Evidence-based Giving in the Financial Times

Making your giving go further

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Getting giving to be based on sound evidence

'How to Give It' in

the Financial Times, by Giving Evidence Director, Caroline Fiennes

How to avoid grants that cost more than they give.

Why a few big gifts are better than loads of small ones.

Ensuring your donation to medical research isn't wasted.

What needs to happen to make charitable giving more evidence-based?

Giving Evidence's Director Caroline Fiennes spoke with the Skoll Foundation about exactly that

How impact measurement could be more useful

Much of the

'impact measurement' and 'evaluation' by charities is really unreliable and unhelpful. And anyway "you don't fatten a pig by weighing it every day". This article explores the problems and solutions.

"Ask an important question and answer it reliably"

Rather than every

charity doing poor quality 'evaluation' it would be better if sectors came together to identify the important unanswered questions, prioritise them into a sector-wide research agenda, and then get experienced researchers to answer them reliably. We're doing exactly this in one sector - and happy to talk with you about doing it in yours too. Explained here.

What makes for effective philanthropy?

Knowing what make

s some grants succeed and others fail would be useful to know - would it not? Giving Evidence is finding out, by investigating the 10 year grant-history of one particular foundation. The project is described here. We're happy to talk with you about finding the learnings from the 'back catalogue' of your grants.

Subtle Christmas gift suggestion!

Hard copies available here, and on Kindle here.

Great things to do

Support our work, since there is tons of work to be done to improve charities' performance.

Book Caroline to speak at an event. Contact Jo.

Join us: we always need smart people, who can do analysis, write well, and respect deadlines.

We always welcome feedback: on this newsletter, our writings or our ideas.
Contact details here.

What works in international #development? Test your knowledge by taking this quiz! Most people score's are only marginally better than random chance... so it's worth knowing the evidence.

Evidence-based medicine has much from which philanthropy can learn. But it still needs improving: read the manifesto for fixing it fro Oxford's Centre for Evidence-based Medicine.

And please welcome into existence the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, at Cambridge University (wherever that is).

Quotes we love

"There is nothing a government hates more than to be well-informed; for it makes the process of arriving at decisions much more complicated and difficult".
- John Maynard Keynes

"Don't fix the lights; fix the institutions which fix the lights".
- Nelson Mandela

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect”.
– Jonathan Swift

If you are interested in seeing how existing research can inform your own giving, or finding learnings from your own history, contact us.