Friday, 18 December 2015

How to avoid unwanted gifts

The exchanging of gifts at Christmas brings with it the awkwardness of what to do with an unwanted gift. Do you pretend to like it? Do you return it or perhaps give it away? We all get gift giving wrong sometimes – it is hard to choose the right present and wanting to achieve the element of surprise means you cannot ask the recipient what they most want.

There are no such excuses when it comes to giving a gift to a charity.

If you read the research, charities are clear that what they want is an unrestricted donation so that they can chose how best to spend it and will most likely spend it on their core costs. It can sometimes be difficult for them to say this to you directly as they are trying to second guess what you would be happy with – think of a teenager coming up with gift ideas for Grandma when what they really want is cash. If it is important for you to know exactly how your donation will be spent, ask and the charity should be able to tell you what item, staff role or project is a current priority for them. Many of them will already have come up with some packages to help you e.g. £15 or £200 or £2,000 or £10,000 will pay for …

When donors direct how a donation can be used, without consulting the charity, it can cause difficulty. For example, in one recent example, people with good intentions donated clothes and shoes to a small charity supporting refugees. The stretched charity staff and volunteers were diverted from their usual work to spend time getting rid of unwanted items when actually what the charity really needed was money to pay volunteer expenses and the utility bills and extra staff hours to keep their centre open longer to cope with the rise in demand of refugees seeking help. In other examples I have seen generous gifts left in a will cause nothing but frustration as they were so tightly tied to a project that was already fully funded or a piece of work that was not the most needed.

So to avoid the difficulties associated with unwanted gifts this year, do the best you can to ensure your donation brings smiles all round. Check out the charity and their impact. When you are confident they are good, give a donation with no strings attached. I am sure they will be delighted to tell you how they spent it.

Emma Beeston Consultancy advises funders and philanthropists on giving strategies and processes; selecting causes and charities; assessments and impact monitoring. Services for charities include external perception reviews; bid reviews; training for fundraisers and non-fundraisers involved in bids. E: emma@emmabeeston.co.uk; T: emmabeeston01

Friday, 4 December 2015

Tips for giving

Christmas is a time for giving …

Every Christmas a group of my friends pick a charity to support instead of giving each other presents. And because it is my job to assess charities, they ask me which one I would recommend. Many people do this, but most won’t have a philanthropy advisor to help.

It is easy to pick the usual big brand charities but there are lots of great, smaller charities out there where your donation could make a bigger difference. To find them try one of the tools available such as CharityChoice, Charity Navigator, CAF, or Localgiving to help you select a charity working for a cause you are passionate about.

But then how do you know if they are any good? It is my job to advise on which charities should be funded based on desk-based research, assessment interviews, scrutinising accounts and panel discussions. I don’t recommend you do all that before parting with £100, but here are five quick things you can do to reassure yourself that your money will be well used:

Check out the charity’s website – this should at least let you know they are active and is likely to include case studies about the difference they make. It may also show if they are members of any professional bodies or hold any quality marks.
See who else has funded them – if they’ve had money from say Comic Relief or the Big Lottery Fund recently then you can rest assured that a professional assessor has had a good look at them.
Consider keeping it local – there are 48 Community Foundations in the UK that pool donations to fund local projects. Again, all checked by them as part of the grant giving process.
Look your chosen charity up on the Charity Commission website. You may not want to read all their accounts but there is an overview page that will tell you how big they are and if they have reported as they should and on time.
Ask around – friends, family and colleagues may well know of a charity that really supported them when they, or someone they know, needed help.

There are some brilliant charities around that don’t have money for high profile marketing so it pays to dig a little to give you the confidence to give to charities which aren’t necessarily the household names.

… giving more …

Look out for ways to increase your giving, for example the Big Give Christmas Challenge will see donations made from 5th to 14th December matched. Some employers run matching schemes so it is worth asking if they will double your donation. And don’t forget gift aid increases your donation by 25%.

… giving together …

Pooling money with friends means your chosen charity gets a larger donation. You can also take part in giving circles or live crowdfunding events like those run by The Funding Network or the Soup method. (The latter is an idea from Detroit that is taking off in the UK where people come together over soup to hear pitches and vote on who gets the money taken on the door).

