Nine reasons why Red Nose Day is brilliant and deserves your money(!)

Posted on January 28, 2012 by carolinefiennes

An independent view of Comic Relief & Red Nose Day

In short, because they’re very impressive and focused, and do a lot more with your money than you could.

What are their goals?  

Well, notice first that they have goals. They’re not in the business of raising money to give to charities: they’re in the business of solving problems.

The overall goal is “a just world free from poverty”. They operate in the UK and less developed countries, notably Africa but also in Asia and Latin America. Focus areas include mental health, climate change, street children, HIV/AIDS, older people, sexually exploited trafficked people. Notice that those are not all the easy, fluffy causes – they’ve chosen some tricky areas which really need work.

Second, they publish a vision and strategy for both their UK and non-UK giving 🙂  It shows goals for each programme (eg, “Ensure that people with mental health problems are at the heart of decisions that affect their lives, whilst supporting recovery and reducing stigma and discrimination”).

Third, they stay fresh. They review their main areas of funding every four years, ie, check pretty frequently that they are addressing the priorities. They involve experts in each field to advise on their strategy and operations.

Where does the money go?

They publish their criteria for assessing charities 🙂 – if you’re going to raise funds from other people, you really should tell them how you decide where to put it, it seems to me.

Yes, they report on how much they raise (the input), but they also report on what they achieve (the output) – which after all is the aim of the game. This indicates that they’re more interested in results than process (sometimes donors’ processes takes over, which is a bit of a disaster). For example, this table below is from the results section of their website:

The activity is spread across organisations which directly support individuals and also ones which change government policy, public awareness and system-wide change. An example if the latter is them co-funding a major campaign to change attitudes in the UK to people with mental health problems, ending the discrimination they face.

What else do they do?

They add value to your money. They use their brand, their contacts (eg, getting Sainsbury’s to stock more Fairtrade; getting Alesha Dixon and Chris Moyles et al to climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise awareness of malaria; and working with the BBC to make programming highlighting abuse of older people) and their influence with other funders.

And lastly, isn’t their fundraising this year just brilliantly innovative? I just love the way they’ve gone out of their way to appeal to people / budgets which might not otherwise be available for charity – win the chance to conduct the BBC Singers (good news for aspiring musicians), get on a comedy flight, win being the cover-face of BA’s inflight magazine (good news for self-publicists).

Donate to Comic Relief: https://www.comicrelief.com/donate 

Why people in charities should dress better–>

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Charitable gifts for the Royal Wedding: analysis of the plan

Posted on January 28, 2012 by carolinefiennes

Prince William &Kate Middleton are asking for donations to a set of charities, rather than wedding gifts. Here’s my analysis of their plan.

Good idea

For sure the couple don’t need any towels from John Lewis. And since charities’ income falls during recessions just as the need for their work rises, some extra cash will certainly help. Hopefully there’ll be a secondary effect too of getting more people (back) into giving to charity.

The charities

Look to have been thoughtfully chosen.

Some reflect the couple’s own backgrounds – the community foundation near Kate’s family home, conservation activity near where they got engaged, and support for service personnel and people who’ve suffered bereavement.

Most striking is that most of them are little-known: in charities, being well-known is almost totally independent* of being any good, so small fantastic charities often struggle to attract the support which their work and professionalism deserves.

Recognise any?

Beat Bullying (does what it says on the tin), Oily Cart (accessible theatre for vulnerable children) and the Association for Children’s Palliative Care are all recommended by independent analysts New Philanthropy Capital. That’s a good sign.

Including the Association for Children’s Palliative Care is particularly interesting. It works across a whole industry, ie, quite a long way from ‘the front line’, and those organisations -whose work has significant reach – often struggle for funds because they’re less visible and emotive.

Any omissions?

