The web puts integration back on the agenda, says John Tate. Twenty years ago I left my job as a finance director in the commercial sector and set up an IT business. 1989 was the start of perhaps the last recession. Early clients in my IT business included organisations in the charity sector.

It seems like yesterday that Heather Lamont and I were scratching our heads to devise the structures and processes for the Charity Awards. In fact it was a prior millennium and this year on 11 June is its tenth anniversary. How time flies when you’re having fun! The programme we put together then has proved robust and rigorous and has required virtually no amendment over the past decade. It sets out to identify and celebrate excellence in charities and to promote the conviction that well planned, effective management leads to better outcomes for beneficiaries and more efficient use of scarce resources.

Impact reporting must not become prescriptive, argues Don Bawtree. I understand that Oxfam are claiming (on beer mats) that they are building Utopia, as part of a new campaign to engage the public in their work. I received today a report from Raleigh International. They had consulted with more than 100 former Raleigh ‘venturers’ from disadvantaged backgrounds who had been on expeditions between five and 20 years ago. The group included young people who had experienced a range of difficulties in their life such as unemployment, homeless-ness, drug and alcohol problems, mental illness and violence.

William Jensen says we have lived through a period of abnormally high returns. It is difficult not to feel profound disappointment with the leaders of those financial institutions which underpin our economies and global commerce. At the top of that roll-call of let-down are the bankers who built a celestial city from a little bit of real things and a great deal of nothing that continues to crumble and suck the rest of the world into its vortex. Even the most generous of spirits will struggle to excuse the majority in that industry of the charge of cynical self-interest.