It might partly be the time of year, but everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon of the Daily Telegraph’s survey of the salaries of chief executives of the big aid charities. First William Shawcross, chair of the Charity Commission, chose to throw fuel on the fire with his remarks about risk to reputation; this brought an… Read more »
Posts By: Stephen Cook
ATM giving is far too clunky
Our analysis in Third Sector earlier this year indicated that ATM giving is struggling to get off the ground, not least because people fail to understand that the contribution is coming from them and not the bank. How naïve can you get? But leaving that aside in the hope that people will wise up, I… Read more »
You can live or die by a soundbite
So what’s the difference, really, between eating cows and eating horses? And what about dogs and cats? And the more you think about it, the more likely it is you might want to eat less meat or even stop eating meat altogether.
A night at Lord’s with the IoF Partners in Fundraising Awards
A new set of awards by the Institute of Fundraising, the Partners in Fundraising Awards, got off to a good start last night in the hospitality suite at Lord’s cricket ground – not least because of a card sharper who entertained people in the cloakroom queue with some amazing sleight of hand. We never found… Read more »
Dry and delightful? Or just dry and dreary?
Until now I’ve never sought sponsorship for doing stuff for charity – unlike my colleague David Ainsworth, for example, who’s run two marathons for the Motor Neurone Disease Association. That changed this month, however, when I signed up for Cancer Research UK’s Dryathlon for January and gave up “the demon drink”, as my mother, with… Read more »
When charities make the front page…
The journalist and broadcaster Mary Ann Sieghart held up the front page of the London Evening Standard and pointed to Tuesday’s splash story about the Get London Reading campaign, run with the literacy charity Beanstalk. “That says to me it’s a slow news day,” she said. “News is about events, and this isn’t really news.”… Read more »
Here’s some route one, Dorothy Donor fundraising
I recently spent some time in a part of East Anglia where a lot of elderly people live, and through the letterbox popped a piece of cold, unaddressed direct mail from the British Red Cross, a charity I admire a lot and have donated to at times of disaster. I was there at about the… Read more »
Ed Miliband – isn’t he our man?
Until recently commentators such as Tim Montgomerie of Conservative Home have been fond of saying that the Tories’ best asset at the next election will be Ed Miliband: geeky, awkward-looking, poor communicator and a bit Old Labour. After yesterday, they might need to change their tune on the first three points at least. Even his… Read more »
Is William Shawcross the right person for the commission job?
The proposed appointment of the writer and journalist William Shawcross as chair of the Charity Commission at least bodes well for a relatively short interregnum. John Wood, an existing board member, took over as interim chair of the regulator at the beginning of this month after the departure of Dame Suzi Leather. A starting date… Read more »
There is a great deal of churn, turmoil and change going on in the sector
It feels as if the sector has taken a real beating in the last couple of weeks. It’s not so much a matter of big individual hits as of death by a thousand cuts. Each day seemed to bring a new closure. The educational charity Red Kite, which works with ex-offenders, was sunk by the… Read more »