The Big Give is launching two new matching services – one to marry up charities with prospective trustees and another to introduce art students to small charities that don’t have logos.
The Make-A-Wish Foundation has received its largest-ever single donation - £702,158 – from Surrey businessman Andrew Reynolds.
It sounds like a warm, fuzzy, cardigan-ed idea that could only be borne out of a cosy Oxbridge office, walled in by leather-bound books and the all-pervasive odour of hope. But the Oxford boffin who has pledged to give away £1m over his career, and has created a society to get people to do the same, is no generous dope. His pipe dream is much more substance than smoke, and only the best charities will see a penny.
Most days we are rung at Thames Reach by somebody who wants to help the homeless; it is really rather gratifying. Media bods come with propositions intended to shed fresh light on ‘The Plight of the Homeless’. The Big Idea often involves them sleeping rough on the street to give a ‘down and dirty’ account of what it is like to be a rough sleeper. Quite often they are genuinely unaware that a proposal of this type is put to us at least once a month.
Donor circles have been floating around a few US organisations for more than a decade, but can the major donor fundraising technique gain traction in the UK?
An extra £100m has been allocated to frontline charitable activity by major philanthropists, according to this year’s Coutts Million Pound Donors report. Million-pound-plus donations have been largely resilient to the recession, according to the report. Some 189 donations of £1m or more were made in 2007/2008, just 6 per cent fewer than in the previous financial year.
All major banks will offer charity giving accounts “in the not too distant future”, according to Coutts & Co’s philanthropy chief. The prediction was made by Mark Evans, head of philanthropy at the private bank, today as the company launched its own charitable giving account.
The charity sector should ask why donkey welfare charities raise more income than domestic violence charities, according to Martin Brookes, director of New Philanthropy Capital. Brookes highlighted the imbalance in funding in his NPC blog this week, questioning why the Donkey Sanctuary, with an income of £20m in April 2008, earned £3m more than the top three domestic violence charities - Refuge, Women’s Aid Federation and Eaves Housing for Women (£17m combined) in the same period.
Tania Mason examines the UK Giving results and finds specks of optimism among the recession gloom Charities should not panic about the news that donations to UK charities have plummeted by 11 per cent in the last year, say researchers from the Centre for Charitable Giving and Philanthropy. The broad trends mask huge variations in giving patterns and the results are not all bad, they insist.
Newspaper coverage of philanthropy and the recession between September last year and April this year contained eight pessimistic portrayals of a ‘vulnerable’ sector for every one article that depicted the sector as robust and resilient, a study shows. The inherent danger in this is that such stories can affect confidence in giving and create self-fulfilling prophecies of a giving recession, the researchers suggest.
Sir Alec Reed has put up an extra £1m for the Big Give’s latest match funding challenge, boosting the potential challenge fundraising total to £12m. The philanthropist (pictured) decided to double his donation to the match fund offer after charities responded more enthusiastically than expected to the match funding scheme.
A quarter of wealthy individuals have increased their donation levels over the past 18 months, according to a report which suggests philanthropy is thriving. New research from Barclays Wealth says three-quarters of major donors have not reduced their giving in the recession, and more than 25 per cent have given more. The report, Tomorrow’s Philanthropist, which is based on a survey of 500 wealthy individuals in the UK and USA, is the second in less than two months to demonstrate an upward trend in philanthropy.
Scottish giving levels have dropped by more than 10 per cent over the past year, according to a new survey. In April this year, 71 per cent of Scots reported having made a donation to charity in the last six months according to the Scottish Charity Engagement Monitor, released today by nfpSynergy. The figure was down from 79 per cent in April 2008.
Major donors show no signs of winding back their giving, according to a survey released today. Nearly nine in ten philanthropists at a recent forum said that they planned to increase their giving (42 per cent) or maintain their current levels (45 per cent) over the next year, regardless of the economic downturn.
The government should establish a £30m fund to boost internet technologies for the charity sector, according to a manifesto released this week. The Community Foundation Network (CFN) has released its long-awaited Manifesto for Community Philanthropy, which calls on government to create a ‘Philanthropy Infrastructure Investment Fund’ to invest in those projects aiming to increase giving levels, but also to introduce new philanthropic tax breaks and bank account types.
The personality of a charity's leader is as critical to philanthropic decision-making by family businesses as the organisation's charitable mission, according to new research. Commissioned by the Institute for Family Business and the Community Foundation Network the Natural Philanthropists: Family Business Philanthropy and Social Responsibility Inquiry examines the philanthropic and corporate social responsibility habits of family businesses in the UK.
The value of philanthropic prizes in the US The value of philanthropic prizes in the US has soared over the past decade but sales of fundraising products by charities have dropped off, according to two separate reports. There has been a $250m increase in the value of philanthropic prizes since 2000, according to a study by the Social Sector Office at management consulting firm McKinsey and Company, which said both the number and value of philanthropic prizes has increased significantly since the turn of the century.
