SPEAKER_01 0:37

Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rodri Davis, and this week we've got a conversation with Ian McQuillan. Now, Ian is the founder and director of the uh fundraising think tank Regare, which is based here in the UK. Um, and I sat down with Ian a few weeks ago now uh to talk about uh a wide range of things. Um the starting point was a paper that Ian recently co-authored about disintermediation in fundraising and charities and the impacts of that, which is a topic that I've been interested in for years, so uh it was really interesting to see uh that analysis and to have a chance to talk to Ian about it. Um, so yeah, we discussed what disintermediation actually is in the context of charitable giving and why it's such an important topic now, and one that had come to his attention. Um we talked about the different ways in which various aspects of the work that charities can be done is disintermediated, what some of the potential benefits of that are, what some of the risks are, and I guess the big overarching question of what, if anything, charities should do about it, more traditional charities that is, should they learn from the ways in which different aspects of their work are being disintermediated and embrace that, or should they see it as a challenge and try and adapt? And I guess for the rest of us, the big question is if increasingly elements of what charities do is being disintermediated or, you know, kind of cut out of the picture, does that matter at all? Is it just an evolution or is there a danger of something being lost? Um, we also talked about the wider question of uh fundraising ethics, which is something that Regari has done a lot of work on, um, and sort of thinking about the different ways in which we could apply existing ethical theory to the context of fundraising, particularly in a normative sense, sort of thinking about how things ought to be done rather than just descriptively how they are done, and whether in that context the focus should be entirely on process, about the sort of how fundraising is done, the methods employed, or whether some element of it is also about the what, and whether you know the different causes that are actually being fundraised for are an important uh aspect of that. Um, we talked about the relationship between fundraising ethics and legislation and regulation about fundraising and to what extent ethics needs to go above and beyond what is mandated by uh the law or regulation. Um, and uh we talked a bit about the dangers of um some different approaches to ethics, uh particularly consequentialist ethics, and the idea that things are justified by the end results they produce, and whether actually the danger there is you get a sort of end justifies the means approach that allow that uh leaves people to not focus enough on the how and on the um the ways in which process can have value or also uh do damage. Um we also talked uh specifically about the question of tainted donations, which is one you know we've covered before on the podcast, but um is something I'm really interested in. Uh and we talked uh a bit, uh Ian R and I about some of the ethical implications of that and how the sort of normative ethics framework that he's uh come up with and that Rugari's worked on can be applied to that context. Um we also touched on the question of the debate that's going on about community-centric versus donor-centric approaches to fundraising and what the sort of different views are on both sides, and why that has become something that is quite a sort of hot topic in the fundraising um world. And then we touched a little bit on another project that Rugari has got going at the moment that's really interesting about the history of fundraising, why that was something that they felt was important, and what kind of value a historical perspective can bring to our understanding of fundraising today. Um so without further ado, let's go into the conversation. I will be back at the end for the usual bit of housekeeping. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Ian McQuillan. Hi there, Ian. Hi Rodri. Hi, how are you? I'm great, thank you. Yeah, really good to have you on the podcast. And yeah, for those listening, I'm sure as you you heard from the the interview, uh from the introduction, Ian is the founding director of Regare, which is a fundraising think tank based here in the UK. Really great to have a chance to talk, Ian. I've been meaning to get you on the podcast for ages. Um, and I'd love to talk about quite you know a lot of the work that Regare has got going on at the moment and that's done in the past, which I think will provide us with all kinds of you know food for discussion. Um, particularly, I'd like to focus on a paper that you did relatively recently about um disintermediation in the fundraising world, particularly and kind of in the charity sector more broadly, which is a topic very close to my own heart. Um, but there's lots of other things as well, fundraising ethics, the history of fundraising that I'm sure we'll come on to as well. Um, but maybe the best place to start is just for you to tell people a bit about what regare actually is, what the organization does, and how it came about in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 5:47

