{"id":370,"date":"2014-01-21T13:27:07","date_gmt":"2014-01-21T12:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/?p=370"},"modified":"2014-01-21T13:27:07","modified_gmt":"2014-01-21T12:27:07","slug":"debunking-philanthropic-myths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/2014\/01\/21\/debunking-philanthropic-myths\/","title":{"rendered":"Debunking Philanthropic Myths"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just a quick blog today, as I start teaching the new intake of students on our\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/courses\/modulecatalogue\/modules\/SO839\">Masters-level class in &#8216;Fundraising and Philanthropy&#8217;<\/a> this afternoon.<\/p>\n<p>But I couldn&#8217;t resist sharing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alliancemagazine.org\/node\/4444?utm_source=1401+Mid+Month+Email&amp;utm_campaign=b908bc06a0-1306_subscriber_email_2&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_3660db21b3-b908bc06a0-292863301\">this link to an article called &#8216;Debunking Philanthropic Myths&#8217;\u00a0<\/a>in the new edition of Alliance magazine. The title is a bit grandiose, as it only presents findings from a survey of US private foundation donors (it took me years to realise that many people use the word &#8216;philanthropy&#8217; when they really mean &#8216;foundation philanthropy&#8217;). But nonetheless the report is worth a look.<\/p>\n<p>Two main findings \u00a0jumped out at me:<\/p>\n<p>Firstly, when asked, \u2018How do you typically identify organizations for potential grants?\u2019 85.6% of respondents said, \u2018We mostly find and choose organizations ourselves&#8217; and only 7.9 % said, \u2018We mostly fund organizations that submit proposals\/requests to our foundation.\u2019 If this situation is any where near comparable in the UK, that&#8217;s a lot of trust and foundation fundraisers who are on a hiding to nothing.<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, impact is simply not as high a priority for the surveyed donors as we might imagine. To quote directly from the article:<\/p>\n<p><em>Many in the philanthropic sector believe that if non-profits could provide hard evidence of results, donors would give more to the best-performing organizations. [But] our survey indicates that this isn\u2019t necessarily the most important criterion. While 37.4 per cent cited \u2018personal knowledge of\/previous experience with the organization\u2019 as the most important factor in determining whether to grant to a non-profit, only 25.6 per cent cited \u2018clear evidence of demonstrable impact\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This article is from the current online edition of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.alliancemagazine.org\">Alliance magazine<\/a>, if you&#8217;re not familiar with them, they will send <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alliancemagazine.org\/en\/content\/sample-copy\">a free sample edition<\/a> for potential subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just a quick blog today, as I start teaching the new intake of students on our\u00a0Masters-level class in &#8216;Fundraising and Philanthropy&#8217; this afternoon. But I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/2014\/01\/21\/debunking-philanthropic-myths\/\">Read&nbsp;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1193,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1193"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":372,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions\/372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/philanthropy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}