All charities and charitable foundations exist to serve the public good. Most of them are subsidised by the public, through various tax breaks. Whereas any company must have a meeting at least annually at which the directors are held to account to the people whose capital they deploy, in over 15 years in this ‘industry’, we’d only encountered two charities /foundations which have meetings at which the people whose capital they deploy – the public – or the intended beneficiaries can what goes on. The 800-year-old City Bridge Trust lets anybody observe its decision-making meetings, and Global Giving UK has an AGM at which anybody can ask anything. Why don’t more?

It’s hard to be accountable to people, or to hear from people, if they’re not in the room. So we wondered how many charities and foundations have public meetings.

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This article first published in the Financial Times in May 2016.

Toilet roll seems an unlikely emblem of effective philanthropy. Yet I’ve heard of a donor
who specifically funds loo rolls in London museums and galleries on the simple grounds that this kind of donation is both necessary and tough to fund.

Many donors want to fund the glamorous stuff: front-line programmes, identifiable projects and new buildings being prime examples. To do so, many “restrict” their gifts to those items. The main problem with this approach is that donors generally all want to fund the same things — none of which include loos, core staff or rent.

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Like those of many social programmes, the goals of Sail Training voyages are long-term: In this case, to improve young people’s life chances, involvement in employment and training, and sound mental health. However, many organisations which provide Sail Training cannot conduct or commission high-quality longitudinal studies that demonstrate an impact on these long-term outcomes, because of complexity and cost.

So Giving Evidence was delighted to be asked to identify short-term outcomes that, if ‘produced’ by an intervention, have a beneficial effect on key longer-term outcomes. If future research can show a link between the intervention(s) and certain short-term outcomes, and there is a known link between those short-term outcomes and particular longer-term outcomes, then one can make a coherent and evidence-informed claim about the long-term outcomes produced by the intervention.

Our findings are here.

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A lovely interview on US radio station The Business Of Giving with Denver Frederick. We discussed lessons for philanthropy / nonprofits from Galileo, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; how nonprofits sometimes harm, how we don’t yet have good frameworks for analysing the (likely) effectiveness of (future) campaigns and other systemic work, and much else.

https://soundcloud.com/business-of-giving/caroline-fiennes-ceo-of-giving/s-zBBnZ

We were busy this year! Pushing forwards substantially on improving the quality and use of evidence in our three areas of interest: assessing interventions, assessing charities, and assessing ways of giving.

Read our 2015 Year In Brief.