Posted: January 18th, 2010 | Author: Alex | Filed under: charity, funding, philanthropy, social media | No Comments »
This is off-topic (normal service resumes shortly), but I think it’s important. @sarahewalker and I have been thinking about the situation in Haiti, and in particular about how principles of effective giving apply to disaster relief situations. When problems arise suddenly it’s easy to let the understandable will to help immediately get in the way of a more even-handed and possibly more effective approach to aid.
So we’ve come up with The Long Give - a short list of principles which people might find useful when they want to make effective giving decisions that stand a chance of having long-term impact. It’s designed to be quick, not perfect, but we hope it helps.
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Posted: October 12th, 2009 | Author: Alex | Filed under: charity, funding, philanthropy | 1 Comment »
Update: Third Sector reports that Help for Heroes has not stopped recommending Justgiving as the Times article suggests. It is, apparently, trying to keep its donors better informed about the funding models used by different online giving sites.
Just a brief post in response to this piece in the Times, which gets it right then gets it wrong about online donation websites.
It starts off by covering the decision by Help for Heroes to stop using Justgiving.com as its online fundraising site of choice. This is because Justgiving is a commercial organisation, not a charity, and takes a 5% commission on donations (taken out of Gift Aid where possible), which it uses to generate profits.
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Posted: May 16th, 2009 | Author: Alex | Filed under: charity, funding, government | 13 Comments »
Two-sentence version: Fakecharities.org thinks government funding makes charities mouthpieces of the state. It is wrong.
Long version…
Bad Science author Ben Goldacre brought the website fakecharities.org to the attention of a fairly wide readership the other day when he wrote this Twitter post:
FakeCharities.org: fun idea, nicely run site http://rly.cc/8qVXn
The link is to a blog post on the website of the free-market think-tank the Adam Smith Institute, who describe fakecharities.org as ‘excellent’.
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Posted: April 28th, 2009 | Author: Alex | Filed under: funding, philanthropy | No Comments »
Over at Mission Measurement there’s a good little post cautioning against an overly narrow conception of what philanthropic foundations are for. As Kim Silver (the MM author) says, the US National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s recommendation that a good funder should give ‘at least 50 percent of its grant dollars to benefit lower-income communities, communities of color, and other marginalized groups’ excludes foundations with entirely different objectives (such as environmental foundations), and makes some unnecessary assumptions about what they should fund.
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