Current campaigns

DSC’s Great Giving campaign originates from our principle of Responsible Giving.  We want to support and help develop best practice among those organisations that give to charities and other voluntary organisations. 

Our campaign has four themes which are supported by specific research projects:

We believe that funders have a responsibility to understand the environment they are operating in.  At present there is not sufficient information about where money is going and what it is supporting. 

Providing a clearer picture will enable better planning and decision-making from funders and policy makers, as well as contributing to the growing body of knowledge about the sector.

Our first Funders’ Almanac highlighted some key gaps in available information and data.  Over the next year we will be compiling a second edition, building on what we have already done and filling in some of the gaps we have identified. We will be sharing that information with key funders and driving debate on the implications of the research.

Financial support for campaigning is vital to the role organisations play in achieving social change.  Our research report Funding for Sustainable Change illustrates a lack of clarity from grant-making trusts about whether they will fund campaigning activity.

In undertaking future research for our fundraising publications and websites, we will clearly identify funders that support campaigning, and will encourage funders to specify how they provide this support.  We will also host discussions with major funders to identify the issues surrounding the support of campaigning.

Forthcoming DSC research illustrates a considerable lack of transparency from funders across the board when it comes to the terms and conditions that govern the use of their funding. 

We want all information that governs the use of funds to be available to prospective applicants upfront.  We believe this will help applicants to make more informed decisions about whether to apply and will support better applications and fairer terms and conditions.

Our research will set out the issues and seek to estimate the scale of the problem.  Details of the availability of terms and conditions will be integrated in to the ongoing research process for our funding publications and websites.

We know that most funders receive more applications for funding than they can award. We also know that a significant proportion of those applications are ineligible. 

In some cases the fault lies with the information provided by the funder, and in some cases the fault lies with the interpretation of that information by the fundraiser.

As a first step, we plan to use our ongoing research process to assess and quantify the level of wasted effort that occurs as a result of ineligible applications.  This will help to build a picture of the most and least oversubscribed funders. That information will drive future recommendations for both funders and applicants.