, it disincentivises the advisor from looking at impact investing, i.e., using the capital for social & environmentally useful purposes before it is given away. And, of itself, this structure doesn’t encouraging using any other resources, e.g., time, contacts, reputation, convening power – which may amplify vastly the impact of any money given.

Success fee / performance-related pay?

Sadly this is impossible because there’s no single metric of success on which donors can judge their success. Charitable giving is fundamentally different to financial investing in that sense: the advisor can’t take 2% of the upside, because there isn’t one; they can’t take be paid based on whether the beneficiaries like the donor because they probably won’t know that the donor exists; they can’t take be paid based on whether the charities like the donor because that may be totally independent of whether the donor is really adding value.

Other models?

The only other model I can think of is a fixed fee. Say £10k to fix your philanthropy strategy, irrespective of the amount you’re giving or the complexity of fixing it. That feels bizarre. It also leaves the advisor taking all the risk (they then have the incentive to opt for easily-findable charities.)

Perhaps some econo-brainbox can think of a better structure. Do give your suggestions in comments below.

(First published at carolinefiennes.com where it generated lots of comments.)

Posted in Admin costs, Analysing giving, Donor behaviour & giving stats, Promoting giving | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

How do you know if your charity is making any difference? Take control

Posted on January 31, 2012 by carolinefiennes

Charities need to understand which parts of their activities are working and which aren’t. But to really understand the charity’s impact, we need to know not only what did happen, but what would have happened without the charity’s work.

Imagine a city with poor air quality. Suppose that a charity works there, trying to persuade inhabitants to turn off their car engines when idling at traffic lights. When the charity started work, the air was clean 10% of the time (it has some sensible definition for air cleanliness: perhaps the air has fewer than 10parts per million of particulates), whereas a end late, it was clean 20% of the time. Result! Really? Perhaps the improvement was due to the charity; but perhaps it would have happened anyway; and perhaps more improvement would have happened without the charity. (It’s not unknown for irritating campaigns to provoke people to ‘rebel’ and do the opposite of what’s being asked.)

These kinds of ‘before/after studies’ indicate precisely nothing about whether the charity is doing a good job. It’s scary because they’re very common amongst charities (and others). If you think about it, the example above is analogous to an educational charity saying: ‘At the beginning of the year, the average height of a child we helped was 1.2 metres whereas afterwards it was 1.3 metres’! Or someone saying ‘we banged some pots together and then it stopped raining’ or even ‘we elected an Afro-Caribbean President and then the economy tanked’. We can’t infer causation from simple before/after statements.

To see why something happened, we need a control, that is, a situation in which everything is the same apart from the charity’s work.  This will show which of the scenarios above applies and therefore whether the programme is actually doing anything useful.

Celebrated development economist Professor Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says that without control situations for social or charitable programmes, we’re no better than medieval doctors putting leeches on their patients. If right now somebody put a revolting slimy leech on your arm, you too would probably claim to feel just fine. It is only by comparing ailing people treated with and without leeches that mankind learnt that the slimy bugs weren’t helping and could move to more effective treatments. Charities too need to test whether their programmes are working by using controls.

Sometimes getting a control is easy: run the programme in one class at school and not the other (keeping everything else the same between them) and look at the difference between them at the end. Sometimes it requires a bit of imagination: if you (like me) run national campaigns to influence behaviour, then look not only at changes in behaviour of people who have seen the campaign but also in people very unlikely to have seen it.

But without controls, we might as well be handing out leeches: we’ve essentially no clue what’s causing what, and thus we ourselves have no control.

How a proper control trial showed one programme is 25 times better than another–>

(‘Control’ article also published by TrusteeHome)

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Who’s the most generous nation on Earth?

Posted on January 31, 2012 by carolinefiennes

It’s not the US! According to The Economist, the rankings contain a few surprises:

Australia               57%  

New Zealand        57%

Canada                  56%

Ireland                  56%

Switzerland          55%

US                          55%

Netherlands         54%

Sri Lanka              53%

UK                          53%

Austria                   52%

Laos                       50%

Sierra Leone         50%

These are rankings based on three factors: ‘in the previous month, those surveyed [said they] gave money to charity, gave time to those in need or helped a stranger’. (Source: Pocket World in Figures, 2012 Edition, The Economist, p91, itself taken from here I think)

Why is comparing giving in the US and UK totally spurious?–>

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NatWest’s Community Force programme is crushingly awful

Posted on January 31, 2012 by carolinefiennes

NatWest’s Community Force programme creates huge amounts of waste for charities and doesn’t even reward merit. It’s the worst programme for giving money to charity I’ve ever seen. Here are the larger of my concerns about it:

  1. It’s massively wasteful 

NatWest has given £6,000 to each of 396 charities who received the most votes in a Natwest – pro-manchester public poll conducted on NatWest’s site. Any charity (or ‘project’ – a terrible term to which we’ll return) could enter, and then they had to drum up voters. It’s a popularity contest. We’ll come back to that.

