Dr Catherine’s Surgery

Dr Catherine: This month I’ve been inundated with people asking me if individual giving really is down, following the release of CAF/NCVO’s ‘UK Giving 2012’ saying that donations by the public have fallen by 20% in real terms this year (that’s 2.3 billion pounds!) You may have caught my rant last month about the generation gap not being what it might first seem at first glance. Since then, Professor Sarah Smith has published a clarification which states that the real issue is that every generation since the war is giving less, not just the 20-30 year olds (to be fair to her, the findings had been used slightly out of context to create the more media-worthy impression of a younger generation gap than in fact existed).

Well it seems that this latest piece of research has ignited as much furore, with counter-claims by other researchers saying that giving is up, or at least stable (see my in-depth piece on this here)

I am reminded forcibly of Rowena Lewis’ plea in Civil Society for everyone in the sector to stop bickering and work together. But above all, I would like for everyone to stop dismissing everyone else’s research as a knee-jerk reaction and to examine the evidence in detail! As I pointed out last month, different methodologies and different pools of people will yield different results – this does not make them all invalid. Good research conducted with scientific rigour is our best bet as a substitute for crystal ball-gazing or relying on our own (I’m afraid, inherently biased and subjective) “intuition”.

So my plea this Christmas is that we don’t reject good research. After all, what else can give us good evidence? And good evidence should the basis of good decision-making. In these straitened times we need more than ever to make good decisions, and therefore we should not scrimp on the research. Bad research, and misuse of data for better headlines, gives us all a bad name (just look at any of Ben Goldacre’s work to see my point on this).

We believe that evidence-based policy and practice is important to a thriving, independent voluntary sector. So if you’re struggling to know what to do next, or what the signs are really saying, please don’t hesitate to call us. We run a practical training course for non-researchers, plus we can give you help and advice about what research we could help you with, or point you in the right direction for other qualified help. Don’t let the dark winter obscure your strategic vision. Call us and let Santa’s little researchers make your Christmas more merry and bright!

The Surgery is now open for business, so to get Dr Catherine to answer your research query or for more information on giving data, please email her at cwalker@dsc.org.uk

We can help: Talk to us about research.

This month I have been musing with my colleagues on the pitfalls of Government consultation, or ‘nonsultation’ as we are beginning to call it. I’m sure many of you will have heard the expression “rubbish in, rubbish out”, often in relation to computing? Well, the same is very much true of surveys. If your questions are poor, then so will your answers be.

And there are all kinds of ‘poor’ when it comes to surveys. Questions can be badly worded so that you can’t tell if the answer is what you were looking for or not:

E.g. Is a pomegranate unlike a pear? Yes/No

The negative wording will confuse many respondents so that you could never be sure if a “Yes” meant that they thought a pomegranate was like a pear or was not like a pear!

Questions can mislead or bias a certain answer by the way they are prefaced, by what order they appear in, or by their wording:

E.g. “The average UK adult gives £5 to charity every month. How much do you give?”

This question will embarrass most people into lying about whether and how much they give, thus rendering the results at best, useless (if someone realises the error) and, at worst, misleading (if the answers are assumed to be accurate).

Or questions can be downright stupid, like Q33 of the recent Charities Act Review which asks whether you have ever heard of the FRSB (then goes on to explain what the FRSB is, after which you answer whether you have heard of them or not). Well, given that you’ve just explained to the respondent who the FRSB is, they would have to be an idiot to have not heard of them!

Many of us will need to construct simple surveys at some point so my advice is, firstly, keep questions short, simple and to the point; think very hard about any possible bias and misconstrual of words or phrases; and thirdly PILOT TEST, PILOT TEST, PILOT TEST! – you’ll be amazed at how even simple-looking questions can throw some people and you’ll need to rethink.

Lastly, if you’re answering questions in a poorly worded survey, don’t just go along with it. Let the person or organisation know – whether it’s a University project or a Government department – odds are you’ll be helping them to see that they need to rethink how they use the results (especially if it’s a Government department!)

This month, as many charities and social enterprises come to the end of their financial year and/or start thinking about Annual Reports it can feel like “wading through treacle” as you try to find some meaningful statistics to report your performance. If you are struggling through a morass of numbers wondering what they mean, then take heart. Things don’t need to be so complicated that you need a world-class statistician, or a set of graphics that looks like a Japanese anime artist redrawing spaghetti junction in the style of Salvador Dali!

