Giving Evidence

This article first published in the Financial Times.

The news that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla are putting $3bn towards “ending all disease” has renewed the spotlight on the giving of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest. They are not alone in their enthusiasm for medical research: it is also the most popular target of charitable giving in the UK. 

There is a problem, however: about 85 per cent of medical research is wasted. That’s equivalent to 22 of the 26 miles which people run in marathons to raise funds for research into cancer and other conditions. Globally, that waste costs around $170bn every year. Perhaps many of us suffer with conditions which could have been cured if those funds had been spent more productively.

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UK non-profits delivering mental health services are not great at producing or using scientific evidence.

This is the main finding of a new study by Giving Evidence. We interviewed 12 such organisations to understand their ‘evidence system’, i.e., how evidence is:

• Produced
• Synthesized
• Shared, both ‘outbound’ from them and ‘inbound’ to them – and stored.

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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 FT.

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.