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Coming clean2

Finance | Ian Allsop | 28 Nov 2011

A nice piece of duck at the CFDG dinner, gets Ian Allsop chewing on the meaty subject of impact reporting. 

I honestly wasn’t going to write anything about CFDG’s annual dinner this year. Someone who I won’t mention by name – but let’s just say is very tall – told me that my blog was becoming increasingly detached from the working world as time went by. While I took this as both a compliment and reassurance that I have at least one reader, I realised that I should try and focus on something meatier than a culinary assessment of the Gressingham duck at the Lancaster (very good, as it happens).

However, before the coffee was served, I saw the minister for civil society and keynote speaker for the evening, Nick Hurd MP, struggling slightly with the paper towels in the toilets after washing his hands. I realised later that this was the perfect metaphor for the sub-text of his address.

It’s very easy to be cynical about what politicians tell us – it saves time. So that’s what I am going to do. Now, I am sure that Nick is a perfectly pleasant chap. People who meet him say so, and he is rightly held in high regard. He is erudite, charming and an engaging speaker.

He started by talking about giving being the lifeblood of the sector. He shared his passion for increasing levels of giving in the UK. He acknowledged that every government for the last 20 years had been unable to significantly affect money raised through donations – I assume he has heard of the gift aid changes – and, while I must have missed his concrete examples of what the coalition were going to do, he assured us they would do it.

This is all very laudable. It is also very convenient, especially at a time when voluntary income will be required by many organisations to plaster over cuts in government funding used to provide vital services not provided by the government. And that is ignoring the additional pressure on disposable income that the current climate may exacerbate.

He even hurriedly shoehorned in a reference to a bigger society (remember that?) at the end. Raising giving is all very well, but – and I realise this is slightly naïve and trite – why not concentrate on creating a fairer society so we don’t need to sustain such a high level of voluntary giving to heal its deficiencies?

While on the surface this was a speech of encouragement and a desire to help, I was left with the impression that Hurd might as well have said the government will try and help charities raise the amount they take from the public because there will be considerably less available to the sector from that which the government takes in taxation. But as I said earlier, it’s easy to be cynical and I’m sure I will be proved wrong.

Other than that, what events like the CFDG dinner always bring home to me is the sheer diversity of organisations working in the charity sector.

Where else could you sit next to someone from a body promoting chemistry and the FD of an educational charity? They both inhabit very different worlds but are united by the overarching charity ‘brand’, and ultimately by the fact they exist to make a difference.

For both it was impressive just how much they had achieved over the last few years, and the fact that they could demonstrate this very easily. For the scientist this was in terms of research articles published and disseminated, for the school it was in raising levels of academic achievement.

Evidence

While measuring impact is not always as clear-cut, reporting simply on what your charity achieves is an integral part of displaying it.

For some organisations it seems to be less easy to evidence effectiveness in a concise, tangible way. Or perhaps some are over-complicating it. As with any new-fangled management tool, an industry often quickly forms around it, driven by consultants.

Am I being cynical again if I say the suspicion is that it’s this that is driving impact reporting, as much as the desire of the public to read and act upon such reports?

There may be a danger that you spend so much time demonstrating effectiveness that you lose effectiveness. But charities must at least be fully engaged in the process of coming clean about how successful they have been in meeting their objectives, however that impact is shown.

Just producing something big and glossy that has “Impact report” on the cover doesn’t mean it will in itself have an impact, unless it is thrown at someone. Perhaps we need to develop reporting to assess the impact of impact reporting. And maybe the government will offer to fund it. 

Who's Who: Ian Allsop