First, take a step back and ask yourself: what are we trying to demonstrate? Secondly, what’s the easiest way to do this?

The most effective data analysis is often the most straightforward, as long as you’re clear about what you’re measuring and reporting on.

For example, if you are a grant-making trust then you might well want to look at some simple metrics measuring successful and unsuccessful application rates. This is a relatively straightforward task (assuming that you log all of these measures systematically in a way which allows easy retrieval) of reporting the total number of funding applications received in the year against the total number of grants given out, and a note of the number of ineligible applications. These simple measures can tell you and your audience a lot.

So, for example if, as Caroline Fiennes pointed out recently, you find yourself in a similar position to NatWest’s Community Force programme, you may find that you received a total of 5813 applications to your scheme, of which 395 charities were successful in receiving grants (a success rate of 7%) and you might want to ask some questions about your eligibility criteria.

And if, say, none of those applicants were ineligible (did not meet the criteria you had set for the grant programme), this would mean that you had rejected 93% (or 5418) eligible charities who had put time and effort into applying to your programme. Now if your application process takes a charity just a few minutes (when has that ever been the case?!) this would not be so much of an issue, but say it takes a conservative average of 3 hours per charity, that’s 16,254 wasted hours of charity time, or £99,000 of minimum wage time. Probably not a good use of your or their time and time for a rethink.

(For more details about this real-world example, including all of the figures above, see Caroline Fiennes excellent dissection of the NatWest Community Force programme.

Dr Catherine: As the January blues give way to February’s freeze many small charities are wondering whether the worst is over yet? When will Spring arrive and will it bring much-needed funding respite? The most recent research estimates tell us that 70,000 jobs were lost in the voluntary sector last year; which, if translated into cost cutting reflective of lost funding, represents around £1bn of cuts.

But while competition may have increased for funding it is by no means true to say that funding is not available. Our team of avid researchers at DSC estimate that there is still currently £3.9 billion of funding available from trusts and foundations, £2.3 billion from Government sources, and 850 million from companies.

Targeting your ask is, however, vital. Making sure that your organisation meets the criteria, follows the guidelines and reads the terms and conditions is essential to making sure neither you nor the funder is wasting their time, and is likely to make your application more successful. You can find more help and information on how to make a more successful funding application on our website and in many of our funding publications.

And to give yourself the best chance of finding the right funder for you I’m going to finish by shamelessly plugging our essential guides to funders:

• The Guide to UK Company Giving 2012/13 (& subscription website: www.companygiving.org.uk);
• The Directory of Grant Making Trusts 2012/13;
• The Guide to New Trusts 2013/14 (online download),;
• The Guide to Major Trusts 2012/13 Vols 1&2 (& subscription website: www.trustfunding.org.uk);
• The Guide to Grants for Individuals in Need 2013/14 (& subscription website: www.grantsforindividuals.org.uk); and
• www.governmentfunding.org.uk

Dr Catherine: This month I have been perusing the accumulation of reports on giving which have been produced in the past year of financial upheaval. Most of them make sombre reading.The most optimistic say that giving has held up in troubled times, although it hasn’t really increased in the last 30 years.

Last year the Government published the Giving White Paper packed full of initiatives and schemes designed to promote more giving, but what impact will these really have on smaller charities? Well, not much in the short-term! Unless you happen to be one of the few chosen to pilot a new scheme.

So what can you do? Since the Giving White Paper is pretty inaccessible to most small charities you can always talk to your local CVS for more information on what might be happening in your area. As for your own donors, all the smart talk this year is on local giving, so keep your donors close, keep them happy and try to enrich the relationship you have with them in order to maintain and build on your base.

You might want to try something new in 2012 in which case why not invest in some smart thinking yourselves. Books like “Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion” are filled with tips on how to communicate better to get your message across….

The Surgery is now open for business, so to get Dr Catherine to answer your research query or for more information on impact measurement, please email her.

Dr Catherine: This month I have been hearing a lot of small charities worrying about impact reporting – what is it and how to do it - particularly when trying to attract new funders. I sympathise completely and you are not alone.