Yeah, thanks. So um Regari and it's a think tank and it's Latin for to ask, and it's like a double play on the meaning there because fundraising is all about asking, but regari is asking about the critical questions about our own profession. And what we are trying to do at Regari is try to look at and consider some of the really knotty, thorny issues that impact and affect the fundraising profession, but those that seem to be kind of uh underthought. So, although there's often a lot of practical research about fundraising, some things like our ethics or our public perception we don't make a lot of headway with. So, what we are trying to do is to try to rethink all those um difficult underthought issues by looking for solutions outside of mainstream fundraising and philanthropy uh research, by looking into disciplines such as marketing and public relations, which are very similar to fundraising, but also going more widely afield into things like evolutionary biology, moral philosophy, anthropology, things like that, and seeing if we can mine lots of different ideas there to try and synthesize new solutions to the challenges that we face in fundraising. So that's what we do. The reason this the I had the idea for Ricari and how it came about was that for most of my career I was a journalist and I never stayed in a single sector. I I went from from every time I got a new job, mainly working in the B to B business to business and trade sector press, I went from to a different sector to every time I got a different job. And in 2001 I found myself in fundraising, editing a professional fundraising magazine, which is now a fundraising magazine of civil society. And I'd come previously from a waste management industry magazine. And at waste management uh conferences the plenary session was given by the environment minister or the EU's environment secretary. And then when you'd go to sessions, there were sessions about new techniques, new approaches, the ethics of doing this, what were the legislative implications of EU legislation coming in. And at my first fundraising conference, I was kind of really surprised that most of the sessions were just it was a glorified training session, it was all about how to write a direct marketing appeal, how to write grant applications. And I kind of thought that there aren't there isn't much space and time devoted to tackling these really big picture issues. So we did a lot of that and professional fundraising. Um we did many articles that tried to focus on those things, but in the back of my head, you know, I was thinking many sectors have their own think tanks that that think about things like this. And I'd always wanted to try and put in place a dedicated organization that did that. And it just so happens that ten years ago, um I found myself um with some time on my hands, and I went to Adrian Sargent at at Plymouth University, and he just started with Jen Sheng, the Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy, and I said, I've got this idea for a think tank. Any ideas about how I might set it up? And he said, Come come and do it with us. And he just like created a space for me then, you know, without Adrian and Jen, Recovery would never ever have got off the ground.

SPEAKER_01 8:50

Yeah, it's I mean really interesting to hear, and I'd I'd love to hear a bit more, I guess, both on the it feels as though you're doing that kind of connecting role between where some of your own thinking, but also trying to take existing thinking that's maybe there in academia or in other fields and try and turn it into something where the relevance is obvious for people working in in the fundraising field, which it's very close to own heart, because I mean a lot of the work I do on the kind of giving side around philanthropy is is essentially the same sort of thing. So I guess one of one of two questions. I mean, one is on the the side of the the audience, over time have you got a sense that there is a real appetite amongst, you know, in your case fundraisers, but I guess kind of a wider audience for things that allow them to think more deeply about the work they're doing above and beyond it being a day job? Because I I I get that sense all the time that actually there's loads of people out there who, given the time and space to engage with issues around philanthropy, really want to and find it fascinating and want to think about it quite deeply, but there just it you know isn't always that space in organisations that are focused on you know delivering frontline services or raising funds. And it do you find that around the work you do in fundraising as well?

SPEAKER_02 10:00

I I I do. I do find there is definitely that appetite because when if ever I go and present on these things and you know Regari doesn't soft soap, it doesn't dumb down the stuff we do, we produce like 8,000-word white papers, we look at sophisticated complex issues. And to be quite honest, we just don't have the resources to put out the the the the um the the slightly you know the more general generally applicable accessible versions. We're just quite a small organization and most of our resources go on developing these big picture ideas. But when I go and present them and we're talking about ethics and ethical challenges and the big picture issues that we're facing, you know, people are on the edge of their seats. They are literally they're leaning forward. You can see by looking at them, they've got, you know, they're stroking their chins, they're looking, they're nodding, they're shaking their heads, they're making notes, and I see the people engaged with that. I think the problem is for the profession of fundraising generally, is that not everybody, as you kind of alluded to, has the time to do that because fundraisers are so overworked and have targets they have to they have to do. And I think part of the problem is we don't really have any entry pathways into fundraising that equip fundraisers with the knowledge that they need. So it's very hard to hit the ground running. When you start as a fundraiser, you're always paying catch-up with the knowledge that you need, which is one of the reasons why conferences, rather than trying to take fundraisers forward in their professional development, are so often kind of equipping them with knowledge they already, I think, probably ought to have. So, yes, I think fundraisers are engaged with this. Not every all of them have the time to, however, you know, we do we do, I have to say, get the criticism that what we do is overthinking, it's unnecessary, you know, we don't we you know we don't don't need it. So we do get we get criticisms for being inaccessible and also elitist because we focus on some of these big picture issues, but but but I find that we have our audience and our audience inj like what we do.

