From wellies to websites: 50 years of DSC research

As part of celebrating 50 years of DSC, I’ve been asked to share some recollections of what things were like when I started as a Researcher in our Liverpool office over 22 years ago…

Back in the summer of 2003, I had only just turned 30, had no kids, still had dark brown hair (!) and was renting a flat with my wife above a hairdresser’s in Liverpool. After bouncing around various temp jobs, I was really excited to find a tiny ad in the employment section of the Guardian print newspaper looking for researchers. It looked like a really good fit for me and the various research and public policy jobs I had done previously. I applied and got an interview.

Suited and booted, I arrived early at DSC’s Liverpool office on Hope Street, midway between the city’s two cathedrals. I had prepared as thoroughly as I could and was ready. One of the team welcomed me and showed me to an Apple Mac desktop, and handed me a glossy pamphlet, which turned out to be a foundation’s accounts. He told me to translate the information within the pamphlet into the Mac.

Having mostly used PCs, I found using the Mac a bit like trying to type on your smartphone wearing ski gloves, to say nothing of my lack of familiarity with charity Trustee Annual Reports and balance sheets. But I had done similar things before – bibliographic and database work – so I forced myself through the nerves and must have done a halfway-decent job, because after a subsequent interview, I got the call – I was hired!

Little did I know then that 22 years and about five job titles later, I would still be at DSC and still involved in research and policy – now as the Director of that very team. That interview changed my life.

The dawn of the digital era

The organisation I joined was in some ways quite different to what it is now, but in terms of its campaigning spirit and ethos much has remained the same. We were office-based and paper-oriented then, whereas since the pandemic we now all work online from our homes and our communication is entirely digital.

A few years before I joined, our current CEO Debra Allcock Tyler had only just taken over on her way to 25 years as DSC’s leader – modernising the organisation’s business approach and building up its outspoken campaigning reputation to new heights. Mike Eastwood, Debra’s predecessor, had run DSC for seven years prior and had brought the research function to Liverpool in 1985.

A major reason for this was because up to around 2010 the Charity Commission had an office on the Liverpool docks. DSC’s researchers used to regularly trundle down the hill to the waterfront to actually check foundation accounts at the Commission’s office, often clad in waterproofs, wellies, and brollies. It was akin to visiting a research library – researchers weren’t allowed to take documents home – they had to take notes, and then compile the information for the funding directories!

I remember we also regularly posted paper surveys to foundations to gather key data, cramming as many questions as possible into two sides of A4 to save on postage, along with requests for their annual reports and accounts, which we housed in row after row of filing cabinets. We then analysed the paperwork and compiled the data into a database.

At the end of the 1990s, DSC had taken over the production of the Directory of Grant Making Trusts from CAF, which had been published since 1969 – and you can get the latest edition here. We even produced a ‘CD-ROM’. This was a pre-internet tool – a compact disc that you put into your computer’s disc drive, which you could search. By the very early 2000s, DSC had launched its first website, as well as its first online funding ‘directory’ – www.trustfunding.org.uk.

This was very much Web 1.0 – not many images, slow speeds, and a lot of Courier and Times New Roman fonts – but looking back, it was a big moment. The researchers would spend months compiling funding information into a database and then even more months writing HTML code (<p> </p> etc) to make it format correctly online prior to being uploaded.

Growth of the internet and the advent of ‘open data’

Around 2006, the research and data collection process really began to change, turbocharging the potential for greater transparency about foundations. This had been core to DSC from the very beginning, first from its founder Michael Norton, who founded the charity and published training manuals about how to fundraise, including the first Guide to UK Company Giving in 1983.

Michael’s friend and colleague Luke FitzHerbert joined around that time, and he launched a crusade for greater transparency from charitable trusts and foundations, whose workings and funding decisions were still decidedly opaque if not downright secretive in the 1970s and 1980s. Even in the early 2000s, I remember he would receive snotty letters from lawyers acting for foundations, demanding that DSC cease and desist publishing information about them, which he gave short shrift.

Foundations mostly lagged far behind in terms of setting up their own websites or providing email addresses to contact them (as a group many still don’t have these). But by 2006 the web had developed to a point where it was exploding, and it was a priority for the Labour government of the time. Public bodies were putting more and more information and services on websites.

A big milestone and a game-changer was when the Charity Commission published its first online register of charities. Suddenly we could get much of what we needed from Annual Returns, Accounts and other info on a dedicated website, which existed prior to gov.uk. Around this time, the Office for the Scottish Charity Regulator was also set up with an online presence, which boosted charity transparency there, along with DSC’s research on Scottish charities.

In the intervening years, DSC produced further funding websites and continued to adapt to developments with the Charity Commission website, as they started to provide more accessible open data about charities. This culminated in the launch of our Funds Online website in 2019, where we brought all our funding information together in one place.

What does the future hold?

It’s amazing how within just 25 years, we’ve gone from a primarily analog, paper-based system of gathering and processing data and information, to one that is primarily digital or digital-first. What will the next 25 years hold in store?

Is Artificial Intelligence the next chapter? It must be at least to some degree – but it’s hard to separate the hype from the potential, let alone the risks and dangers. It’s likely already impacting the ‘system’ of funding and applications in fundamental ways. Personally, I think there is going to continue to be a need for human experience, judgment and expertise in this area for the foreseeable future. We will still need human researchers.

AI may be able to make data more accessible to researchers and to aggregate it more easily. But it also needs experienced human minds to know what to tell it to do, what to let it do (and not to do), and how to check that what it’s doing is actually correct and not hallucinations or slop.

At DSC, we’re always looking at what’s on the horizon and hence we’re actively looking at how we can use AI in our research. How we do this will be guided by our ethics and values, and above all, by how we can serve people best.

We’ve got big plans to develop our research and our Funds Online website over the coming months, to make sure it is delivering the maximum possible benefit for the people we serve – our beneficiaries and customers – so stay tuned!