Britain’s Prime Minister has cause for a small (nice cup of tea, rather than pop the champagne cork) celebration today, now that his Big Society idea has had its first positive headlines in quite some time, with the long-awaited launch of the £600 million Big Society Capital (BSC) social investment fund. BSC has cost the […]
Tag: New Philanthropy Capital
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No More Labradors Please
Want to raise a lot of money from the public? The answer, according to Sir Stuart Etherington the chief of Britain’s voluntary sector trade body, the NCVO, speaking at a conference in London on Thursday morning, is to set up a charity featuring “a Labrador driving a life boat”. Most giving, he argued, is not […]
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The People’s Aid
Back in the day, before Britain was run by the David Cameron-led coalition, many of us assumed that, under the weight of the public spending axe, a Conservative government would wriggle out of its commitment to keep upping the UK government’s aid budget to 0.7% of national income. It seemed like a no-brainer that increasing spending […]
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Trust and Performance
Why do we trust charities (non-profits, NGOs) so much more than we trust government or business? After all, each of these sorts of organisations are run by the same sort of flawed human being. Charities may have more obviously good intentions than business, though not perhaps government, but talking a more virtuous talk does not […]
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Take off the tin hat, Polly
When Britain’s leading liberal commentator on social affairs, Polly Toynbee, laid into Prime Minister David Cameron’s Big Society project last week, she was at pains to say that she has nothing against stronger communities and more volunteering – she was bristling at the fact that the public spending axe has fallen on charities. Since “governments are defined […]
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Election Fever
There’s a bit of a ‘phoney war’ feeling in Britain at the moment. Whichever party (parties?) takes power after the general election that will be held some time before May 6th, the parlous state of the nation’s finances will demand a complete re-egineering of government. Yet we won’t know what our politicians have planned until […]
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When is a Charity Not a Charity?
The recent decision by the English Charity Commission that two private schools are not doing enough to justify their charitable status has sparked a volley of criticism in the media, with accusations that the venerable Commission has succumbed to the politics of envy and even class war. The controversy is the product of the 2006 Charities Act, which tried to tighten […]
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Tying the knot
Our critics bristle at the idea of (carefully) applying techniques from the business world to the nonprofit sector. A report released today by New Philanthropy Capital, one of the leaders of the philanthrocapitalism movement, shows that such complacency is misplaced and even, in these tough economic times, downright dangerous. “‘Merger’ is a dirty word in the charitable […]
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Analyze This
Demonstrating that giving makes a difference is one of the biggest challenges facing philanthropy. In business, profit provides a good (though not perfect) guide to whether your activities are working. But in philanthropy there is no such standard unit of measurement for impact – though plenty of efforts are under way to change this. Here’s […]
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A great giving opportunity
Mike spoke today at the Royal Society of Arts in London (a podcast of the event will appear shortly), which itself was a product of one of the past golden ages of philanthropy in England during the 18th Century. Indeed, the RSA was one of the pioneers of ‘incentive prizes’, which have been rediscovered by […]