NatWest allowed 5811 organisations to register. So NatWest has rejected 93% of its applicants. I’ve never seen a rate so high. (Why NatWest thinks it’s a good idea to engage and then disappoint 5415 charities and their supporters is a mystery.)

Even if the entry process took two seconds and was then a lottery, that would still be pretty awful. But in fact charities have to gather votes: collectively they have gathered 296,137 votes. Let’s do the maths.

On average, each charity has gained ~50 votes. That required some work: for example, I’ve been approached by loads of charities I’ve never heard of, and had umpteen emails forwarded by friends. Let’s suppose, probably conservatively, that each of those 5815 organisations has done three hours work to enter the contest and drum up voters.

That’s 41 hours of wasted work for every successful application. Across the whole programme, it’s 16,254 wasted hours work. Man, that’s a lot: it’s over nine person-years of work totally wasted just because NatWest has allowed way too many organisations to enter. Priced at the minimum wage, that would be a wasted wage bill of £99,000.

A responsible funder goes out of their way to deter applicants who are unlikely to succeed. The rather more progressive BBC Children in Need – mindful of this wastage – is busy trying to clarify its rules in order to cut the failure rate of its applicants from 3/4 (actually pretty good by industry standards) to 1/2.

From which it looks mighty like NatWest is more concerned about raising the profile of its community engagement than it is in actually doing anything useful. It’s egregious to waste so much charity time just to raise a corporate profile. If NatWest had really wanted to find great community-based charities, they could simply have called the Community Foundation Network.

  1. Public voting is no way of ensuring merit

This is a popularity contest. The organisations which win will be those who can garner most votes. Hmm: that is unlikely to be the organisations which are the best. Why would it be? Most of the people who vote – people with internet access, who are well-connected socially and so on – are unlikely to be the people who are most needy in society; and the ‘business’ of raising votes is a totally different ‘business’ to that of creating social change. (For example, there is only one entry from an organisation concerned about climate change, cited as a ‘national security concern’ even by those lefty liberals at the Pentagon [i].)

So we seem to have a massively wasteful mechanism for not choosing the best charities. Great. Then there are a few other Crimes Against Effective Giving.

  1. NatWest calls organisations ‘projects’

If you’re not a native in the Charity World, this will not strike you as heinous. But if you are, it will.

Projects finish. Organisations don’t – they continue, they develop, they have enduring influence. Calling organisations ‘projects’ leads people – nudges them, if you like – to think that the work will one day be done. It won’t. Charities are dealing with some of the most difficult problems on Earth – problems which no lesser brain that Warren Buffett says ‘have resisted great intellects and often great money’. They’re not going to be finished any time soon. Calling charities ‘projects’ belittles them, and encourages people – and NatWest has gone out of its way to put this dreadful term in front of as many people as possible – to trivialise their work. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, wrote a sequel called Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking is Not the Answer in which he says that ‘To make the greatest impact on society requires first and foremost a great organization, not a single great program’.

  1. NatWest makes ridiculous claims

Last year it gave £8,000 to the Yorkshire Air Ambulance. ‘With an £8,000 award, they’ve been able to carry on their invaluable, life-saving work.’ surge in asx growth share price represented by tiny bean stalk being watered by miniature watering can

Really? Yorkshire Air Ambulance has revenue of  £3.75m, ie, this grant is less than the amount it gets through in less than a day (£8,000 x 365 / £3.75m = about 18 hours).  So not really enough ‘to carry on their invaluable work’, then.

But they also provide volunteering: doens’t that help?

Not much. NatWest does provides volunteering, by its staff and by encouraging anybody else to volunteer. But it seems fantastically unlikely that it’ll provide nine person-years of work per grantee – this is an annual programme, so that would mean nine people all year. Not going to happen.

This programme creates work, and rewards popularity rather than merit. Lots of people have reported that NatWest’s voting system is difficult to use. ‘Helpful banking’? Hardly.

___

Can’t you say that the work is being done by volunteers so shouldn’t be priced?

No. Because (a)volunteers’ time, just like anybody else’s time should be appreciated properly, and (b)that time, given to the charity, could have been spent doing something more useful.

