Cutting-Edge Philanthropy

(Our Glasspockets team is thrilled to be included on NPC’s list of 10 innovations in global philanthropy and touted as philanthropic pioneers with ideas worth spreading. Plum Lomax is the deputy head of the funders team at UK-based NPC. NPC consults with foundations, strategizing their giving to maximize social impact. This post originally appeared on the NPC blog.)

Well-known economist, Thomas Piketty, says wealth inequality is at its highest point for 100 years. Needs are rising, the problems we are trying to solve are getting more complex—and yet giving levels have remained relatively static.

Cutting-edge thinking is being applied to all areas of our lives, and giving is no exception. It’s astonishing to think that at the start of my working life (and I’m not that old!), there was no internet, no email, no networked computers. We are continuously changing the way we shop, catch up on the news, book a holiday, listen to music, find a new partner—all of these new methods supposedly improving our lives in some ways.

But is the evolution in giving keeping pace with other areas? And more to the point, are resources being better used as a result: to help more people, to solve complex problems, to improve the world in which we live?

Maximising social impact is at the heart of NPC’s mission—deriving the greatest value from limited resources. But this requires constant innovation on the part of both charities (in the way they approach issues they want to tackle), and donors and funders (in the way they spend their money).

That’s why today we’re excited to launch 10 innovations in global philanthropy, a new report on the most pioneering approaches to philanthropy worldwide. The aim was to discover what could be brought back to or scaled up in the UK, and now, after months of desk research and interviews with experts from every continent, we hope it kick-starts more innovative action in this field.

We found some fascinating developments—new uses of data, greater sharing of information, different types of collaboration between funders, better ways of investing for impact and more. From an initial list of 42 initiatives, we narrowed down our selection to ten concepts we believe have significant potential for transforming philanthropy in the UK, as shown in the table below.

We at NPC hope to take some of these concepts forward ourselves; in particular, research-based giving circles, based on Dasra’s model in India, and knowledge sharing within sectors, looking at whether the water and sanitation sector’s online portal—WASHfunders.org—can be adapted to other sectors. But we hope the report also inspires others to try these and other approaches, so that ten years from now we can look back and confidently say that giving has been transformed as much as other areas to great effect.

Over the next few weeks, NPC will be writing a series of blogs on innovation within philanthropy, highlighting some key examples from the report. We welcome all your comments.

-- Plum Lomax