Searching for Serendipity

It is wonderful that technology allows us to be so easily connected to all the new research and ideas out there, but frustrating that it is so hard to find time to actually digest all this information. Lately I have been working out how best to build reading time in to my week. Assuming this is true for others, I thought I would share my efforts so far …

Acceptance - I found twitter overwhelming at first because I wanted to read everything and got frustrated that this was never going to be possible. Now I have got the hang of it and accept that having a sense of what the key issues are and getting to read one or two short articles is enough.

Necessity - I am currently working on a series of lectures for the Advising Donors module of the University of Kent’s Masters in Philanthropy. As well as the pleasure of teaching the students, this has given me a great incentive to read all those books and reports I have gathered because I want to read them but somehow struggled to find the time to do so. There is nothing like a deadline and a driving need for creating space in your schedule.

Help – Step up the wonderful Kathryn Redway. I took one of her rapid reading courses which has given me some very effective tools and strategies for quickly tackling longer reports and strategy documents. I now have a slot in my diary to read them and permission to be ruthless. The upshot is things don’t sit in my ‘to read’ folder on my desktop but actually get read.

I have made good progress but, as is often the case, solving one problem has created space for a new one. The reading I am doing is focussed on my areas of interest: I follow like-minded people and subscribe to mainly UK-based bulletins about philanthropy, charity, funding. There has been lots in the media lately about echo chambers such as this piece in the Guardian where users of twitter interact most with those who share their views. Tom Stafford, a cognitive scientist at Sheffield University explains that “homophily, where we hang out with people like us, is an ancient human trait, resulting from our basic psychology.” Whilst this is great for a sense of connectedness, it can lead to narrow thinking.

So my next challenge is how to widen my reading to create the space for opposing views and serendipity – the random connections, insights and advances that come from outside my sphere of interest and beyond people like me. How do I do that without getting even more overwhelmed with all that there is to read in the world? And can serendipity come through effort? I have found some encouragement from research conducted by a Dr Erdelez who found that serendipity is something that people do so it is a skill that can be learned. Those who see things through a narrow focus and tend to stick to their to-do lists experience less serendipity. Whereas others, the ‘super-encounterers’, report that happy surprises popped up wherever they looked.

Emma Beeston Consultancy advises funders and philanthropists on giving strategies and processes; researching and scoping options; selecting causes and charities; assessments and impact monitoring. www.emmabeeston.co.uk ; emma@emmabeeston.co.uk; @emmabeeston01

Can the annual return reduce duplication?

When at Comic Relief this week I overheard one fundraiser say “if only there was one place that fundraisers could post their request for all funders to access”. I have heard this sentiment expressed many times over my years in grant making. I think we can all agree on the problem: that in order to get funding, charities have to complete lots of separate application forms that all ask for roughly the same information and then send them to lots of different funders. It is a process full of duplicated effort – on both sides.

The tricky bit is working out the right solution. There have been attempts at a common application form and examples of funders pooling funds so applicants are applying just once. In fact, this is what the Community Foundations seek to address with their model. But as funders have different decision timetables and criteria, it can be hard to get these approaches to work. Technology has offered promising solutions such as Localgiving and the Big Give, which both provide a platform for charities to promote their work and enable donors to search for those they want to support. And more recently The Good Exchange, created by the Greenham Common Trust, “makes it simple to connect those looking to make a difference in their local community with those who are able to provide the financial support”. And here’s the rub: these are all good answers to the problem, but in practice what they mean is that instead of writing lots of application forms, charities now have to write and manage lots of online profiles. So should you have an entry on the co-operative website, and on a crowdfunding platform, and on Charity Choice, and on JustGiving and on Remember a Charity and, and, and … ?

As soon as we have more than one solution, we are back to the original problem. Except we do have one place where all charities have to post their information and which all funders use to check that charities are registered and to access accounts: the Charity Commission. Wouldn’t it be great if the annual return required all charities to also give answers to the most common application questions: a summary of the organisation, a summary of activities, the numbers of staff and volunteers, how they listen to the voices of the people they serve, the outcomes of their work, a typical case study, their plans for the year ahead. That way they would just need to tell a potential funder what had changed since their last submission and the specifics of whatever they want funding for. And imagine if all this data was searchable? Then funders would be able to proactively seek out e.g. all those charities working with travellers in the South West, or take a look at the difference they are making, and decide which ones to approach. And what if charities could also upload content such as short films or appeals for particular projects? Perhaps this is a pipe dream – and I am sure you, like me, can think of all kinds of barriers to it working – but we do have an opportunity right now. The Charity Commission are consulting on the annual return:

“We are seeking your views on changes to the content and structure of the annual return for charities and how we target questions so that they only require the information which is needed for regulatory purposes.”

If you feel there is an opportunity here, now is your chance to tell the Charity Commission (even though they really want responses to their specific questions but hey, if you don’t ask…). You have until noon on 9^th March 2017.

Emma Beeston Consultancy advises funders and philanthropists on giving strategies and processes; researching and scoping options; selecting causes and charities; assessments and impact monitoring. www.emmabeeston.co.uk ; emma@emmabeeston.co.uk; emmabeeston01