SPEAKER_01 12:03

Yeah, and I I mean I again that's something I can sort of keenly feel because uh probably less from external criticism at this point and more from my own sort of internal questioning with the work of Done Philanthropy. I often sort of wonder, you know, is this getting a little bit, you know, abstruse and is it slightly too meta? But then I kind of think the the point was that I felt that was where there was a gap. Um, and you know, yes, actually work that's very heavily focused on practice is important. I absolutely wouldn't want to diminish it, but that also, you know, it's not a zero-sum game. It doesn't mean that the stuff then that brings more sort of theoretical focus to things is is unnecessary. They're just, you know, there's surely there's more space for a lot more thinking and kind of you know grey literature and things that join the dots between theory and practice in you know in the charity world. Um so I I can't the criticism to me seems slightly sort of um misplaced.

SPEAKER_02 12:50

I was gonna say, well, what we do is additive. It does, you know, we're not worse off from having the stuff that we do. It's not, as you said, it's not taking anything away from anything. There's extra stuff available and extra ideas and thinking for the people that want to um use that. That's how we see we're contributing to the development of knowledge in the sector.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

Yeah. And and in terms of where you're drawing from, I mean, as you say, obviously some of it is your your own thinking, but um there's I presume you know a certain amount of synthesis as well. And how much of that comes from, as you mentioned before, sort of other fields where it might not be sort of directly applicable to fundraising in the minds of a practitioner, but actually there's there's a lot of uh possibility of kind of drawing comparisons and just you know, it requires the work being done to do that. And how much of it comes from work that is focused on charity or or fundraising, but maybe more from an academic point of view that then also needs a sort of different form of translation?

SPEAKER_02 13:49

Well, lots of it does come obviously from within fundraising and philanthropy. There's there is so much, you know, in the academic world that focuses on fundraising uh on philanthropy and and charities, uh, and so much good stuff around that. So obviously, we're not discounting any of that and just saying all of our answers lie outside of that, but what we are thinking is that there are probably going to be some things where we're stuck that we are going to have to look outside for, and it will be natural too. So if we are trying to solve or develop ideas around ethics, we are going to have to look into the literature and the and the thinking in moral philosophy. If we are, for example, looking uh well as well around example for things about regulation, we're gonna have to dive into issue into the literature and the thinking around regulation, which is not just about fundraising regulation, but it's about how regulation works. So it's about going to the places where those things are most relevant and extracting the information that we need. But it's also a little bit about blue sky thinking. So, one of the things, the ideas I had at Regari right at the start, and then we never actually developed it, is that can we apply some thinking from game theory to the way the fundraising is regulated to come up with some new ideas? Uh, we never follow that up, but that's one of the idea the ways that we could say, well, instead of going where we know something is needed, can we go to a to an idea and see if there's ideas that we could apply? However, with and and and and and you may know and and and but for people that don't, I used to work at the Public Fundraising Regulatory Association, and what we did there was regulate street fundraising, so what people call chuggers, and we hit upon um uh a form of regulation which actually subconsciously borrowed from established economic theory about how you regulate common pool resources, and we'd put in place, stumbled upon by trial and error, all the ideas that actually um and that the economist Lynn Nostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work on regulating common pool resources. So, there again, there is something where we can go out, find an idea of something that is completely outside the remit of fundraising, and take those ideas and bring them in and create something new that we didn't have before.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

Yeah, absolutely. And as you say, I mean, as there's so much in the world of fundraising and charity that that is good but has been sort of stumbled upon in some way or another rather than starting from a sort of you know from theory and then implementing that into practice. And I guess the final sort of general question before diving into the some of the more specific bits of work that you've done. One of the things that I've you know often found that I guess is most rewarding about philanthropy as a topic, but also most frustrating is that it is so cross-disciplinary. So, you know, on a good day, if you're trying to figure something out about philanthropy, you can be thinking about philosophy, legal theory, you know, micro, macroeconomics, um, you know, law, all these sorts of things. But then when it comes to looking at it from more from a research point of view or an academic point of view, it does slightly then fall between the cracks of how you know the silos of academia are currently structured. Do you do you find that, you know, do you see that as a positive and you know something that kind of makes it a fascinating area of sort of uh of study, or or do you find that it makes you know your work more of a challenge?