Not all corporate giving is bad. Eurostar’s charitable programme is rather better –>

[i] Pentagon to rank global warming as destabilising force, 31 January 2010 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/31/pentagon-ranks-global-warming-destabilising-force

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The good, and the weird, features of Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save

Posted on January 31, 2012 by carolinefiennes

‘How much should each of us give to help the world’s poor?’, asks the moral philosopher Peter Singer in his book The Life You Can Save. It’s a cracking book, with some great insights about poverty, effective solutions and the weirdness inside us all (ie, behavioural economics). Nonetheless, there were three respects in which I found the book peculiar.

First, the American-ness. ‘We Americans this’, ‘a survey of American found that’, ‘the average American this’, ‘American radio stations that’, ‘the New York Times the other’, and so on. Surely defeating global poverty will require people in all developed nations, not just in one, and so it’s kind of odd to alienate / ignore everybody else. Though he probably is addressing people in all developed nations, because Singer doesn’t refer to us at all (except as comparators to the US), it rather sounds as though we don’t count, or our giving is irrelevant or something. And that’s particularly weird coming from somebody who is himself not American and who, the very first page tells us, doesn’t live in America. Still, maybe his publisher decided that the main audience was in the US.

He should have fought them off, because the American-centricity of the language seriously undermines his work. Singer laments (rightly) the low levels of international giving by US individuals and by the US state, and it seems not unreasonable to imagine that this is partly because people in the US are simply less aware of the existence of other countries, or less familiar with their situations than one might hope. Indeed, Singer (rightly) explores how people give to causes with which they feel they have a connection, which feel proximate to them, and which they can envisage. By talking to his US audience as though they are the sole nation who exist, or at least who matter, surely he is perpetuating the isolationism which creates / reinforces the very problem he is trying to solve.

Professor Singer, if you read this, please explain. I’m hugely interested, not because I want to understand publishers but because your quest is such an important one.

Second, why did he publish it commercially? The front cover has a stamp saying “URGENT, URGENT, URGENT Acting Now to End World Poverty”, and the back cover claims that “For the first time in history, it is within our reach to eradicate world poverty”. Crickey – so we need to get the message of this book into as many hands and heads as possible, and pretty pronto. For which, commercial publishing at £14.99 a copy isn’t obviously the best route. When Professor David Mackay felt a similar urgency – to debunk the myth that our current attempts to produce ‘clean’ energy would meet our energy needs – he wrote a marvellous book and dishes it out for free, so as to minimise the barriers to people reading it.

Again, Professor Singer, please explain. If commercial publishing is, by your analysis, the best way to disseminate a message, then all those of us who are on missions to spread messages need to know that.

And third, the answer at which Peter Singer arrives is that we should all give 5% of our incomes, with a bit extra if you earn a lot. Five? It does seem kind of weird that after 164 pages of detail about how much poverty there is, about how we can solve it using these natty effective interventions we’ve now discovered, about wealth disparity, behavioural economics, blah blah, Singer seems to give up, saying that ‘oh that’s all jolly tricky’ and picks from the air a low number – no less than half what is in the Bible. Surely if we have a unique opportunity to “eradicate world poverty”, surely we should all dig deep for a while and nail it. The book is a peculiarly complex way of defending a pretty mild conclusion.

However, you can’t beat this book for its tour of the relevant bits of behavioural economics – that fascinating offshoot of the dismal science. We’d rather help one person than help ten. If somebody else isn’t helping, rather than thinking we should help (precisely because they’re not) we’ll decide that we shouldn’t help either. If we so much as see a dollar sign (or, if you don’t happen to be in the US, a pound sign, or yen sign, or Rand sign…), we become more less likely to give.

Fundraisers and charities need to know and use these insights. Even if they’re not in America.

Posted in Books, Impact & evaluation | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Comparing giving in the US and in the UK is a total red herring

Posted on January 31, 2012 by carolinefiennes

If I had a pound for every time I’d heard people try to compare giving in the US and in the UK, I’d have more pounds than is given in both together. It’s a rubbish comparison. Here’s why.

First, they normally compare solely the US and the UK. As though there were only two nations on Earth. It’s just lazy. Do you really not think we might also be able to learn something from other countries too?

Second, the comparison normally says ‘giving is higher in the US than here, so we should try to get our giving as high as theirs’. Any philosopher will tell you that an argument’s validity depends on its structure, independent of its content. So we can think of this statement as saying “Blah is higher in the US than here, so we should try to get our Blah as high as theirs.” Really? The rate of school shootings is higher in the US than here, so we should aspire to increase that? The proportion of ethnic minority men in prison is higher in the US than here. Carbon emissions per head are a lot higher in the US than here. The death rate for teenagers is higher in the US than any other developed country. And so absurdly on. Thus this ‘argument’ giving makes no sense.

