The Funding Commission wants to increase giving and put fundraising front-and-centre in a new world order. Co-chair Richard Gutch explains precisely what the Commission wants to happen.

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) set up the Funding Commission in February 2009 because of the sector’s concerns about funding.

It was already apparent that the decade of growth, driven in the main by public sector contracts but also by increased trading and giving, was coming to an end. What was less clear was that we were not just facing the prospect of two or three difficult years; we were about to experience a radical shift in the financial context within which civil society operates.

The Funding Commission’s brief was to help set a funding agenda for the sector for the next ten years. Its membership included my co-chair Fiona Ellis, interim director of Philanthropy UK, Paul Amadi, then chair of the Institute of Fundraising (IoF), and Dawn Austwick, chief executive, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation. Papers were commissioned from, among others, Beth Breeze and Joe Saxton, and interviews were conducted with ten directors of fundraising from a range of different sized charities. All these papers can be found, together with the full and summary report, on the Funding Commission website.

Increasing individual giving

The Commission identified individual giving as a potential growth area. There are going to be two million more older people by 2020 (older people give more than other age groups) and the baby boomer generation (the wealthiest generation there has ever been) is entering retirement and will eventually die. There are also more very rich people than ever before and the number of people giving a million pounds or more is increasing.

Over the past ten years efforts have concentrated on encouraging people to give and to volunteer, through initiatives like the Giving Campaign and incentives, such as gift aid. One of the main lessons from the Giving Campaign was the importance of involving charities from the outset. Some of the Commission’s interviewees felt there should also have been far greater involvement of fundraisers in the campaign and a greater focus on the mechanics of giving. The value of the work done by charities could have been promoted more strongly and the campaign should have continued for longer.

The consensus from those we spoke to was that the current priority was not to try to run another giving campaign, but rather to help charities get better at asking – without which many people will not give in the first place – and then to promote better engagement with those who give. We took it as given that all the efforts to improve the tax regime for giving were to be applauded and supported.