SPEAKER_02 17:06

I think it is a bit of a problem. Uh, and I think it's an added problem for for for fundraising because fundraising falls through the cracks of philanthropy as well. So I said there's a lot of great research on charities and fundraising and philanthropy, but most of it is about philanthropy, and it's all about donors giving behavior, attitudes, and not all of that is information that fundraisers need to apply, but that's not the only information and research that fundraisers need. They need new ideas and research around ethics, around regulation, around career development, about the nature of their profession, around all sorts of things, about the nature and the essence of fundraising. There are many things that fundraisers need to know that aren't just about the research and information around the process of giving. We need to ask questions about asking ourselves, uh, about the uh the process of asking. And the other thing as well is that uh there's a relatively small number of uh academics and researchers focusing uh specifically on fundraising, and a lot of those are are marketers have come from the marketing discipline or the psychology discipline, or they are fundraisers who've who've gone in to academia. But when other fund when other academics who it's not their home discipline do something around charities, it's published in one of their home journals. It goes in the consumer um behaviour research. And everyone writing about the so-called poverty pawn issues uh issue hardly ever publishes in um Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing or NVSQ. It goes into their specific uh journals. So as you say, it's not easy, it's siloed and it's not easy to find all of that. And Ernob does a great research of bringing all that together in the research notes, but if you go through those, again, most of those are about philanthropy. And I think fundraising research sometimes, and also this is one of the reasons we did the history project, which I'm sure we'll come on later, sometimes struggles to find its own voice against philanthropy. And we see that I think in in the research as well.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Yeah, absolutely, and and definitely want to come on to the the history project um in a bit, and as you say, that kind of the asking side of the the equation does sometimes get slightly lost, um, whereas it, you know, as most people would say it's the kind of absolutely necessary counterpoint to the to the giving side of things, which tends to get more of the attention. Um the the thing that I wanted to come on to first, as I mentioned just in that the intro at the beginning, was um the paper that you fairly recently did um looking at a kind of typology of disintermediation um in in uh in terms of fundraising and in and in the charity world. Um I guess you know, it in terms of trying to do that thing of of breaking this stuff down and making it digestible for people you know listening who who are practitioners, I guess we should start by saying, well, what is what do we mean here by disintermediation? And it'd be interesting to know kind of what it was that brought you onto this as a topic, because it's something that I think is fascinating, but it'd be just kind of good to hear from you about that as well.

SPEAKER_02 19:54

Well, what brought us onto this was that the first year that Regari started, I went out to people that we might work with, and I spoke to Kyla Shawy when she was the um CEO of the Resource Alliance, and she said, one of the things that I'm really concerned about is how other organizations are coming in and doing the job that charities do, and they're cutting us out of the picture. And you know, is that a good thing, is that a bad thing? We just don't know, we need some research around that. I said, Well, that's brilliant, that's exactly the kind of thing Rigari was set up to do. And then they did work with actually with the Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy, but they actually didn't do that project, they went with by doing something else. So I'd always was thinking in the back of my head, that is something that we need to do. And it's been sitting on Rigari's back boiler for f ever since then. And we made an effort to get this off the ground s slightly before the pandemic, but we never got around to um to to doing it. But then when we were talk talking to Rita Cotta at Kingston, this was an area of interest of her with her crowdfunding research, so it kind of all aligned, which kind of gave us the impetus to actually to do it. But it was the Kyler and the uh of the Resource Alliance ten years ago and said this this is a problem, it's a challenge for us, and a lot of fundraisers don't see what's coming up on the horizon, which is a threat to our satin charities. And I thought, well, we're here to to Regari's here to explore those things. So that's why why we did it. So disintermediation is like literally cutting out the middleman. So it's a concept that was developed in the commercial sector, and it's usually cutting out the middleman via a digital medium. So in in simple terms, it's like whereas you used to go to the high street and book a book a holiday through a travel agency, you can go onto Airbnb or book your holiday directly. You don't need a record company to publish your music, you can record your own stuff and upload it to a streaming platform and people can download that. So those middleman um uh delivery mechanisms have been cut out and replaced by a digital um uh intermediary. So although there is still an intermediary, uh a previous intermediary has been intermediate. Intermediated, cut out from the process. In the charity sector, it's all this intermediation and crowdfunding. So crowdfunding platforms, they tend to be up until we were doing this work, they tended to be kind of conflated. The talk of the two seemed to seemed to be the same thing. So what we wanted to do by explor we wanted to explore what the challenges might be by having charities cut out of various processes, but we realized that there was no consensus about what this intermediation in the charity sector really was. It was more than just crowdfunding, but we hadn't really conceptualised really what it was. So before we could even do that, we had to create this typology of of what this intermediation, what we perceive it and think it is.

