Caroline Fiennes

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Begun only last year, Emirates Foundation’s annual summit has already become a fixture, and it’s huge. It started as a way for Emirates Foundation to gather insights to improve its own work – running a …