There are a lot of consultations taking place at the moment into charity tax reliefs: inheritance tax relief, VAT relief on shared services, relief on gifts of pre-eminent works of art. There seems to be a common thread among all of them. In all cases, sector experts think the proposals are rubbish. Inheritance tax relief… Read more »
Posts By: David Ainsworth
Why do some smart people lose their faculties when talking about charities?
Sometimes, it seems that the topic of charity makes even intelligent people say stupid things. The other day I had dinner with a friend of mine who I admire very much. He’s a very smart bloke, he’s made a lot of money, and he’s generous to good causes. We talked a bit about my work,… Read more »
Let charities run local newspapers
This week, a group of academics, journalists and charities proposed that charities should run local newspapers.At the moment, it’s far from clear whether a newspaper can be a charity. Many legal experts think so. The Charity Commission is sceptical. The new proposals ask the government to make it easier for them to do so.Providing a… Read more »
Why do some causes raise more money than others?
Last week, Cass Business School published its new Charity Market Monitor, which looks at the most successful fundraising charities in the UK. One interesting factor was the differing success of different charities. By far the most successful sector for fundraising was health, with Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation occupying the two top… Read more »
The Standard Chartered Great City Race featured the best-dressed audience I’ve seen on a sporting occasion
Last week, three months almost to the day after the London Marathon, I took to the streets of central London once again, surrounded by thousands of people running for charity. Roads were closed, and people gathered around to cheer on the runners. The distance was a little less dramatic, mind. Instead of the 42 kilometre… Read more »
Is the sector cheering an own goal over the abolition of cheques?
On Tuesday, the charity sector celebrated an announcement from the Payments Council that it was abandoning it target of abolishing cheques by 2018. I think there’s a possibility that the sector may be cheering an own goal. This is partly because it’s cheering the end of something that was never going to happen. The Payments… Read more »
There are no hard and fast rules about charity campaigning
Acevo chief executive Sir Stephen Bubb appeared before a committee of MPs recently to issue a stirring defence of the idea that charities must be allowed to campaign for what they believed in. However he was stumped when asked by Tory MP Robert Halfon what the difference was between campaigning by Shelter and by the… Read more »
Could merger problems be eased by matchmaking?
Our coverage of RNIB and Guide Dogs failing to find a common path this week and last leads back to an age-old question: why aren’t there more mergers in the charity sector? In our analysis on the subject, Richard Gutch and Craig Dearden-Phillips both said that basically, for mergers to go ahead, charities need two… Read more »
Why is the charity sector being outdone by private businesses?
This week, we’ve published an analysis of welfare-to-work provision. This is historically an area where charities have ended up as subcontractors to private providers. Many feel the sector gets stiffed by this process. Looking at the ages of those private providers, though, it seems the sector may have missed a trick somewhere along the way,… Read more »
Fundraising and finance: the oddly successful couple
A while ago, I interviewed a finance director who claimed she could tell which department of a charity she was in, just by looking in the fridge. Go into the finance department in her organisation, she said, and the fridge was full of sensible sandwiches: ham and cheese on plain brown bread. The fundraising department… Read more »