Intelligent Giving needs to raise its own standards

Howard Lake | 25 July 2007 | Blogs

I attended the Institute of Fundraising awards dinner a couple of weeks ago. I had a good time celebrating some of the best work produced by fundraisers over the past year. Some of the charity workers who attended the dinner were clearly overjoyed and delighted that the work that they had done in support of their charitable cause had been recognised by their peers.
But why don’t I cut straight to the chase, eh?
Intelligent Giving were there too and they were far from pleased.
Intelligent Giving, for those who don’t know, is a website with the laudable aim of providing advice on how to give to charity ‘happily and confidently’. Alas, part of its service is also highlighting, with apparent relish, what it sees as poor practice by fundraisers.
And the awards dinner is one of those cases Intelligent Giving thinks is worth highlighting. Without recounting the article in full (look them up on Google if you want) you can probably guess what they wrote. Blah blah corporate flavour, blah suits, blah blah free flowing champagne, blah donors’ money etc etc. The gist, basically, was that it looks bad when charities celebrate and pay for it out of donated funds. And then they listed all the charities that had decided it was worth rewarding their fundraisers’ good work with a night out at the awards (blimey, they’ll be giving them pay rises next!) has a handy reference for anyone who ‘felt strongly’ about it.
As you can guess, this engendered a lot of complaints from charities, which Intelligent Giving reported on with glee the following week. ‘We hit a nerve last week,’ they gloated. ‘Some people got very cross indeed.’
They also recounted how one charity had told them they were being irresponsible because of the damage that would be done if the press got hold of it. I’m going to come back to this later.
Intelligent Giving has done quite a good PR job in setting itself up as a self-appointed de facto watchdog to the fundraising sector. They had a big splash in the nationals last year criticising Children In Need and they are regularly quoted in the sector press. But why should anyone pay them any attention at all? What actually qualifies Intelligent Giving to make these public pronouncements on fundraising?
One of the responses to the article on IG’s website said that charities appeared to be coming over very defensively (I wonder why?) and some more rational debate was needed. I couldn’t agree more. So that question – why should we listen to Intelligent Giving? – is not a rhetorical question. Let’s examine it rationally and evidentially.
Let’s start by asking why we listen to other regulators and commentators.
Take Adrian Sargeant. Adrian is the UK’s leading academic dealing with fundraising matters. We listen to Adrian because he speaks with an authority that he has earned through the quality of his research.
What about Jon Scourse? Notwithstanding Jon’s long career as a charity fundraiser, we listen to Jon because he is in charge of the Fundraising Standards Board. He speaks with an authority that has been vested in him by the rest of the fundraising sector.
I could list anyone from this sector – Alan Clayton, Lindsay Boswell, Andrew Watt, Becky Slack, Joe Saxton, Tony Elischer, Giles Pegram, George Smith, Stephen Lee, Megan Pacey, Ken Burnett, to name a few off the top of my head – and we would have an opinion on what does or does not qualify them to speak or judge on fundraising matters. I’ll wager that you would be using an unconscious matrix of how much they had earned the right to talk and how much that right had been appointed to them.
Can Intelligent Giving claim one of these two sorts of authority, earned or appointed? These are their credentials, taken from their website: ‘We have been inviting advice and opinion from expert charity commentators since we started our work in 2004 and we have solicited advice from the voluntary sector via meetings, the charity press and an online questionnaire. Also, having examined the Annual Reports and websites of over 500 charities, we can speak with some authority about how charities present their work to the world.’
You decide.
Now let’s look at its approach. IG say the ‘privileged fare’ served up at the awards (er, were they actually there?) ‘is not something the average donor would approve of’.
How do they know? Have they done a survey of average donors to find out? If so, did they use Mori, Harris or YouGov? Did they go with the 1,000 or 2,000 sample option? And when will they publish it?
Would we expect the Charity Commission to make such sweeping statements about the behaviour and attitudes of ‘average donors’ that were unsubstantiated by statistical evidence? Would we expect the FRSB to do likewise? We would not and we would roundly criticise them if they did. Moreover, we would criticise them in the knowledge that we would not get a patronising, supercilious article posted on their websites in response.
I suspect that the people at IG would say that they were ‘average donors’. The reasoning then goes thus: if they, as ‘average donors’, do not approve of the IoF awards dinner, then it is self-evident that all the other average donors must disapprove as well. Apart from this being a logically-flawed, question-begging argument, most people in the UK have not set up and run ‘how-to-give-to-charity websites’, so IG staff are clearly NOT average donors and are therefore not qualified to speak on behalf of the average donor without researching what the average donor actually thinks.
Intelligent Giving may well be right in their assetion about what an average donor thinks of a charity awards dinner, but it’s still a guess.
So I come back to IG’s recounting of the story about the charity who asked them if they’d considered the implications of their story being picked up by the press. This is IG’s response (which came just after they announced that they, of course, understood that fundraisers need to let their hair down but ‘not everyone else is a sympathetic as us’):
‘We did [consider the implications], which is why we didn’t tell the Daily Mail, or anyone else, about it. But, one day, the media will pick up on the dinner – and the champagne. They’ll go to town on it. And what will charities do then?’
Total rot!
First, if Intelligent Giving thought that fundraisers’, charities’, donors’ and beneficiaries’ (has anyone at IG given a thought to the beneficiary?) interests were best served by the “mutual backslapping” at the IoF awards being in the public domain, then going to the Daily Mail is exactly what they should have done to get as wider coverage as possible. But if not, then why did they publish it on their own website in the first place?
Second, the reason they did not take it to the Mail was not out of sympathy for charities; it was out of pure self-interest. For if IG had taken the story to the Daily Mail, who ran a big exposé as a result, the IG staff would have looked like a bunch of sneaky stoolpigeons and that would have blown their self-professed ‘collaborative approach’ to working with charities out of the water.
Third, as former journalists themselves, the people at Intelligent Giving know full well that the story run by the Mail would not have been ‘charities enjoy knees-up at donors’ expense’; it would have been ‘charities slammed by watchdog for enjoying knees-up at donors’ expense’.
Which brings me back to my original question: why should the Daily Mail – or anyone – base their story on what IG says about charities? By what authority do they speak?
I am sure Intelligent Giving would claim that they have a ‘right’ to do what they do. This I don’t deny. We live in a country where freedom of speech is a right that we are born with. But there is a difference between a right to speak, which you are given at birth and which no-one can take away; and a right to be heard, which you must earn, and can lose.
Intelligent Giving has pretensions to watchdog status, yet is not much more than online op-ed journalism. If they want to be taken seriously by fundraisers and earn their respect, Intelligent Giving needs to raise its own standards. Until they start behaving like the FRSB or the Charity Commission, they’ll remain just another bunch of bloggers.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.