Unfortunately you are often being asked for what we called EBO or Evidence of the Bleedin Obvious! Your work clearly has positive impact which is hard to quantify in statistical terms although the people you serve could doubtless tell many stories about how your services change their lives for the better. So we need to remember that stories, in themselves, can also be impact measures.

Any funder worth their salt will be able to negotiate with you to find some measures which really work for both of you. And don’t get bullied into always looking to capture new and innovative measures when the ones you already know and collect are perfectly fit for purpose. Don’t be afraid to talk to them about this and remember that you are the expert in the real impacts of your services.

The Surgery is now open for business, so to get Dr Catherine to answer your research query or for more information on impact measurement, please email her at cwalker@dsc.org.uk.
We can help: Talk to us about research.

Firstly, we attended a Giving Summit Action Group with the Minister for Civil Society - Nick Hurd - at which we argued that companies need to do far more in terms of actual giving, better partnering and better reporting.

Of course, it is this latter issue which exercises me as much as the lack of cash being given. Anyone who has ever tried to research how much a company gives to which charities will be able to attest to the poverty of reporting, despite valiant efforts by such groups as Business in The Community and London Benchmarking Group.

So it is with some pride that this month also sees the launch of a new briefing paper produced jointly by DSC and CGAP (the Centre for Giving and Philanthropy), which highlights what the top corporate givers in the UK actually give. The figures were mainly gathered from 2 excellent sources: DSC’s Guide to UK Company Giving and CGAP/CaritasData’s Charity Market Monitor, however some additional information had to be collected directly from companies’ reports and websites.

Having gathered some of the data myself I can tell you through clenched teeth that it was one of the most frustrating tasks I have carried out in a long time. For an experienced researcher to take hours to find a couple of simple figures in a labyrinth of websites within websites and reports within reports is very annoying. Why can’t companies report their giving upfront in their annual reports and accounts, instead of hiding them behind a mountain of rhetoric and obfuscation? Of course some companies have really excellent websites dedicated to their giving and partnerships with charities, but would it be so very difficult to point to this from the annual report instead of leaving it to chance that one might happen upon it?

In last month’s “Word from Hurd”, Minister Nick told us: “I believe that we have barely scratched the surface of what could be achieved if we made better connections between Business and Charity.” And it has further been announced that £4.8 million from the Lottery is going to Business In The Community (BiTC) for the Business Connectors programme. This is a great step forward and I wish them all the very best of luck, but I also wish fervently, that someone would put some effort into the reporting side as well so that we could all know what’s going on.

This is one of the issues around corporate giving which DSC intends to campaign around this year, so if you have any questions, issues, suggestions or answers we’d love to hear from you, as well as your usual research queries.

P. S. If you are looking for help around corporate fundraising techniques, then Corporate Fundraising 4th Edition is for you, and just out this month.

The Surgery is now open for business, so to get Dr Catherine to answer your research query or for more information on performance metrics, please email her.

We can help: Talk to us about research.

Dr Catherine: I am, sadly, the kind of person who gets excited about randomised controlled trials. At least when Government may start using them to test policy ideas.

You see, we often berate Government ministers for getting it wrong (see my columns in January, February, March, April, May and June). So we really ought to applaud them when they sometimes get it right. And this month they’ve actually managed quite a lot of that. First there was the Give It Back George victory u-turn over the income tax relief cap on charitable donations; then there was the launch of the Community Life Survey to replace the axed Citizenship Survey (which, OK, they shouldn’t have axed in the first place but hey ho); then, in a whispered conversation with a member of the “Behavioural Insight Team” (BIT - the so-called nudge unit) at the Cabinet Office came news of the potential infiltration of … SHOCK! HORROR! … proper scientific rigour into Whitehall.

The Cabinet Office report – ‘Test, Learn, Adapt’ - co-authored by none other than ‘Bad Science’  guru Ben Goldacre, recommends more robust trials on policy initiatives to save public money and stop inadvertently harmful policies. Randomised controlled trails do what they say on the tin. They divide subjects (people in this case) randomly into test groups (who are subjected to a new policy) and control groups (who are not, but who do not know that they are not). Such trials are considered the gold standard of evaluation in some areas and are now mandatory in medicine for testing new drugs, so why not introduce them for policies which can have an equally good or bad effect on people?

