Author Archive:
Caroline Fiennes
Most grantmakers don’t seem to know if they are effective
Is your foundation any good? I don’t mean: is it big, or does it give away a lot, or does it run an efficient process, or do the grantees achieve much. Rather, I mean: are …
A call to foundations: make it easier for charities to apply for funding
The system by which charities apply to charitable foundations for funding is dreadful. When I ran an operational charity, I and the team spent far too long on it – often simply re-writing and re-formatting …
Fighting factory farming with new approaches to producing and using research
Moving to a sustainable and fair food system is a giant challenge, and the organisations driving it are small compared to the problems. So it is crucial that they are as effective as possible. That …
Mapping the evidence to improve grantmaking in child protection
Porticus has been using rigorous published evidence and experiential learning to increase its effectiveness. Here’s the story so far In order to make its grantmaking in child protection more effective, Porticus, an international philanthropic organisation …
We don’t know how to get donors to use more evidence to improve their giving
What aids and impedes donors using evidence to make their giving more effective? This question motivated a two researchers at the University of Birmingham to do a wide search of the academic and non-academic literature …
Royal patronages of charities have no discernible effect
Nearly 1,200 UK charities have Royal patrons. Mindful that some donors are much less helpful than they think they are, Giving Evidence set out to investigate whether Royal patronages help charities. We could find no …
We tried to see whether charities’ admin costs correlate to their effectiveness, and you won’t believe what happened next
Many people believe that charities waste money on ‘administration’, and hence that the best charities spend little on administration. Some people even take a strong form of this view, that the best charities are by …
What the Skoll Global Threats Fund learnt with its $100 million
The first president of eBay, Jeff Skoll, set up his Global Threats Fund in 2010 to ‘make progress against five of the gravest threats to humanity’: climate change, pandemics, water security, nuclear proliferation, and conflict …
White and wealthy
The Alliance diversity survey reveals some gaps but we only know so much. Introduction When Alliance magazine was planning its special feature, it wanted the issue to be informed by data on diversity in institutional philanthropy in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, class and disability. As limited data are available, Alliance decided to conduct its …
Experimental conversations: perspectives on randomized trials in development economics – edited by Timothy Ogden
Reviewed by Caroline Fiennes. Much rubbish is spoken about randomized controlled trials (RCTs). And many of the views ascribed to the ‘randomistas’ who run them are not in fact held by them. For instance, it is often said that RCTs are …