SPEAKER_01 22:43

And in terms of that, um maybe you could say a bit about what you ended up finding and/or kind of what the theoretical framework was that you drew up for that typology, because I thought that was really interesting. As you say, it kind of then goes beyond what you might think of as the sort of naive view of disintermediation, which tends to be, as you say, kind of an online digital platform that allows somebody to cut out a tradition, you know, a more traditional intermediary of some kind, and actually taking into account other things like you know the increasing move of corporate entities into the space for social purpose, which again is a sort of different form of disintermediation, or the way in which organisations themselves might be disintermediating some of their functions, including fundraising. So maybe you could kind of say a bit about how you you defined that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 23:26

So the first thing we did was we'd say who what actually is being disintermediated. So it isn't just charity because some of the new intermediaries, like micro lending sites like Kiva, are set up as charities. So what we said is the disintermediation of what we called a traditional charity, and a traditional charity follows the traditional charity of model, which is it solicits voluntary donations, people give it voluntary donations, the charity then converts those voluntary donations into goods and services which it provides for beneficiaries. So what we were looking at is the ways that traditional charities can be cut out of the process of giving and also of asking, and then also, as you said, of service delivery. So we came up with three types that we call type A and B. So type A is where charities are cut out of the giving process, and type A1 is where they can be replaced by a different type of intermediary, so a micro lending site such as Kiva, for example, where instead of people giving to the charity so they can turn into goods and services, you're loaning money directly to a named individual who then uses that money to usually for a business purpose. Um, and then a type A2 is crowdfunding for beneficiaries directly for their own services. So we're not talking about when people run crowdfunding appeals for charities. Um this is when you're setting up some uh something usually often for medical bills. Then type B2, type B rather, is then when we're actually disintermediating and cutting out the fundraising process itself. So here we have individuals which are kind of called free agents or um like in aid of beneficiaries, the fundraising regulator's term. So someone sets up a crowdfunding appeal for a charity, but the charity doesn't know about it. So they're just raising the money, and then the money arrives at the charity, and the charity didn't even know it was going to be organized for them. And then the other way, B type B2, is if you've got an organization that specifically is doing fundraising for an organization, but it's not actually part of or in integrated into the the organization's fundraising process. So we often see that we're not talking about outsourcing to agencies, that's not what's part budgeted for is controlled for. This is where you've maybe got something like one of those uh micro donation sites where you top up your bill. You can join that as a charity, but you have no you know you don't know who's giving, you have no control over the fundraising message, it's just something where you're not actually part of the process. And then type C is where service delivery is disintermediated and provided by someone else, and one of the big areas of that that's doing that is companies for purpose, social purpose companies with CICs, B Corps increasingly kind of coming into charities charities territories and doing what charities have previously done. And and a lot of times, you know, you watch company TV adverts and they're almost indistinguishable from charity adverts.

SPEAKER_01 26:19

Oh, absolutely. It's something I I often sort of point out to people like the number of adverts on TV and on the radio where you think nobody actually mentioned the product or service that this company is providing. All they've talked about is how much social good they do, or if you join them as an employee, you know, how how much purpose you'll find. And that that I f I find that absolutely fascinating. I wanted to ask, well, there's lots of things I wanted to ask, but one of them is um focusing on that kind of A2 type of disintermediation that you identified, which is where it's essentially the kind of the disintermediation um from people giving to traditional charities to being able to give almost directly to to individuals. In a way, that seems like the the thing that people might most likely have in mind when you mention the word disintermediation in the context of charities. I I wanted to get your take on the question of you know, is that essentially an existential threat to traditional charities, or is it something that they can look at and learn from? Is there a is there a way in which they can say, oh, right, there's something about you know that direct human connection that appeals to people and drives them to give and you know produces empathetic responses? Maybe we can find a way of tapping into that and changing the way that we ask people to give to our organization, or is it fundamentally something that's not for them and they need to kind of figure out how they adapt what they do in response to it?