Such a scientifically proven route to policy-making could potentially avert disasters as diverse as the Work Programme, the national curriculum changes or the drugs rating system, and perhaps avert the dizzy-making u-turning we’re seeing at the moment. And the fact they’re looking into it at all shows that they’re listening.

In his Guardian column in May 2011, Goldacre argued that the BIT should be sacked and replaced with a ‘Number Ten Policy Trials Unit’. Furthermore he said that it would never be implemented: “because politicians are too ignorant of these simple ideas, too arrogant to have their ideologies questioned, and too scared – let’s be generous – of hard data on their good intentions.” It says a lot about Goldacre and BIT and OCS that a year later they have published a report on the implementation of just such a system.

In some ways this seems so self-evident I feel rather stupid even writing about it. This is first year science degree territory. Yet whether it will actually happen, of course, remains to be seen. Plus the trials themselves need to be done well – they’re not an easy option and they take a bit of time to properly test. But with everything at stake in an economy which can’t afford to make big policy mistakes, can we really afford not to? Test, learn, adapt… sounds like a good way to go about things. We might even consider using them ourselves?!

This month I’ve been hearing a lot of discussions about volunteering in the post-Olympic glow, with charities wondering whether it will ‘inspire a generation’ to volunteer after the flame’s gone out? So I decided to take a look at the evidence…

It started with 8,000 inspirational people carrying the Olympic flame across the country in the Olympic Torch Relay; then came the 70,000 volunteer "Games Makers" chosen from 240,000 applicants and dressed in garish uniforms of purple-and-poppy-red polo shirts and matching jacket; followed by the bright almost-neon pink-and-fuchsia-clad "London Ambassadors” of which there were 8,000 - they contributed 8 million hours to make the Games happen.

The volunteers were ordinary people from every walk of life. Many taking annual leave from work to do their bit in the greatest show on earth (well, this month anyway). Many of them already volunteered in other capacities (the majority according to Volunteering England), but others were first-time volunteers. So now that the Games are over will they swell the ranks of volunteers across the country and inspire others to do so, or will it just be a flash-in-the-pan over as quickly as Usain Bolt’s 100m final?

CAF’s World Giving Index records that across the world around 21% of adults volunteer time monthly. Looking at NCVO (Civil Society Almanac) and CAF estimates together somewhere between 25%-28% of adults in the UK volunteer formally at least once a month, with 39% volunteering at least once every year. That’s 12-17 million people doing stuff for others, however research by the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC) has shown that within this there is a hardcore of volunteers (9%) who account for 51% of all volunteer hours.

Because volunteering takes dedication, and it’s not usually going to be done in front of crowds of millions or for the benefit of world-class athletes or in such a happy atmosphere as London 2012. On the other hand, there’s never been a better time to try to capture the pervading spirit of joining in.

Psychologist Steve Reicher from St. Andrews University (and incidentally my old Social Psych lecturer) has described how the Olympics create a shared identity for all those participating or watching at home. To the extent that the Olympics “become a symbol of what is good about Britain” he writes, they can become a way of defining our national identity and priorities. So talking up the Olympics is a good thing and might help us to extend the warm glow of volunteering long beyond their end.

There is some evidence that this may be happening in some places: The Cornish volunteering charity Volunteer Cornwall has reported a 40% increase in filled volunteering placements over the past year, and puts the increase down to the Olympics.

Besides it should be a win-win relationship for charities and volunteers, because volunteering makes you happy, looks good on your CV and helps build a better society (a recent Demos research report even found that it boosts feelings of patriotism!).

In particular, many charities need good trustees. NCVO has estimated that there are some 585,000 trustee volunteers in the UK currently, with 45% sitting on two charity boards. Yet one in seven charities still reports the lack of sufficient numbers of trustees.

So perhaps charities can learn something from the Olympic volunteering experience too. One volunteer, writing in the Independent, suggested that flexibility and openness are important, “Worthiness and cliquishness are forbidding.”

My advice? Get out there and ask for volunteers if you need them. Quick! Before the Paralympics finishes and our glorious summer memories start receding……

By the way, this month’s e-news survey question asks you for your opinion on the Olympic volunteering legacy. So click here to give your views on the subject.

