Author Archive:
Caroline Fiennes
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
A welcome public row about donor effectiveness
Well done Malcolm Gladwell. On Wednesday this week, Harvard announced its biggest gift ever, $400m from the American hedge fund manager John Paulson for its school of engineering and applied sciences. Gladwell ridiculed it: ‘It …
Is Constituent Voice a proxy for randomized controlled trials?
The short answer is no. At first sight, it seems that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and Constituent Voice (CV) could be substitutes for each other because they both seek to ascertain a programme’s effect. In …
