The following article was originally published in Australia’s “Generosity” magazine in 2015: What if we gave a $10,000 grant but only $9,000 was received? And what if our $100,000 funding programme delivered only $45,000 of community benefit? We’d probably be outraged. Unfortunately, due to a concept I call “funding burden”, this happens frequently – and…
Continue reading →Community funding often isn’t as transparent as it should be; games get played and thorny issues are sometimes unacknowledged and often unaddressed. I explored some of this recently at a breakfast meeting with the Fundraising Institute in Auckland: – here is my presentation: “Beyond the game, through the thorny issues and towards thriving communities.” The…
Continue reading →Here’s another voice urging funders to reduce our compliance costs and think differently about how we measure our performance – see what Caroline Fiennes in the Stanford Social Innovation Review has to say. She asks whether “a funder is essentially spending a grant on itself”. Good question Caroline!
Continue reading →(or: To get more impact from funding, first look in the mirror) In my last post, I explored how, once we factor in compliance costs to grantees, funders give considerably less than we think – and in fact some of our grant-making practices reduce the very impact we seek to make. So what can we…
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