Lord Sainsbury has become the first Briton to give away £1bn as new figures show top philanthropists increased their giving by £216m in 2008. The supermarket magnate’s generosity, which has mainly benefited charities in the fields of arts, mental health, children and scientific research, is distributed through the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. More than £660m has already been given away, and the 68-year-old has donated a further £465m which he is keen does not become an endowment. While Lord Sainsbury is the first to pip the £1bn post, figures in the new Sunday Times’ Giving List – released next week – show strong growth in top-end philanthropy in the UK, with the 100 most generous philanthropists donating £2.86m in 2008, a near ten per cent increase on the previous year.
New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) has cut one fifth of its research team, but denies reports that this is as a result of a drop in donations. The organisation would not reveal how many staff have been made redundant, but told Charity News Alert that “less than five” positions have gone. A spokeswoman for NPC said that the cuts are due to a “tilt” in focus at the organisation which is working to become “more lean and focus on the demand – which is at the consultancy side”.
Barclays Bank and HBOS have been named the largest corporate givers, increasing their charitable giving by 10 per cent and 4.2 per cent respectively in the last financial year, according to research by the Directory of Social Change (DSC) in its biennial Guide to UK Company Giving 2009/10. The guide, which covers the financial period 2007-2008, listed Barclays as the biggest contributor, giving £38.9m, a 10 per cent increase on 2005/06. It was followed by fellow banks Lloyds TSB, which gave £37.5m, and HBOS, which gave £18.6m.
Prince Harry’s African children’s charity has received a major boost from the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. The controversial entrepreneur and Tory politician (pictured) made a donation worth £250,000 to Sentebale, the organisation set up by Prince Harry in 2006 in memory of his mother Princess Diana and which supports projects for vulnerable and orphaned children in Lesotho. Lord Ashcroft’s donation is a significant one for the charity, which, according to most recent reports on the Charity Commission register had an annual income of £1.15m.
The charity set up by Jane Tomlinson has more than doubled the fundraising target set by the legendary fundraiser before she died. Jane’s Appeal has increased its fundraising target to £5m, having already surpassed the £2m goal set by Tomlinson before her death from breast cancer in 2007. Mike Tomlinson, Jane’s husband and now head of her charity, revealed that the organisation has raised £2.6m and expressed hope that the fully-booked Jane Tomlinson York 10K in August will make major inroads into the remaining £2.4m to be raised.
Britain lags far behind America in terms of a giving culture, so it’s about time we started actively teaching lessons in philanthropy in schools says Matthew Bowcock. Britain collectively donated a staggering £10.6bn last year, so in spite of the economic climate the shutters are far from down on charitable giving.
Donations website The Big Give is offering a £50,000 match fund pot to animal charities to commemorate the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (pictured). Philanthropist and Big Give founder Alec Reed has put up the money in the hope that it will produce a ‘survival of the fittest’-style competition among animal charities to get the greatest amount of money for their cause. Five animal charities have been selected by Reed to compete to secure the largest share of the £50,000 fund, which goes live at 10am on Monday 23, February. The charities must persuade their supporters to put up their donations first, then The Big Give will match these up to a limit per charity of £20,000.
Philanthropist Alec Reed is looking into the possibility of matching legacy gifts through his website The Big Give. Reed told PF his idea is in its infancy but would involve someone leaving their legacy through The Big Give to be matched, and only giving it to the charity once it had been doubled. He quipped: "It's fundraising from the grave! But we think it could work." The Big Give's £1m matched funding programme in December proved very popular, with 260 charities benefitting from up to £20,000 each.
Serial philanthropist and founder of The Big Give, Alec Reed, has mooted the idea that charities should only get tax relief when they spend money, not when they receive it. The philanthropist voiced his opinion during an open discussion at the European Association of Planned Giving's seminar on the economic crisis, hosted by Brakeley fundraising and management consultants in London.
Individual philanthropy will likely remain strong while statutory and corporate funding could drop off as a result of financial turmoil, according to a new report. Looking at historical indicators from both the UK and US, NCVO has this week produced a report aiming to predict how the voluntary sector will fare during economic downturn, but has warned that “the evidence is mixed and often conflicting”. It suggested also that the predicted coming recession could be of a different kind to those experienced in the past.
The majority of million and multi-million pound gifts made during the last financial year were banked in trusts and foundations, according to a new report which paints an interesting picture of the trends within major giving in the UK. The Coutts Million Pound Report reveals that 56 per cent of gifts worth £1m – which total £1.618bn - or more were designated by donors to be banked rather than spent immediately.
Charities looking for corporate funding should use the vocabulary of venture philanthropy, says JPA Europe which predicts that corporates will increasingly look to investing in this model.
Governments are one of the biggest barriers to diaspora philanthropy acting as an agent for social change, according to a paper by Mark Sidel, an expert in diaspora philanthropy at the University of Iowa College of Law in the USA.
