I couldn’t be happier to see that charities are finally getting the message but what will be harder is getting donors on board.  As Stephen Buckley, Head of Communications at Christian aid, noted, donors in the UK have a definite propensity to give more to help people survive, than to thrive.  I would suggest that this is based on a lack of understanding on the part of many donors – and one which charities must play a part in combating – as to how economies grow.  Certainly not by giving the bare minimum which will only go far enough to help the very poorest avoid starvation.  Without funding for the creation of employment opportunities, support for entrepreneurs and new businesses, communities cannot support themselves, much less thrive.  But thrive they must, if growth is, indeed, a key factor in development.

I applaud Christian Aid for showing another side to the same old sob-story we are so often told, and hope that other charities will begin to do the same.  I would also encourage donors to look at the bigger picture.  For me – the question of supporting survival versus the opportunity to thrive, comes down to the old proverb ‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show a man how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime’. So let’s not just give fish. Let’s allow the fisherman to not only feed his family, but start a business, pass on his knowledge and create employment opportunities in his community.

What do you think? Would you rather give money to help people survive than to thrive? What do you think of Christian Aid’s new approach? We would love to know your views.

CAUSE4 OPINION - Fundraising | Philanthropy | Social Enterprise

The legacy market is currently rather slow, an occurrence attributed to the struggling economy and a falling death rate. According to the latest Legacy Monitor report, when inflation is taken into account, the real value of legacy income has fallen 13% when compared to its peak in 2008.

Despite this, legacies are still worth almost £2 billion a year to UK charities – that’s the equivalent of 20 Comic Relief appeals! And it seems there’s considerable untapped potential. Research indicates that whilst 35% of over 40s are ‘happy to give a small amount to charity in their will’, in reality only 7% actually do.  In contrast, in the United States, 20% of the population donate to charity in their will.

Moreover, with our aging population, the significance of legacy giving is only set to increase. As Meg Abdy, director of Legacy Foresight, highlights in a recent Guardian article: ‘If you look to 2018-20 you see the number of deaths starting to increase as the baby boomer population gets older. . .and as this is an affluent part of the population, this should have a positive impact on the legacy market from 2020.’

"ignoring legacy fundraising is no longer an option"

However, this is not to say increasing legacy giving is going to be easy for charities. While the pool of potential donors is larger, and many of these donors are relatively affluent, they also have a new set of financial issues to think about. Many will be living longer, meaning they will need to pay for longer term care and, because of current economic uncertainty; they may want to leave more money to their families.

Moreover, the legacy market is set to become increasingly crowded as more arts and higher education organisations and hospices start to compete. Charities must be mindful that they are dealing with a generation who are very financially aware and are well used to being asked to donate.  Thus, it seems that those charities who know how to effectively ask for legacies, will soon have a significant advantage over those who don’t.

In light of this, the recent legacy giving partnership between Remember A Charity and the Co-operative Legal Services seems all the more important. In the first six months, this partnership produced commitments of £7m to charities, and it is hoped that it will raise an estimated £1 billion more a year for charities, by encouraging an additional 4% of the UK population to leave a legacy to charity.

This most interesting thing about this partnership is how simple it is. It merely involves will-writers from the Co-operative Legal Services talking to customers about leaving a gift to charity in their will. Whilst this may seem like an obvious issue to bring up, Remember A Charity found that only one in four solicitors and will-writers discussed leaving money to charity with their clients.

With a marked increase in the number of people leaving a legacy since the programme began, it seems like this partnership might actually stand a chance of changing our attitudes to legacy giving and achieving the government’s objective to make the UK the first country in the world where it is the norm to leave 10% to charity in a will.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. If you work for a charity, how do you approach legacy giving? Or would you leave a legacy to charity in your will?

CAUSE4 OPINION - Fundraising | Philanthropy | Social Enterprise

I can understand why the saying is so popular. It is underpinned by the idea of community: caring for those around you to ensure that nobody gets left behind and to foster a sense of belonging, giving something back to those who may have supported you in the past. There is a greater sense of obligation to those who are nearby, and it may feel easier to identify with others from our own area or country. There is also a strong argument to be made for the fact that it is easier to understand one’s local context, and therefore to implement projects that will work well.