Third, do you not think there might be just one or two other relevant differences between the UK and the US? You’ll remember from school that good experiments test only one thing at a time and keep everything else constant. Well, the US and the UK are hardly alike in every respect other than their rates of charitable giving. Cultural differences are vast, differences in social norms are vast, the role of the state versus the individual differs vastly. Citing the differences in giving levels with no consideration of the umpteen other differences is just lazy / stupid – extrapolating from the (kind of) similarity of our language to everything else.

Fourth, it’s the role of the state, stupid. In upstate New York, I was amazed a few years ago to see a sign saying “the next 5km of highway is cleaned courtesy of the [wherever I was] Rotary Club”. In Britain, every km of highway is cleaned courtesy of the government, that is to say, by the tax-payer. And thus, magically, every km of highway is cleaned, irrespective of whether there is a local Rotary Club. Notice that money given by / to the Rotary Club of Wherever I Was to clean highways counts as charitable giving, whereas the money ‘given’ to the taxman to clean UK highways doesn’t. That doesn’t show that the US is more generous, as claimed, just that the US allocates tasks differently between the state and the private citizen. It’s not obvious that a system in which your local highway might not get cleaned (if, for instance, there is no Rotary Club) is better than one in which it definitely will.

Fifth, it’s the role of the church, stupid. Faith, and hence churches and other religious institutions, are MUCH more significant in the US than elsewhere. This piece from the FT magazine even outlines out having no faith is “the last big taboo in America” where people find it easier to be lesbian single mothers then to admit atheism. Hence membership of church (or synagogues etc.) is almost ubiquitous, so of course people give to them. Religious giving in the US dwarfs that elsewhere.

Sixth, it’s not even true, as often claimed, that the US is more generous than the UK. According to NCVO / CAF, whereas 73% of UK citizens give money, only 60% of US citizens do[i]. Or another way of looking at this, official overseas aid giving by the US is 18 cents for every $100 of Gross National Income, whereas in the UK it’s nearly three times that, at 51 cents If you add together giving to international development by government and private individuals in the US, you get 25 cents per $100, whereas in the UK, you get more than twice that, at 54 cents[ii].

The World Giving Index says that the country with the greatest number of charitable givers is, remarkably, Myanmar. The UK is next. The US is not even in the top ten, in 13th position.

Seventh (yes, really), the uses of this ‘charitable’ money are not exactly what you would choose if you were an alien arriving on our inequitable and disharmonious planet. I read a report some years ago (and now annoyingly can’t find) that analysed the amount of charitable giving in the US which went to ‘communities of which the donor is a member’ – churches, synagogues, universities and so on. About a third, from memory, and enough to wipe out the per capita differences between giving in the US and the UK.

You see this most markedly in giving to universities in the US. Harvard University was sitting on $37bn at the beginning of 2008[iii], almost all of which probably counted as charitable money. Is that giving supposed to somehow embellish the health of the nation, having great cashpiles sitting around in unaccountable institutions, managed by people paid $4.4 million?

And eighthly (a phrase I don’t think I’ve ever previously written) WHAT ABOUT EFFECTIVENESS? We’d argue that it doesn’t matter if the US gives more unless we know that it’s given effectively – which we don’t. It’s not hard to give money in such a way that none of it does anything useful, and on the other hand, it is possible to give it just marvellously. A little given marvellously will produce more impact than loads given badly. The discussion about levels of giving is a measure of INPUT, not of the RESULT.

Please. Can we stop these nonsense comparisons and focus on what really matters: decent analysis which can help us to make the world better – by understanding how to make giving (and everything else) more effective.

___________

Since this article was written, (yet) more data have emerged which indicate that US philanthropy may not be something that other countries want to emulate.

First, it’s mainly regressive. Much US philanthropy – esp from the wealthy – goes to causes and organisations that disproportionally benefit elite the rich. “Of the 50 largest individual gifts to public charities in 2012, 34 went to educational institutions, the vast majority of them colleges and universities, like Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley, that cater to the nation’s and the world’s elite. Museums and arts organizations such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art received nine of these major gifts, with the remaining donations spread among medical facilities and fashionable charities like the Central Park Conservancy. Not a single one of them went to a social-service organization or to a charity that principally serves the poor and the dispossessed. More gifts in this group went to elite prep schools (one, to the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York) than to any of our nation’s largest social-service organizations, including United Way, the Salvation Army, and Feeding America (which got, among them, zero).” – according to The Atlantic.

Second, there is evidence that US donors use philanthropy to cement their advantage. Anand Giridharadas’s book Winners Take All is entirely about this behaviour in US donors.

Get more giving by selling it like chocolate—>

[i] The World Giving Index 2010

[ii] From The Live You Can Save, Peter Singer, page 34

[iii] Harvard endowment manager to retire, following shake-up, Boston Business Journal by Galen Moore, Friday, August 5, 2011

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