Posts Categorized: Uncategorized

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 »

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 »

Today I’m feeling strangely nervous. A handful of avid readers may remember that almost exactly a year to the day I pledged in a blog to fulfill a long-held desire to start volunteering. Twelve months later, that dream is finally becoming a reality.

Earlier this week, Sir Stephen Bubb, head of the chief executives body Acevo, delivered another blow to the government’s big society In a letter to David Cameron, the Prime Minister, Bubb pointed out that the concept was “effectively dead” because the government had struggled to communicate it properly or implement it consistently. Bubb’s letter largely… Read more »

The other day I read something fascinating in a book called Thinking Fast and Slow, the bestseller by a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist called Daniel Kahneman – probably the single most interesting book I’ve ever read about how people think. Here’s what his research has found. If you ask people on the street whether they’ll donate… Read more »

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 »

Last week, at a hearing of the Public Administration Select Committee, the chair of the Charity Commission, William Shawcross, among other things, suggested the threshold for registering with the commission should remain as it is, at £5,000.

The other day, I wrote a story about Charlie Elphicke, Conservative MP for Dover & Deal, who advocated a ban on face-to-face fundraising. Elphicke’s remarks were made in passing, as part of a larger debate which focused on other things, but they were made memorable by the level of hatred he displayed for chugging. Chugging,… Read more »

Recently, I had occasion to log onto Barnardo’s website, and I noticed that just about the most prominent thing on it is an announcement that 95 pence of every £1 the charity spends goes directly on front line services. But earlier this week, Barnardo’s published its annual accounts. These showed a total income of £245m,… Read more »

Should a charity be allowed to use charitable donations (and charitable tax reliefs) to try and change people’s minds? And should an organisation that dedicates itself mostly to campaigning be allowed to call itself a charity? These are the questions that came up recently in a Parliamentary select committee that dealt partly but not entirely… Read more »