“Environment – particularly to build on the growing awareness of the need to find better, more sustainable, models to balance development and the conservation of resources” is one of three areas of focus of the  Foundation of Prince William and Prince Harry (known as “the Princes’ Foundation”), but isn’t represented on the wedding list. That’s odd since its inclusion in the Princes’ Foundation implies that Prince William (rightly) thinks that sustainable development is important.

And none of them are the ones of which Prince William is patron. Very surprising: presumably they’re ‘spreading the love around’ a bit.

Under the bonnet

The selection of charities. No rationale is given publicly for the choice of those charities. This is a shame because (a)then we don’t know, and (b)they probably have done some due diligence on the charities and there’s an opportunity to show other people how that’s done. There is for example no discussion of the charities’ results – which is a shame. Maybe they’ll report after a year or so on the impact that the wedding gifts make – hope so.

The list has two “community foundations“: what are they? Community foundations support charities within a geographical patch. They typically do a good job of understanding need in their local area, and are effectively a clearing house through which local people can serve that need.

The money will be handled the Princes’ Foundation. Though you can designate charities to receive your gift, in fact it’s all decided by the Foundation’s trustees. This is very normal and good-practice: if we collectively donated a zillion pounds to (say) Oily Cart, that would be enough to blow it up, so the trustees need the right to do a bit of air-traffic control. (This is the same when you send a goat via Oxfam, by the way: you just give money to Oxfam and they do useful things with it. They don’t need the possibility of receiving 60million goats one month.)

So who are the trustees? The Chairman is Lord Janvrin, former Private Secretary to HM Queen and active in charitable activity; Trustees are Sir David Manning (former ambassador), Edward Harley, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton (the Princes’ Private Secretary), Guy Monson, Baroness (Fiona) Shackleton (the family lawyer).

Charges They’ve persuaded BT and “all UK mobile operators” to drop their fees on SMS donations.

Follow up They’ve committed to thanking everybody who gives, which is great and important. Like I say, I’ll be interested in the impact report in a year or two.

*It’s independent. That doesn’t mean that big ones are universally bad, nor that small ones are good: rather, literally, that there’s a spread of quality amongst both the big and the small – in a way that you don’t get in companies.

Detail on the fund is at http://www.royalweddingcharityfund.org

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Why don’t we talk about giving?

Posted on January 28, 2012 by carolinefiennes

“I gave some money to a charity the other day, and it was just wonderful. Apparently, my donation helped them to [do something amazing]. I’m so proud and happy.”

Do you ever have conversations like this? I don’t. I realised recently that I’ve literally never had a single social conversation about a personal giving experience, ever, despite knowing loads of people who give, and even having been in charities & philanthropy for over 20 years.

Isn’t that weird?

It’s not like nobody’s got any experience of giving: fully 56% of us give in any given month, and even more volunteer regularly according to the Cabinet Office.

And it’s even weirder when you consider that giving makes us so happy – it’s the best thing known to mankind for cheering us up, with only one exception (which is dancing: which people talk about all the time). Interestingly, clever old ActionAid, in its new donor-recruitment adverts, cite neither the needs (i.e. the problem they address) nor their results (i.e., how good they are at solving it), but focus on the rewarding experience for the donor.

I’d be really interested to hear your experiences of talking about giving.

  • Do you talk socially about it? How do those conversations start? What reactions do you get – e.g. are people inspired, do they feel you’re using it to signal your wealth?
  • Do people start conversations with you about their giving? How do those conversations start?
  • And if you don’t, what’s holding you back?

It’s important to talk about our giving because we know about the importance of social norms – people do what they see other people doing. [Hence why celebrities get paid to use certain mobile phones in public, and TV producers get paid to ‘place’ products in programmes.]

So if we’re to build a culture of giving – and even to leverage our own giving by inspiring others to follow – we need to talk. On platforms and donor events for sure, but also to our neighbours, friends and colleagues.

Tell me your experiences – we can learn together.