There is, however, a downside to giving preference to local causes, which I think is nicely summed up by a graph:

A graph to show world income distribution

This graph shows us how wealth is distributed globally, in terms of income. Even if you only earned £150 a week, well below the UK poverty line for a single parent (ie. very poor by UK standards), you’d be financially better off than some 89% of the world. 1.4 billion people live on less than a pound a day, adjusted for purchasing power parity.

Now let’s take a look at where the rich and the poor live:

GDP per capita

This highlights a clear problem with the idea of prioritising one’s local community or country – we may intend for nobody to get left behind, but in reality, the poor in the DRC, for instance, don’t have any wealthy philanthropic neighbours to help them out.

This extreme wealth inequality is important for donors, because it plays a significant role in determining how much impact they can have with their donations. Money goes much further in poor countries: labour and production costs are lower, and most importantly, there are many extremely cost effective solutions which have yet to be funded. In richer countries, most of the best buys (in terms of dramatically improving people’s lives for a small price) have long been snapped up. The NHS will spend £20,000 on a year of healthy life- but in developing countries people die of diseases which could be prevented or treated for a few pounds (eg. £3 for a bednet to prevent malaria). While there are significant challenges to ensuring overseas aid is effective, with corruption being a prime example, there are causes which have been rigorously evaluated and shown to successfully deliver life-changing work for small prices.

This is not to undervalue the suffering of people living in the UK, but rather to highlight that if we broaden our horizons, we can achieve a much greater impact.

I am sympathetic to the idea of community. But when it comes to prioritising local and domestic giving, I think the cost is too high for those who inevitably get left behind, and where you are born should not determine whether you have access to support when you need it. What do you think?

CAUSE4 OPINION - Fundraising | Philanthropy | Social Enterprise

The idea behind having a diverse fundraising strategy is that charities don’t become dependent on a particular source of funding. There are many areas of risk currently, for example, a recent report by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations suggested that Statutory Funding would fall by £1.7 billion between 2010/11 and 2017/18. Corporate Sponsors are usually quite reliable for large donations, but ultimately the size of their donation is dependent on how well their business is going. And whilst Legacy income may be on the rise at the moment, other people in the sector are concerned that with an ageing population and falling death rate, as well as people being more worried about the financial security of their children, Legacies might not prove as fruitful as they used to be.

Voluntary sector income sources, 2000/01 – 2010/11

With this discussion about different funding sources, should there be a model for charities to follow when starting up, embarking on a period of growth, or when trying to balance their activities? For example, when a charity is starting up, it would be difficult to approach the General Public, Corporate Sponsors, Legacies or Statutory Funding, because these funding sources prefer to support organisations that have a track record or can see actual work being undertaken. Start-up charities are better off going for Trusts & Foundations, because they provide funding for innovative ideas. As the charity grows, they can then begin to build capacity to take on new funding sources.

I wonder if there should there be a ‘golden ratio’ for fundraising, where each funding source is given a particular weighting in the charity’s overall income, and that every charity should aspire to for the purpose of sustainability?

Any such ratio should also consider the time and resources needed to generate a particular type of funding source. For example, Corporate Funding, Major Donors and Legacies can take a long time to secure, as these relationships need trust and understanding, whereas appeals to the General Public might just require a donor mailshot.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. If you work in a charity, do you target particular types of funding? Or do you prefer to go with the flow and take any funding that comes your way? And have you found some funding sources easier to access than others?

CAUSE4 OPINION - Fundraising | Philanthropy | Social Enterprise

- “I understand what charities do” – 82%.
- “I think charities play an important role in our country” – 78%.
- “I will give money to charity during the next year” – 71%.

Following this report, CAF went on to survey teachers to explore their thoughts about the relationship between schools and charities with good results  – 95% felt that schools have an important role in teaching young people about charity work and 78% thought that schools should be doing more to teach young people about charities.

