Author Archive:

Caroline Fiennes

Opinion Caroline Fiennes 12 October 2022

A call to foundations: make it easier for charities to apply for funding

The system by which charities apply to charitable foundations for funding is dreadful. When I ran an operational charity, I and the team spent far too long on it – often simply re-writing and re-formatting …

Analysis Caroline Fiennes 10 November 2021

Fighting factory farming with new approaches to producing and using research

Moving to a sustainable and fair food system is a giant challenge, and the organisations driving it are small compared to the problems. So it is crucial that they are as effective as possible. That …

Analysis Caroline Fiennes, Isabel de Bruin Cardoso and Joachim Krapels 2 March 2021 For Subscribers

Mapping the evidence to improve grantmaking in child protection

Porticus has been using rigorous published evidence and experiential learning to increase its effectiveness. Here’s the story so far In order to make its grantmaking in child protection more effective, Porticus, an international philanthropic organisation …

Opinion Caroline Fiennes 23 September 2020

We don’t know how to get donors to use more evidence to improve their giving

What aids and impedes donors using evidence to make their giving more effective? This question motivated a two researchers at the University of Birmingham to do a wide search of the academic and non-academic literature …

Opinion 1 Caroline Fiennes 17 July 2020

Royal patronages of charities have no discernible effect

Nearly 1,200 UK charities have Royal patrons. Mindful that some donors are much less helpful than they think they are, Giving Evidence set out to investigate whether Royal patronages help charities. We could find no …

Analysis Caroline Fiennes and Shruti Patel 16 December 2019

We tried to see whether charities’ admin costs correlate to their effectiveness, and you won’t believe what happened next

Many people believe that charities waste money on ‘administration’, and hence that the best charities spend little on administration. Some people even take a strong form of this view, that the best charities are by …

Opinion Caroline Fiennes 21 December 2017

What the Skoll Global Threats Fund learnt with its $100 million

The first president of eBay, Jeff Skoll, set up his Global Threats Fund in 2010 to ‘make progress against five of the gravest threats to humanity’: climate change, pandemics, water security, nuclear proliferation, and conflict …

Special feature Caroline Fiennes, Helen Owen and Charles Keidan 5 September 2017

White and wealthy 

The Alliance diversity survey reveals some gaps but we only know so much. Introduction When Alliance magazine was planning its special feature, it wanted the issue to be informed by data on diversity in institutional philanthropy in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, class and disability. As limited data are available, Alliance decided to conduct its …

Book review Caroline Fiennes 5 September 2017

Experimental conversations: perspectives on randomized trials in development economics – edited by Timothy Ogden 

Reviewed by Caroline Fiennes. Much rubbish is spoken about randomized controlled trials (RCTs). And many of the views ascribed to the ‘randomistas’ who run them are not in fact held by them. For instance, it is often said that RCTs are …

Analysis 2 Caroline Fiennes and Ken Berger 15 March 2016

Oops: we made the non-profit impact revolution go wrong

The non-profit ‘impact revolution’– over a decade’s work to increase the impact of non-profits – has gone in the wrong direction. As veterans and cheerleaders of the revolution, we are both part of that. Here …