A version of this article published in the Financial Times in January 2019
My financial resolution for this year – as flagged by FT Money earlier this month – is to review the charities in my will. 
I wrote my will a while ago in some haste, and chose the charities in the way that I suspect many people do: I listed the causes that I care about, then wrote down the first charities working on those issues that came to mind.
This is a pretty rubbish process, as we shall see. Continue reading
With Keystone Accountability, we recently worked for a funder who was relatively new to knowledge management. We created for them a ‘primer’ to introduce some of the key concepts, and are publishing it because we feel, and hope, that the material is useful for a wider audience of funders and implementers.
We also published an introduction to monitoring & evaluation: downloadable here.
New report! 
Giving Evidence has been mapping the existing research around strategic and operational management of charitable and philanthropic activities. We are today (2nd July 2019) launching a ‘review copy’ of the findings, which you can download here.
This sits alongside a separate project which we have done to understand ‘demand’ for further research into charities and philanthropy: that was a large-scale consultation exercise, detailed here, asking charities and donors to list and prioritise the topics on which they would like more research (/ evidence / data). The results of that ‘demand’ study are here.
The press release summarises the findings of the two studies. Continue reading
This talk explains what evidence-based giving is, why it matters, and how it needn’t be soooo complicated. Even the first 30 seconds here show why minimising administrative costs to keep an aid programme ‘cheap’ is a bad idea.
This talk was given in Vienna (notice how Caroline had accidentally turned up basically wearing the Austrian flag…), which is why bits of it are in German:
The main points were:
Because evidence (alone) will save you from wasting your money / time, and possibly making a problem worse
Whom should you support this Christmas (or in your will)?
As we’ve discussed here before, the data on charities’ effectiveness is really ropey, so this question is harder than it should be.
In international development, there are some reliable independent analysts which recommend high-performing charities. The Life You Can Save (disclosure: in which I am involved), founded by the ethicist Peter Singer, recommends 21 charities, each of which either delivers work based on decent evidence, or creates new evidence about what works. Continue reading
This article first published in the Financial Times in April 2018.
The global ‘gig economy’ is awash with the downtrodden and effective campaigners
The council wanted them out. The Grand Parade area in front of Cape Town’s City Hall
needed to be clear for filming one day last month, so the market traders who have their stalls there would need to disappear. There have been traders on that stretch of ground for hundreds of years and, for them, a day without trading is a day without income.
But they had taken a lesson from the previous month. In February, they were to be removed for the then-president Jacob Zuma’s “state of the nation” address, as the Grand Parade area might have been needed for a helicopter landing.
In the end the whole plan changed because of Mr Zuma’s resignation. By March, though, the Grand Parade United Traders Association and its member stallholders knew about their legal rights, and, by showing that the council had not followed “due process”, had the clearance halted. Continue reading
This article first published in the Financial Times.
Break out the champagne. Somebody’s finally done it. I’ve been saying for a while that funders should investigate empirically whether their “help” for non-profit organisations actually does help. It is not guaranteed: some funders create so much work for non-profits that their “support” is in fact a net drain.
GlobalGiving has been called the “eBay of international development”: a website which lists vetted non-profits, improving their visibility to prospective donors, and also offers them training of various types. A quasi-funder, it has recently investigated whether and how its support helps non-profits, and published the results. It is a prospective study and, to my knowledge, the first ever. Let’s hope that many other donors follow suit. Continue reading
With Keystone Accountability, we recently worked for a funder who was relatively new to monitoring / evaluation / learning. We created for them a ‘primer’ to introduce some of the key concepts a ‘primer’ to introduce some of the key concepts, and are publishing it because we feel, and hope, that the material is useful for a wider audience of funders and implementers.
It is designed to explain what monitoring is, and what evaluation is, and how they differ. We structured our thinking into a four-level framework. This simply splits out the various questions about monitoring and evaluation (note that, as the document explains, monitoring and evaluation are two completely different things, even though they are often conflated):
We present these four levels as a ladder, because the issues at Level 1 are simpler than those at Level 2, and so on, both in terms of the types of data / analysis needed and the conceptual complexity.
Download the primer here.
Why charities should do much less evaluation–>
Keynote talk and very spirited panel at the Philanthropic Foundations of Canada, Toronto, Oct 2018.
Notice the all-female panel 🙂
(We will eventually cut the slides into this so you can see what Caroline was talking about. For now, you can download them here and follow what’s going on.)
Caroline Fiennes gave a keynote presentation at the Global Evidence and Implementation Summit in Melbourne, October 2018. To watch, click on the photo and wait a second. You may need to log in – any email address is fine. Excuse the didgeridoo interruption!
Other talks from the conference are here.
Videos of other talks: www.giving-evidence.com/video