First published by The Funding Network, March 2011

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More interesting than what charity programmes achieve is what they don’t achieve

Posted on January 28, 2012 by carolinefiennes

Much effort in the charity world goes into understanding what programmes achieve. Which is fine and well and good, but doesn’t indicate anything about whether funding a particular programme was any good.

Let’s take an example. In India, there is a programme which improves school attendance by paying parents when their children show up at school. It works: it costs about $1000 per child per year. Fantastic achievement. But here’s the rub. There are other programmes which improve school attendance for just $4 per child per year. So if a donor spends $1000 on the first programme (properly called a ‘conditional cash transfer’ programme), fully 24 children miss out. That is to say, the programme only achieves 4% of what it could have achieved; put another way, what it didn’t achieve was fully 96% of what it could have.

How is it possibly meaningful to look at what a programme did achieve without knowing what it could have achieved? It isn’t.

The example above, though extreme, isn’t isolated. Here’s a variant. Getting households in Kenya to put a few drops of chlorine in their drinking water dramatically reduces incidences of diarrhea. Population Services International had been selling bottles of chlorine for this purpose, and had great success. Fantastic – nice achievement. But a randomised control trial found that halving the cost of chlorine increased usage from 5% of households to 10%, and that giving it for free increased usage right up to 70%[i]. So whatever Population Services International had been achieving with donations of, say, $1000, it’s not hard to imagine that they could have achieved a whole lot more if they’d dropped the price.

This analysis really comes alive when we turn to corporate giving. Why? Because a company has many, many options of how to spend, say, £1000. It could give it to Charity A or Charity B, one of which might be better than the other. Or it could use it to ‘buy’ the time of some of its staff to do voluntary work. That can be massively influential: the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm), a complicated bond issue which Goldman Sachs structured on a pro bono basis, is thought to have saved half a billion lives. I’d happily wager that’s more than any of its charitable programmes will ever achieve. Or put it another way. If the company creates some ‘bad’, such as carbon emissions, it could put that £1000 towards reducing its emissions, towards developing technologies which reduce emissions, or research into how to reduce the ‘bad’. Or towards developing or delivering products or services which are ‘good’ socially or environmentally: subsidising delivery to the poor, subsidising R&D of products or services which wouldn’t be economical on their own… or other projects which use the full gamut of the company’s unique skills and assets. “Money is the least valuable social change asset” said Kurt Hoffman, then Director of the Shell Foundation, and companies have many more assets at their disposal.

So yes, it’s great that your programme achieved what it did. But I – and I dare say those 24 children – are interested in what else it could have achieved. We therefore also need to analyse the missed opportunities.

 

[i] From More Than Good Intentions, by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel

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Does donor education achieve anything? Here’s how to find out

Posted on January 28, 2012 by carolinefiennes

I ran a session this month with The Philanthropy Workshop, the flagship donor education programme invented by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and run in the UK by the Institute of Philanthropy. It’s one of numerous activities by advisors, private banks and universities to make donors better.

Do they work? There are two major problems to finding out.

First, the quality of a donor’s decisions are normally invisible to the donor themself. For instance, if they choose a programme which supports one child with the $100 they give whereas an alternative programme could have supported 25 children for that money, the ‘missed opportunity’ felt by the 24 children isn’t felt by the donor. [These are real numbers, from this work to increase school attendance in India.] The donor gets the same warm glow and cheery photos either way.  Hence bad decisions get made all the time, and since the donor doesn’t even know they’ve made a bad decision, there’s no mechanism for them to learn and improve. This itself is a giant topic.

The other problem is defining what a good donor is. Donors vary widely in their goals (improve education, provide bereavement care, reduce deforestation, to name a few), so comparing the end results they enable would be tricky indeed.

Now, we can take a leaf from the book of J-PAL, the research institute at MIT which studies the effectiveness of various approaches to alleviating extreme poverty. J-PAL doesn’t look at the mega-questions – whether aid breeds dependency or spawns poor governance, for example, which are rather ideological. Rather, it looks at discrete answerable questions about practical matters: how can we get these children immunised, what would these children to come to school, what if anything should we charge for anti-malarial bednets in Kenya?