The Surgery is now open for business, so to get Dr Catherine to answer your research query or for more information on volunteering data, please email her. 

We can help: Talk to us about research.

If you’ve got an issue to be researched but don’t know how to go about it or who to ask, then help is at hand. DSC can talk to you about your research needs and even help you to achieve them. Email Dr Catherine to make an initial consultation.

Dr Catherine: This month I’ve been reshuffling my cabinet – the filing cabinet next to my desk – and digging out some of the old papers from my Psychology & Economic Psychology degrees.

This was prompted by coming across a book by Daniel Kahneman (Nobel Laureate in Economics) called 'Thinking Fast and Slow', a book the guardian calls “alarming [and] intellectually aerobic”!

The most basic premise of the book, and the basis of the whole field of economic psychology / behavioural economics is that humans are not purely rational beings reacting in predictable ways. We think of ourselves as independent, conscious authors of our own judgements and choices, but in many circumstances we are not.

This idea and the proofs of it might seem common sense in part, nonsense in other parts, but it’s all based on a series of discoveries about the way the human brain works, made in the last few decades, which completely overthrow what we thought we knew about how we think....and therefore what all of our previous models of human behaviour are based on (including models of how people behave economically, socially and politically).

Over hundreds and thousands of experiments and observations by an army of economic psychologists and behavioural economists this body of evidence has grown into a compelling new model which has come of age.

I am no longer shocked by these “revelations”, having been steeped in the mysteries of the ways people really react to uncertain situations during my training, but some people will be. And the ones who are shocked are the ones who still believe in the old economic (and social, political, military, you name it) models of the way people behave which rely completely on people reacting in rational, predictable ways for the models to successfully predict behavior. These models are outmoded and need to be radically overhauled.

It’s the premise of 'Nudge' – the new bible of many social policymaking circles – that we are irrational creatures of strange habits who sometimes need a nudge in the right direction to correct our dodgy thinking. And it’s an idea which has really come of age now.

Kahneman goes on to refine this basic idea and proposes that we experience the world using two fundamentally different modes of thought: "System 1" and "System 2".

System 1 is our instant reaction system. System 1 will react instinctively, intuitively, as fast as possible, using as little cognitive energy as possible. System 1 thinks FAST.

System 2 is our analytic engine. Holding all our memories and reasoning faculties System 2, is able to reason on the basis of all existing knowledge retrievable from our databases, but this takes time and energy. System 2 thinks SLOW.

Because of this dual system fighting for the limited amount of cognitive energy we have to spend, and because we are generally, by nature, lazy (that is, we like to conserve our energy wherever possible) we fall prey to some amazingly ridiculous mistakes and biases in life. We think that we are smart and rational and logical and deep-thinking, but half the time we are merely responding to cues in our environment like rats in a cage!

Imagine a judge who hands out longer sentences after rolling a 6 on a dice than when he rolls a 3; or a person who helps someone with their luggage when they’ve found 5 pence on the floor but doesn’t when they haven’t.

Our desire to see the world as a logical sequence of events with explainable causes also means that we hugely underestimate the role of chance, as this reviewer in the Guardian noted:

“Analysis of the performance of fund managers over the longer term proves conclusively that you'd do just as well if you entrusted your financial decisions to a monkey throwing darts at a board. There is a tremendously powerful illusion that sustains managers in their belief their results, when good, are the result of skill; Kahneman explains how the illusion works. The fact remains that "performance bonuses" are awarded for luck, not skill. They might as well be handed out on the roll of a die: they're completely unjustified. This may be why some banks now speak of "retention bonuses" rather than performance bonuses, but the idea that retention bonuses are needed depends on the shared myth of skill, and since the myth is known to be a myth, the system is profoundly dishonest – unless the dart-throwing monkeys are going to be cut in.”

There are other practical implications for this kind of knowledge about how we think and make decisions. Imagine how much better you could market your products and services to your clientele, or how you could enthrall your audiences with just the right message to appeal to them, or how you could encourage people to give more to your charity. DSC will be running a unique, new course on the implications and uses of behavioural economics in the near future. Email me to get on the advance list as we expect it to sell out fast!

The Surgery is now open for business, so to get Dr Catherine to answer your research query or for more information on volunteering data, please email her.

We can help: Talk to us about research.