Results from CAF survey of teachers.

Given the results of the Growing Giving report, how can schools help create a mutually beneficial relationship for pupils and charities? Schools have come a long way since the GMTV shoebox appeal and Jeans for Genes day (a bizarre half non-uniform day) that constituted my experience of charitable giving. Most schools make a concerted extracurricular effort to encourage their pupils to engage with local charities. But I still think that there is scope for schools to further incorporate charity work into school life thorough formal lessons, on-going commitment, and shared experience:

- Programmes such as the Youth and Philanthropy Initiative, delivered to 90 schools in the UK by the Wood Family Trust and the Institute for Philanthropy, formalises charity learning through the curriculum and benefits the pupils by developing their citizenship and employability skills. Charities benefit from increased funding and links with the local community.  This could be incorporated into the national curriculum.

- Initiatives such as School in a Bag, providing school equipment to children in disaster hit areas, develops the capacity of pupils to think of children less fortunate than themselves. It also builds links between schools and pupils can become pen pals, providing on-going learning.

- Schools could also provide their pupils with a learning experience, such as taking part in the Live Below the Line campaign, in which people challenge themselves to spend £1 a day on food for the week. Schools could take part in this for a day, enhancing learning through participation, by weaving the campaign into lessons and ensuring the canteen spends no more than £1 per pupil for lunch.

Using schools to tap into the inherent enthusiasm of young people will inevitably have a positive impact for the future of the charity sector. In return, not only will these pupils have a greater understanding of the world around them, but they will develop confidence and teamwork skills – both of which are essential life skills.

Do you think that schools have a duty to educate their pupils about charities? If so, how would you like to see schools engaging?

CAUSE4 OPINION - Fundraising | Philanthropy | Social Enterprise

Without spending too much time thinking about it, I decided, about six months ago, to take on a 10 kilometre swim (which is now only six weeks away and fast approaching!). Whilst I could always swim, and might even say I quite enjoy a paddle – I had absolutely no idea what I had let myself in for.  Five months into my gym membership, and averaging 1.5 ‘swims’ per week, each of about 1.5 kilometres, I have still never swum more than 4 kilometres in one go.  I get the feeling that the next six weeks are going to be pretty tough!

My 10 kilometre swim will take (at my current speed) around six hours, and involve 667 lengths of my (very tiny) swimming pool.  I suppose the (only?) saving grace is that I won’t be in freezing open water.  And yet, I’m quite excited about the whole thing.  I have almost no idea how I will manage to complete it without drowning, but I am confident that I will – and in doing so, feel a huge sense of personal achievement.  Not to mention raising money for the Shackleton Foundation.  I have raised £100 so far, but with six weeks to go, I still hope to reach my target of £500!

Tim Jarvis will recreate Shackleton’s epic journey for his Antarctic challenge.

What is great about the My Antarctic campaign, is how personal it is – turning us all into Ernest Shackleton (but hopefully a little more successful!) Participants can not only raise money for a great cause, but truly feel involved – and feel good about themselves when they accomplish something they never expected to.

We would love to see even more of you join in and take on your own Antarctic – whether that might be a public vocal performance, a marathon run, a day of bee-keeping or a sky-dive.  And, of course, all sponsorship for our challenges is more than welcome.  Six hours battling away in a swimming pool (not to mention the six months of training!) surely deserves some reward, after all…

CAUSE4 OPINION - Fundraising | Philanthropy | Social Enterprise

Singer began his talk by showing a video of a little girl who had been hit by a van and was lying in the road. Upsettingly, a number of adults cycled or walked past her without stopping to help. Asking the audience whether they agreed with him that this was immoral, Singer then made the argument that leaving the little girl to die in the road is morally the same as choosing not to give to charity when doing so could save a life without having a significant impact on our own quality of life. According to Singer, our physical distance from the person being helped makes no moral difference to our obligation to help, only a psychological one. This argument is summed up nicely in this short video.