… and receiving.

Research shows we are happier when we give to others. So giving well to a charity of your choosing should bring you a bit of festive cheer too.

Friday, 20 November 2015

How to spot founder's syndrome

Running a charity is hard. I take my hat off to all those non-profit founders who bring their vision, energy and drive to create social change. However, when assessing charities and deciding which ones to fund, the term ‘founder’s syndrome’ often comes up.

There are lots of inspiring charity leaders and there is nothing wrong with a charity having a compelling and persuasive founder involved – often they are absolutely vital for attracting support. The problem occurs where the founder has too much power. But how do you spot it?

This is what sets off my ‘founder’s syndrome’ alarm when assessing charities:

On paper:

There is a high turnover of Trustees or conversely, the same Trustee group staying for years and years. The first pattern suggests challenges to the status quo fail and the second can indicate that no challenging is taking place.
There is no formal plan – because there is no point having one, it is in the founder’s head and subject to change as they decide. In fact there is generally a lack of formal structures e.g. performance management, Board skills audits.
The charity is not part of any external quality assurance schemes or formal partnerships.

On a visit:

They don’t listen – they tend to avoid direct questions and tell me what they think is important.
They meet you on their own – they don’t bring in a Trustee, finance director, frontline worker or a service user to speak with me.
They lack awareness – founder’s syndrome is much talked about so if you are a founder meeting with a funder it should not be a surprise that they will ask about succession planning, governance, or exit strategies and you should be happy to discuss these.

I am not saying any one of these or all of them means there is definitely a case of ‘founder’s syndrome’ but it does set me off on a line of questioning about decision-making, conflicts of interest, performance management etc. And neither is this confined to founders – there are other non-founding leaders with the same issues of control.

At a recent charity, I met with the founder who, before I even asked, had told me his exit strategy (after 10 years), the work he and the Trustees were doing on succession planning and stated his wish “I want the charity to flourish without me”. Now, that’s the way to do it.

Friday, 6 November 2015

Do not register to vote

Today I got another request from a charity to vote for them to help them to win some funding. I am sure, like me, you get lots of these requests. It only takes a few minutes to register and vote and it is an easy way to demonstrate support. However, I am becoming increasingly reluctant to participate and I have two reasons why I am uncomfortable with this voting model as a source of funding for charities:

1. Popular ≠ Good

It takes resources to select the charity that meets the greatest need or has the most impact. A cheaper option is to hand over the decision to a public vote. I am a supporter of people (grant recipients, service users) being involved in funding panels. But that is not what this is. There is no judgment against criteria, just a simple measure of the most votes. Voting in this instance is a measure of how many supporters a charity can mobilise. On the list of the awards you will therefore see lots of sports clubs and Scout groups as these are well placed to appeal to friends and family members for votes. Charities that work with prisoners, trafficked women or other unpopular causes don’t stand a chance.

2. Proportionality

Proportionality usually comes up when designing grant programmes. For example, is the amount of internal resource needed to assess and administer applications appropriate? Is the amount of work that the applicant has to put in to their application worth it for the size of the grant? But proportionality also applies to the PR gained with any grant. With the voting model, the corporate behind it benefits from the positive profile with the charities, their supporters and the wider public. Such programmes can generate great PR and be cost effective for the company involved but often with just a few hundred pounds going to each ‘winner’. The substantial effort lies with the applicant – to create and upload a profile and encourage their supporters to vote.

You could argue that there is no harm done. The company gets good PR and some popular groups get some unrestricted funding. But I believe there is harm done in the opportunities lost. Charities miss an opportunity to raise awareness of their cause and reach a new audience of potential supporters. In a recent voting appeal, there were over 3,000 profiles for Bristol charities alone – no one is going to read those to make an informed choice. Rather than small cash ‘winners’, these funding pots could be properly managed and allocated with greater effect. Companies could properly engage and create genuine partnerships with charities, not just create an online voting system and leave the public to it.

I for one would like to see an end to these voting appeals – what about you?

