The Power of Giving – October 2025
A fun panel about how to give, and why – lots of discussion about Aristotle! Click on the picture: the video is on LinkedIn so you may need to log into that:
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The Foundation Practice Rating: launch of the Year Four results – March 2025
The full results are in a long report & a summary report here:
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Shifting the Power in Philanthropy? October 2024
What power, and shifting it from whom to whom, and who is doing that and what’s working? A lovely discussion (click on the image below to watch) with Fozia Irfan (now of BBC Children in Need) and Shikha Goyal (of Vitol Foundation), hosted by Dom Bond of Oxford HR – which planted some reforested trees in Madagascar as a thank you 🙂
See here for some categories of types of power-shifting in philanthropy, and various examples.
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The Foundation Practice Rating: launch of the Year Three results – March 2024
The full results are in a long report & a summary report here.
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The Foundation Practice Rating: launch of the Year Two results – March 2023
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The Do One Better podcast: on the need for more research on ‘how’ to give
This podcast series has interviews with many leaders in the non-profit, public and philanthropy worlds. Caroline Fiennes was interviewed in February 2023 by its host Alberto Lidji (a Visiting Fellow at U.Cambridge’s Centre of Strategic Philanthropy, along with Caroline).
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How can philanthropy help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals – given that there is a massive gap between the funding that that requires and the funding available? Giving Evidence Director Caroline Fiennes spoke about this at a Devex conference in London in October 2022.
Answer: Philanthropy helps by influencing things bigger than itself, e.g., commercial investment, government funding, and by ensuring that institutions are fair (non-corrupt), transparent and competent:
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“Some stuff that I have noticed about data and evidence re foundations and non-profits which might be interesting and/or useful to you” – a talk to a ‘learning circle’ group of foundations in lovely Canada (August 2022). Weirdly, though Caroline’s voice & slides appear here, her face doesn’t because her camera was off.
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Presentation to a group of foundations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland about evidence-based philanthropy, and the Foundation Practice Rating. Vielen Dank fuer die Einladung mitzusprechen! (April 2022)
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Getting research into practice: Keynote at Global Evidence and Implementation Summit, 2018: Caroline Fiennes gave a keynote presentation at the Global Evidence and Implementation Summit in Melbourne, October 2018. To watch, click on the photo and wait a second: you will need to log in but any email address will suffice. Excuse the surprise didgeridoo interruption!
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Launch of the Foundation Practice Rating! March 2022
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Shift the Power: webinar with the Cambridge Centre for Strategic Philanthropy, about moving power from funders to grantees and intended beneficiaries, and from the Global North to the Global South (October 2021)
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The evidence about organisational responses to child abuse: webinar with the Campbell Collaboration about our evidence and gap map, and ‘guidebook’ about that. (March 2021.) More here.
Webinar with Alfanar (venture philanthropy fund in the Middle East) about effective funding practices, particularly funding overheads, and avoiding mission creep (January 2021):
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How Giving Was Being Done During the Pandemic
Podcast interview with The Business of Giving and its host Denver Frederick. We discussed:
• Funders have changed their behavior. What will the impact be?
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The potential and pitfalls of evidence-based philanthropy: Keynote talk at the Philanthropic Foundations of Canada, Toronto, Oct 2018.
Notice the all-female panel 🙂
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Evidence-based philanthropy made easy: This talk explains what evidence-based giving is, why it matters, and how it needn’t be soooo complicated. Even the first 30 seconds here show why minimising administrative costs to keep an aid programme ‘cheap’ is a bad idea.
This talk was given in Vienna (notice how Caroline had accidentally turned up basically wearing the Austrian flag…), which is why bits of it are in German. More here.
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The Big Money Questions! Caroline talked to The Daily Mail. Click on the picture below to watch (~20 mins).
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The current supply of, and demand for, research about charities and philanthropy
Explanation of two projects that we did to understand the current supply of, and demand for, research about charities and philanthropy. This was at a conference held by Charity Futures, which commissioned this research to inform its work creating a new academic institute to study charities and philanthropy. That became the Gradel Institute of Charity at U.Oxford.
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Video lesson with the Fitzroy Academy: (click on the picture to watch)
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What can philanthropy learn from medicine about using decent evidence? Six minute audio-interview!
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‘Ask an important question and answer it reliably‘: how to do evidence-based philanthropy. This talk was given to an invited group of major donors. (18 mins)
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Science and philanthropy: podcast
A lovely interview on US radio station The Business Of Giving with Denver Frederick. We discussed lessons for philanthropy / nonprofits from Galileo, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; how nonprofits sometimes harm, how we don’t yet have good frameworks for analysing the (likely) effectiveness of (future) campaigns and other systemic work, and much else.
https://soundcloud.com/business-of-giving/caroline-fiennes-ceo-of-giving/s-zBBnZ
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How Giving Evidence supports donors and foundations:
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The closure of Kids Company (high-profile UK charity) on August 5th 2015 raised the question of charity’s management and effectiveness. Caroline spoke to BBC News about it:
And, once it emerged that there are 60,000 children’s charities in the UK, she spoke about whether there should be consolidation:
Caroline was also on BBC Radio4’s PM programme on the same day, which FeedbackLabs turned into a podcast, here.
The problems establishing the effectiveness of KidsCompany illustrate a wide-spread problem in the charity sector, which Giving Evidence and others are actively trying to solve. More here. Caroline Fiennes discussed many aspects of charities and giving with SIBE at Warwick University, including:
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Does it matter which charity a donor chooses?
giving-evidence.com 