Singer also argued that we should aim to help people as effectively as possible, pointing to charity evaluator GiveWell as a good source of information. He was however more ambivalent than many in the Effective Altruist Movement on the subject of quantifying charity impact, arguing that there are many excellent causes which are not suited to such measurement.

A number of interesting questions were raised in the Q&A after his talk. Shouldn’t we focus on advocating to change the system of which extreme poverty is a result? Why focus on global poverty- what about climate change? Singer’s answer to these questions was that political advocacy and campaigning to stop climate change are worthwhile activities: they are likely high risk, high gain compared to say, distributing medicines in poor countries, which means that there is a small chance of very high payoff and it’s up to us as donors to decide if we think that is preferable to interventions which have a higher chance of lower payoff.

Another interesting question was where we can draw the line? Is every frivolous purchase we make immoral according to his philosophy? Singer takes a practical view of this, stressing that people exist in a context where frivolous spending is the norm. Whilst he doesn’t accept that it is enough to just give one’s fair share when not everybody is doing so, he argues that there is no cut off point between right and wrong, and that setting the bar low encourages more people to contribute.

Historically, religion has played a critical role in encouraging charitable giving- but with its declining influence in the UK, can philosophical reasoning bring us to question how we live, and how we give?

It seems that Singer’s arguments have had a significant influence so far: on his website, over 16,000 people have pledged at least 1% of their future income towards helping those in extreme poverty. What do you think about his views?

CAUSE4 OPINION - Fundraising | Philanthropy | Social Enterprise

This has prompted Breeze to launch a three-year study into the personality traits of successful fundraisers, where she will explore how a fundraiser’s professional skills affect the amount of money that they are able to raise for a charitable cause.

“Despite the importance and urgency of fundraising, we know little about the non-technical aspects of the job of asking for money,” she says. “This is genuinely innovative work, which makes it all the more exciting. I want to even the playing field – there is an awful lot of research into donor behaviour and motivations, but people rarely make unprompted solicitations.”

For the purposes of the study, Breeze will conduct in-depth interviews with over 30 fundraisers, both professionals and volunteers, as well as speaking to donors. A particular focus of her study will be looking at fundraisers that work with major donors, as she feels this role requires the most in terms of building personal relationships.

Beth Breeze says the three-year Formation of Fundraisers project will break new ground by examining non-technical aspects of the profession.

As fundraising makes up a significant portion of Cause4’s work, we thought it would be a good idea to ask people around our office what personality traits and skills they felt were necessary for successful fundraising:

“Imagination – the ability to develop programmes and projects of ambition and scale.” – Michelle Wright, Director

“Enthusiasm and Energy – you need it to get other people fired up and interested. But you also need good communication skills, because no matter how passionate you are about something, if you can’t communicate your message, no one will support your cause.” – Jo McGowan, Associate

“Attention to detail – funders are busy and it’s competitive,  you need to make sure you’ve met all the criteria.” – Sam Davis, Associate

“A Fighter against Injustice – an unbridled desire and dedication to make society a better, fairer and more equal place.” – Oliver Proctor, Head of Development

“Confidence – the ability to communicate your cause.” – Ben Wilson, Senior Development Manager

“Determination – in a difficult funding climate, it can feel that you are fighting all the time. A good fundraiser uses this as motivation to look for more innovative solutions to problems.” – Sarah Dundas, Executive Administration Coordinator

“Emotion – most charities are set up out of an emotive desire to change the world for the better, and fundraisers need to be able to channel those strong feelings when applying for funding or approaching individual donors.” – Ali Khimji, Intern

“Passion – you need it to be interested, to do a good job and to care about the work.” – Ruth Harrison, Head of Development

“Creativity – successful fundraising is often innovative.” – Laura Pedley, Associate

“Opportunism – identifying the right funder, at the right time, for the right organisation or programme is an important skill.” – Robert Clarke, Associate

“Inventiveness – to be able to appeal to a range of different donors.” – Alice Ravenscroft, Associate

Are there any personality traits or skills that you feel are missing? And how important do you feel a fundraiser’s personality traits or skills are when speaking to funders and donors?