Saturday, 24 October 2015

The importance of 'how'

In a previous blog, I wrote about the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ (link below). But when attending New Philanthropy Capital’s NPC Ignites conference last week (link below), I was really struck by the discussions that related to the importance of ‘how’. Here are the points I noted:

· 70% of strategic plans don’t get implemented.

· Budgets support the status quo. The budget setting process is too long, too detailed and bottom-up. The whole organisation can become paralysed whilst it ‘does the budget’. Instead, start from the strategy and think what resources are needed to deliver it.

· Productivity matters – you are not just looking for impact but also at what cost this is achieved. (This resonated with me as a funder because I have to consider the cost of different interventions as well as their expected outcomes. But productivity would also be an important factor for charities deciding how best to allocate resources – some interventions may just cost too much.

· Effective implementation needs both a sense of excitement and dogged perseverance. You need to embed the mission into the culture of the organisation and ensure people hold it in their hearts as well as doing the ‘boring’ bits of implementation like planning and reviewing progress.

· Research has shown the importance of implementation: you can sometimes achieve more by implementing something well, that failed elsewhere, than by implementing a proven intervention badly.

Implementation is a poor relation when compared to the excited talk there was around digital and measuring impact . But if you don’t actually deliver what you set out to then you can’t bring about change. I was pleased to see its importance highlighted. ‘How’ definitely deserves its place alongside what and why.

http://emmabeeston.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-what-and-why.html

http://www.thinknpc.org/events/npc-ignites/

Friday, 9 October 2015

Be more magpie

Research on magpie behaviour (link below) has shown they are not attracted to shiny things, as we like to believe, but instead they try to avoid them. It set me thinking about the lure of the shiny new innovative projects that can appeal to funders and philanthropists giving money to charities.

Charities do great work that changes lives and givers big and small want to support them to do this. But behind that great work is lots of far less interesting things that have to happen. Someone needs to do the payroll; insurance needs to be renewed; minibuses taken for their MOTs; risk assessments and plans written; databases need to be maintained.

Charities all say that it is hard to raise money for their core costs yet many grants exclude them. Full cost recovery and compacts try to address this but often charities have to find ways to package their overheads into their project costs to get them covered. Or they spend precious time away from the frontline to gather unrestricted funding from events and sales.

Similarly, charities bemoan having to find ways to change or dress up their existing work to look like new projects. What they do is working well but lots of funders won’t consider supporting it as they want to back something different and innovative.

As our understanding of magpies has changed, maybe we should learn from this and be more magpie. Rather than just funding the attractive work that gives us those shiny case studies. Perhaps we should find reward in funding what the charity wants and needs. More funders and philanthropists should willingly fund the photocopier service contract, the admin worker or the office cleaner. Or be proud to fund the continuation of existing work that is needed and getting good outcomes. They might be a little less shiny but they are vital.

http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_406690_en.html

Friday, 2 October 2015

The what and the why

In a TED talk classic (see link) Simon Sinek tells us that “People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. ” and for charities there has been a welcome focus on ‘the why’ in making strong cases for support. For example, you don’t donate to the British Heart Foundation because of their research projects but because you share their vision of a world in which people do not die prematurely.

But recently, I have started to question if ‘the why’ has gone too far. When reading though applications and websites, I often read impassioned claims for the difference a charity has made, and will make, and their impact on society. But I can still get to the end of the application form and not have the faintest idea ‘what’ exactly it is that they are going to do with the money. I also recently advised a philanthropist who had named a charity in their will because of what they thought they did, which was a wrongly held assumption based on their ‘why we exist’ and not based at all on what they actually delivered.

Of course, the why matters. I would hate to go back to reading through a list of activities and finding myself thinking “so what?” But when deciding who gets the money, the tangibles have to come into play. If everyone is claiming to make the world a better place then you need details to weigh up their likely practical contributions. I need to make a judgment on whether ‘what’ you actually deliver will bring about the outcomes you state. Is a weekly football club more likely to build confidence in young people than a peer support group or counselling or music therapy? (They will all be valid, but funders have to make a choice).

There needs to be a clear logical flow in any funding application e.g. £A pays for B to deliver C which leads to D. Both the what and the why are in there: the what predominantly appeals to the rational head and the why to the emotional heart. Both have their place in a good application.

https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en