By analogy, we could define some specific characteristics of good giving, and measure whether they’re affected by donor education. One such would be making unrestricted gifts: because almost invariably, money achieves more if it is given without restrictions.

So how can we measure whether donor education increases propensity to make unrestricted gifts? Here is one bad way. Just monitor the proportion of attendees’ gifts which were unrestricted before and after the course. This is bad because it wouldn’t indicate whether any observed change was due to the course: donors might have been influenced by, say, media coverage about giving. This method would leave us with no idea about why any change occurred. Another bad way is to compare the proportion of unrestricted gifts made by people who’ve done the course with the proportion made by people who haven’t. This is no good because it’s not hard to imagine that the kind of donors who elect to do a course are different in some meaningful ways from donors who don’t. That is, we’ve have a case of selection bias, which again gives us no idea about whether any observed change was attributable to the course.

A rather better way is a kind of randomised control trial – the ‘gold standard’ rigorous tests used for drug trials. It’s not complicated. Here’s what we’d do.

First, we’d talk to all the people who apply to come on a donor education course and ask them about the proportion of their grants in the last, say, year which had been unrestricted. Second, we’d randomly select from those applicant donors the set who would do the course. Third, after the course (or maybe a year after the course had finished), we’d again survey both sets about the proportion of their grants which had been unrestricted.

Voila. We’ve got a control group (the set who didn’t do the course) so can see what changes would (probably) have occurred anyway in the group which did the course; and we’ve got rid of the selection bias problem by choosing our course group at random from people all of whom had applied to be on the course.

Has this ever been done? I’d be fascinated.

Why comparing US and UK giving is totally unfruitful–>

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Understanding impact of a corporate giving programme

Posted on January 28, 2012 by carolinefiennes

Giving Evidence is currently evaluating the ‘community projects’ programme of the Guardian News & Media group (i.e., the series of ~12 partnerships which GNM has with voluntary organisations near its London HQ). In this article in the Guardian, I explain what we’re doing & why, why understanding impact is so difficult, and what I learnt about understanding impact from Albert Einstein and Ben Goldacre:

Measuring the effectiveness of the Guardian’s community projects

What else can giving learn from physics and medicine? A lot —>

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Charity credit cards: generate 33 x as much for charity anyway!

Posted on January 28, 2012 by carolinefiennes

Lloyds TSB is withdrawing its charity credit cards. Actually this doesn’t matter because you can actually generate MORE money for charities through your credit card. Here’s how:

1. Get a credit card which gives you cash-back on your purchases. The cash that these cards give you is often more than they’d given the charity anyway. Some charity cards give only 25p per £100 spent whereas cash-back card may be £5. So that’s 20x increase just to start.

2. Donate the money once a year to your chosen charity. You can reclaim Gift Aid (iff you’re a UK tax-payer). That’s a second way which increase the money that the charity gets – increasing it by 25% if you pay basic rate tax and 66% if you pay higher rate tax. So if you get the 66% increase on a cash-back card, you’re now generating 33x times as much money for charity.

3. The charity may incur lower transaction fees this way, because it may have been getting the money in several small dollops. (Transaction fees are usually paid per transaction, i.e., one big payment incurs a twelfth of the cost which twelve small dollops generate.)

Voila. Sadly, the ‘nudge’ is against you, i.e., you have to get your act together to make the donation, rather than it being done automatically for you. But since you might generate more than 33x as much money, you can nudge yourself!

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Giving Evidence

Posted on January 16, 2012 by carolinefiennes

This site will soon contain a pile of useful evidence to use to inform your charitable giving and other charitable activities.

It is run by Caroline Fiennes, a leading thinker about effective charitable giving. For now, see http://www.carolinefiennes.com

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