CAUSE4 OPINION - Fundraising | Philanthropy | Social Enterprise

The Secretary of State Maria Miller would have approved following her speech last week (see our response here). In the panel line up, here we had abundant examples of local authorities making the economic case for culture, citing the positive impact on tourism and regeneration as a key part of decision making about budgetary spend. Of course, we didn’t, perhaps understandably, hear about the other side of the coin, the cultural deserts or those cities that had committed to public spending on culture and had failed…and as we know, failure is just as important in terms of learning about what works and what is needed, as success.

In England there are currently 39 LEPs in operation – these voluntary partnerships between local authorities and businesses carry out some of the functions of the previous Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) that were abolished in 2012. LEPs were formed by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to help determine local economic priorities and to lead economic growth and job creation, and some are bidding for large resources (hundreds of millions of investment) – although the picture in terms of investment, structure and leadership varies across the country.

Arts Council England/RSA ‘State of the Arts’ event exploring City Arts Strategies in a cold climate.

The event’s audience – a wide range from funders, policy makers and cultural leaders – outlined the main challenges in the debate – how to navigate disparate and complex partnerships, how to protect innovation and how to support the smaller, individual player so crucial to our artistic and cultural economy. However, there was also a sense, and perhaps I read this wrongly, that somehow from a policy perspective there should be some national, clean strategy that allows our arts and cultural sector (let alone our creative industries) to make sense of this new world of LEPs.

It’s clear to me that any such aspiration, is out of the question.  It’s messy out there….there is no easy solution to a set of complex challenges. These new LEP partnerships that all look individual, that are all funded differently and that all bring together a complex set up of partnerships, mean that the prioritization of culture is a lottery (and if we’re honest that was probably the deal with the RDA’s too). An effective response to culture and the arts at a local authority level depends entirely on the regional context, the local cultural assets, the ease with which a partnership can be explored (i.e. how easy cultural organisations can engage with it) and most importantly, whether the leadership is stable and ‘gets’ the impact of culture.

If in June we get the poor funding settlement for the arts that now seems to be broadly expected – it would seem that ACE needs to connect with individual LEPs with some urgency.  As ACE CEO Alan Davey articulated at the event – what could a joined up funding strategy between ACE, LEPs and other players look like that can really protect cultural infrastructure both at an organisational and individual level – and especially outside of London? Any response to local cuts is going to need a far broader response than what might be available via Grants for the Arts or other such funding.

The policy response will need to be imaginative and to make the best out of the context we’re in, it will also need to be coordinated LEP by LEP. However, surely with care there is some potential for entrepreneurial and joined up thinking and to coordinate resources between ACE, LEPs, Local Authorities and private funders in a way that could both protect what we already have and grow new innovations that will pay off in the longer-term?

We’ll wait to see.

CAUSE4 OPINION - Fundraising | Philanthropy | Social Enterprise

Since 2012 Baldwin has been the face of Capital One in the USA, promoting the bank’s Venture Awards credit cards, and has,  according to his spokesperson  been earned a ‘few million’ in the process, all of which he has donated to cultural charities. This includes a recent donation of $1million to the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and $500,000 to Roundabout Theatre Company. Even better, Capital One pledged to match donations (up to $50,000, that their customers make to Americans for the Arts, one of Baldwin’s favourite charities.

Alec Baldwin - donating proceeds from this advert to great causes

What is even better about Baldwin’s generosity, as he explains in an article in the Wall Street Journal, is that he is not just handing over cheques. He is actively seeking to use the adverts and the publicity he is generating as a platform from which to publicise the cuts in arts funding taking place in the US and urging people to join him in offering their support.

So this month while Cause4 salutes Alec Baldwin for the great work he’s doing, let’s also draw attention to the celebrities earning large sums as the face of brands and products here in the UK and see if we can’t persuade them to be as generous…

Are you impressed by Alec Baldwin? Who in the UK do you feel could be doing good in the same way?

CAUSE4 OPINION - Fundraising | Philanthropy | Social Enterprise