As New Philanthropy Capital investigates ways to resurrect the oft-maligned Intelligent Giving, Celina Ribeiro looks at the future of the organisation and the role of watchdog bodies who monitor and rate charities within the sector.

Last month, quite a few people in the sector started to get worried.

An article published in the Times titled ‘Beware the High Street fundraiser’ declared street fundraising bad practice, and quoted both Intelligent Giving and a senior figure at the organisation’s new home, New Philanthropy Capital to back the assertion. Intelligent Giving declared that “chuggers are usually in it for the money and don’t always know much about the charities they represent”, and NPC head of strategy Tris Lumley was down as saying “all chuggers care about is getting that £10 monthly direct debit”.

There was concern that Intelligent Giving, which has lain dormant since being taken over by NPC last summer, was back. And back with a vengeance.

But, while not quite a relief, the article was quickly slated by NPC, who noted that the Intelligent Giving ‘quote’ was drawn from a 2008 blog entry on the site by a former worker, and argue that Lumley had been both misrepresented and directly misquoted.

This kind of controversy, for which Intelligent Giving developed a reputation in its first incarnation, is not what NPC chief executive Martin Brookes wants to see the watch dog get embroiled in as “Intelligent Giving version two”.

Before taking over the charity last summer, Brookes says that he had respect for the general principle of Intelligent Giving, but was uncomfortable with some of its actions and attitude. “Occasionally we looked at what they were doing and thought some of it was interesting and some of it we didn’t agree with… Sometimes it felt like they weren’t actually on the side of charities,” he says.

“There was an issue of tone. It sometimes felt a little too acerbic for my liking. This is based from my perspective of not being involved with it, but it sometimes seemed as though it didn’t engage with charities before it slammed them. You can understand if a charity gets a bit miffed at that.”

But while Intelligent Giving is not dead, nor is it alive. It is, as Brookes puts it “on ice” until funding can be secured.

“Our first goal was basically to stop it dying entirely,” he says. “Then we sat back and thought for a while. Some people said to me ‘why have you done that? It’s a horrible outfit. It has a horrible reputation’ and so on.”

But Brookes is confident that, with the right tone and thorough analysis, the organisation can play a productive role in the sector. Productive, but not essential: “If we put Intelligent Giving on ice, it wouldn’t be the end of the world… Even if we can’t resurrect it actively again, we’ll still have the frameworks and we’ll be able to resurrect it at some point in the future.”

Ian MacQuillin, head of communications at the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association (PFRA), a long-time critic of Intelligent Giving - in particular of its aggressive stance on face-to-face fundraising - says that any refreshed organisation would have to be substantially different from its original form in order to be welcomed by the sector.

“There’s no problem with someone coming along and doing this kind of thing, but they’ve got to be clear and honest and transparent about what they’re doing. Intelligent Giving was none of those things,” he says.

“I hope that when New Philanthropy Capital resurrects Intelligent Giving, it resurrects it with the job that it was originally supposed to be doing; which was to look at how effective charities are, the quality and clarity of who they present their annual reports. Even so, the Plain English campaign could probably do something very similar.”

As for the organisation’s past habit of publicly proselytizing on types of fundraising that get the most media attention, such as face-to-face and telephone fundraising, MacQuillin says that Intelligent Giving was making unnecessary noise.

“The sector’s perfectly capable of having those debates themselves. It’s capable of sorting these things out.  It doesn’t need somebody like Intelligent Giving to tell it what to do,” he says, but adds that it is “always good to have some outside observers watching and pointing out when you’ve done wrong”. MacQuillin says that the real problem the sector had with Intelligent Giving was that “the core corporate cultural ethos was anti-fundraising”.

MacQuillin also complains that for a body so vocal about transparency, Intelligent Giving itself lacked transparency and accountability. But Brookes assures Fundraising that Intelligent Giving II will be exceptionally transparent.

Any resurrected Intelligent Giving will look different to the old one. It will be more than a lick of paint, but less than a wholesale re-building. “In some sense it will be in the same spirit that it was: a slightly spiky voice about the sector. But more hopefully in keeping with NPC’s desire to build effectiveness and performance and more clearly a constructively critical friend of the sector.

“We think we can do that,” he says. “The challenge now is can we get that funded?”

Bringing Intelligent Giving closer into the NPC model of charity analysis will involve a greater emphasis on impact and effectiveness, but its reports will still focus on annual reports. Brookes says the challenge has been to find a reasonable middle ground between the ten days it typically takes NPC to assess a charity and the three hours it took Intelligent Giving interns to produce their assessments under the old formula.

Charity Navigator, the closest equivalent organisation to Intelligent Giving in the US, is also expanding its remit. From its inception in 2002 it has primarily been focused on financials about charities, but it is this summer to move into assessing accountability and governance policies and is hoping within the next few years to be able to begin rating individual programmes at charities.

But while Charity Navigator now influences in the order of several billions of dollars worth of donations every year in the US, it too had a difficult birth.

Sandra Miniutti, vice president of marketing at the organisation, says that Charity Navigator “definitely had some push back” from the US charity sector at its inception.

“When we initially launched our site we started asking charities for copies of their [tax returns] and of the largest charities in America only a third complied with our requests, even though it was the law,” she says.

“Things have really changed since then. We’ve moved away from charities saying ‘who are you and how dare you rate us?’ to now we have charities almost every day asking to be added to our site. They want to be rated and donors are asking for our analysis before they contribute. In the span of eight years things have really changed. But initially charities were not too thrilled we existed.”