When did you last hear of a charity that was rubbish?

By some estimates, fully 60% of donations are made with no research into the charity’s performance.

Whereas about 0% of commercial investments are made with no research into the company’s performance.

Why the difference?

Because we never ever talk about bad charities. We hardly ever even talk about relative performance.

Commercial investors look for high-performance companies solely because they’re perfectly aware that poor-performing ones exist which they’d like to avoid. But most people just don’t know that some charities are much better – and, by implication, some much worse – than others. So of course it never occurs to them to find and avoid the poor-performing ones.

This isn’t some theoretical notion. I know of two programmes delivering the precise same outcome, one 96% cheaper than the other. It’s about education. So every time somebody funds one child through the more expensive programme, fully 24 children needlessly miss out. It’s described here, in Buy one, get 24 free!

We need to stop this.

All students must be above average

We don’t need to slag charities off, but can set up the notion of relative performance in how we talk. For example, rather than saying “x charity distributes books to schools in Ghana”, or even “x charity manages to distribute books to schools in Ghana for only $5/book”, it’s more powerful to say that “x charity delivers books to schools in Ghana more cheaply than any other programme”. Or “Y charity can provide the same level of care to more older people than other organisations do”, or “Z hospice is in the top quartile of hospices in the UK.” These types of statements are quite rare about charities, though perfectly normal elsewhere in our lives – schools, hospitals, local authorities, companies.

For sure it’s a tall order to do this. For one thing, evidence about charities’ individual performance is thin on the ground, let alone about their performance relative to others. But I see no attempt to rectify this. If you know of anybody publishing relative performance data, I’d be interested to hear. I have only ever seen the one example mentioned. And since we need more comparative data, we better be prepared to fund charities to collect it – or collect and collate it ourselves.

Of course, I appreciate that charities’ work varies – hospice care for a severely disabled person is a different kettle of fish to care for a non-disabled person – so comparisons are difficult. But that’s no excuse for not trying.

Since donors are allocating scarce resources, they obviously do make choices between charities. And if we – donors who are interested in ambitious charitable giving – never set up the notion of performance as a criterion, then it won’t be. We have only ourselves to blame if people choose based on other criteria – such as who’s famous, or large, or the best at asking for money, or has the best fluffy bunny photo.

So perhaps paradoxically those of us interested in high-impact giving should talk more about failure and about relative performance. If we only ever talk about charities being great, we feed the notion that giving to ANY charity is good enough. Which – if you’re one of those 24 children left behind – just isn’t true.

What’s great & what’s weird about Peter Singer’s book–>

Language shapes how we think. No clear language: no clear thinking

What is this thing that we do? “Deploying money, time and other resources to achieve positive social and environmental change”. A snappy phrase, don’t you think??

I’ve been talking a lot recently about this (‘this’ being ‘deploying money, time….’), and am frustrated at the absurd length of the sentences I get into because… there’s no verb for this. What do you call it? I’m VERY interested to hear your ideas. I’ve heard several verbs used, all of which are pretty unhelpful & misleading in my experience:

“Giving” is too passive for what I mean. I give you a book at Christmas largely to signal that I like you. Sure, I hope that you’ll read and like it, but I’m not primarily trying to educate you. If you don’t read it, but nonetheless get joy from my having bothered to give it to you, that’s great. “It’s the thought that counts”, as all our mothers told us: the value is in the act of giving, rather than the ‘results’ – which I why I don’t audit your knowledge on the book a month later. It’s yours – to do with as you will. If you want to burn it, or “re-gift it”, that’s totally up to you. But not so with ambitious charitable giving: I don’t “give” time to the children’s charity of which I’m a trustee. I invest or deploy or use that time to help the children – I give through the charity. It’s not the thought that count: it’s the results.

“Giving it away” is even worse. It implies that the recipient is ‘away’ – distant from you. Carnegie was wrong: it isn’t, as he claimed, “more difficult to give money away than it was to make it”: all you need to do succeed at ‘giving money away’ is to stand in the street and dish it out. You won’t need long. Ambitious charitable giving isn’t about a recipient who’s ‘away’ – it’s about a recipient or cause that you care about, and hence you’re very interested in them doing a good job. Carnegie needed our missing verb: I suspect he meant that “it’s harder to deploy this money in such a way that it achieves positive social and environmental change”, which probably is harder than making it.

“Investing” is just confusing, because it’s so commonly used to mean something totally different (ie, deploying money to generate a financial gain). I don’t invest money in a human rights campaign: I have no expectation of seeing that money again – let alone with a profit – because the campaign has no mechanism for generating revenue.

“Donating” is possible, but also rather passive. Associated with loose change or taking clothes to second-hand shops, it hardly implies expectation of significant change, or holding the “don-ee” accountable.

It matters that there’s no term for it. Any passing socio-linguist will confirm that language shapes how we think – people normally only perceive things for which they have words, and the words signal what’s important. Hindi has different words for ‘elder brother’ and ‘younger brother’ because the difference matters.

However can we create a culture where people “use money and other resources to achieve positive social and environmental change” well (as opposed to badly) if we can’t even speak about it?

And by the way, it matters that there’s no verb. I happen to think that there’s no decent noun for this stuff either*, but even if there were, we’d still need a verb. “I’d like to [insert non-existent verb] better”, “this course / book / article will help you …. better”, “we’ve learnt so much from sport or business about how to [insert non-existent verb] well”, “they’ve made a great innovation in non-existent verb-ing.”

Ambitious charitable giving: what do you call yours?

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*These nouns include philanthropy, venture philanthropy, philanthrocapitalism. There are (in my view) good reasons to steer clear of these: (a)hardly anybody can spell them! (b)nobody, apart from philanthro-niks ever uses them, and (c)they’re horribly ill-defined. Often people discuss them at complete cross-purposes because they’re using them to refer to quite different things.

“I gave some money to a charity the other day, and it was just wonderful. Apparently, my donation helped them to [do something amazing]. I’m so proud and happy.”

Do you ever have conversations like this? I don’t. I realised recently that I’ve literally never had a single social conversation about a personal giving experience, ever, despite knowing loads of people who give, and even having been in charities & philanthropy for over 20 years.

Isn’t that weird?

It’s not like nobody’s got any experience of giving: fully 56% of us give in any given month, and even more volunteer regularly according to the Cabinet Office.

And it’s even weirder when you consider that giving makes us so happy – it’s the best thing known to mankind for cheering us up, with only one exception (which is dancing: which people talk about all the time). Interestingly, clever old ActionAid, in its new donor-recruitment adverts, cite neither the needs (i.e. the problem they address) nor their results (i.e, how good they are at solving it), but focus on the rewarding experience for the donor.

I’d be really interested to hear your experiences of talking about giving.

• Do you talk socially about it? How do those conversations start? What reactions do you get – e.g. are people inspired, do they feel you’re using it to signal your wealth?
• Do people start conversations with you about their giving? How do those conversations start?
• And if you don’t, what’s holding you back?

It’s important to talk about our giving because we know about the importance of social norms – people do what they see other people doing. [Hence why celebrities get paid to use certain mobile phones in public, and TV producers get paid to ‘place’ products in programmes.]

So if we’re to build a culture of giving – and even to leverage our own giving by inspiring others to follow – we need to talk. On platforms and donor events for sure, but also to our neighbours, friends and colleagues.

Tell me your experiences – we can learn together.

First published by The Funding Network, March 2011