SPEAKER_02 27:42

I think there is there are things they they can learn. So the typology is a typology of process and logistics and mechanics, it's all about what happens and it's processes that are disintermediated. So Meredith Niles of Sophie is one of our project team members, and she's looking at the I mean, there's other ways charities can be disintermediated, they can be disintermediated from the experience they provide to donors, and it could be that other forms of I mean not just A2, but all these other forms of disintermediation uh provide a different experience for donors, and it may be that those experiences are better for donors, it gives them what a better ex experience, and charities can certainly learn and take some things from that. But it also is an existential threat to charities because it may not be that charities are able to replicate what people are doing. It may not just be that it may be that people feel better about giving directly to a beneficiary because they feel like they've got control over it because they can see directly what's what's helping. But not charities won't always be able to do that, they won't always be able to put up name individuals and say help this person but not that person, because that reintroduces the notion of the deserving and the undeserving poor. And we come back to the ideas of voting charities, which I know that you you've written about uh are there, and so one of the advantages of a charitable sector and charities is it is more equitable, it eliminates some of these inequites where you've got people choosing who they give to to make sure that help is distributed much more evenly and the people that need the help actually get the help. That's not to say that charities always get these rights and don't have have flaws with what they do, but I think one of the problems with with disintermediate disintermediating giving and asking is we can't guarantee that the people who will get the help who need the help most actually get it. That again is something that's true with with with things like like um micro lending sites. It could be that the people that receive the help are the ones that are just best able to promote and market themselves, and the people that need it most who are not necessarily able to market themselves are sitting there waiting for the for the for the for the loans to come their way, but they never come. And so, yes, I do think there are things that charities can look at this and learn from and consider you know, why is it that people give this way? What does it make them feel? But it doesn't mean that charities have to replicate exactly what they are doing, it may be that they need to try and win back that form of giving with a different approach. And I wouldn't say that it's just a question of replicating the the reasons why people are giving that way.

SPEAKER_01 30:34

And and building on that actually, one of the other things that I I wondered about is is the extent to which, in contrast to some of these alternatives and sort of disintermediating alternatives that are available now, charities don't need to change what they're doing, but actually focus on making a sort of positive case for what they were already doing. And I I wondered about this in the context of some of the examples you highlight in the paper of examples, particularly where individuals end up crowdfunding or fundraising, you know, either on behalf of a generalized cause or a particular organization, but then there has been some element of scandal, you know, subsequently because that people have become dissatisfied with the money not actually going to where they thought it was going to or being mismanaged in some way. Are there things that charities can learn from that about how they position themselves and some of the slightly less glamorous things they do in terms of providing necessary infrastructure and accountability, you know, to say to people, all of this stuff is great potentially, but you know, when it goes wrong, that also highlights the fact that we did create a lot a lot of this structure for a reason in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 31:41

So so to deal with this, if it is an existential threat, to deal with that, I think trying to replicate it in the charity sector wouldn't work. Trying to micro-regulate it by bringing in lots of rules and regulations about what should be done, shouldn't work. I think it's about reconceptualising and widening the notion of the profession and trying to encourage people who are kind of in effect citizen fundraisers to think of themselves as not separate from the charity sector, not doing something alternative as better, but trying to welcome them into the into what we are doing and then giving and providing them the guidance to help them do that. So, for example, if we take one of those spectacular cases of something that didn't go quite right, which was the Australian comedian Celeste Barber's appeal for the New South Wales Fire Brigade uh Fire Service to raise money to fight the Australian bushfires in 2019, it raised £53 million Australian dollars, which is something like £26 million. It's way, way, way more money than the fire brigade could deal with, you know, and the money had to be used for the court for the reason that it was that it was it was given. And it needed a legal resolution to resolve that. So some good practice around that would have been to have capped the appeal or to have alternative beneficiaries written into the appeal. So I think, as you said, the charity sector ha exists for a reason. It is regulated, it has structures, it has governance. And the thing I think also about the charity sector is it is constituted in a way, and charities are as constituted that they have to focus on the mission. They have to do these things. Whereas other forms of giving, um, especially you know, companies taking on the charity's mantle, they aren't constituted to have to do that. Uh, it may be that they do as a competitive advantage, but it may also mean that they change that strategy when it doesn't work for them, or the company goes out of business, or they change their constitution in some way. So there's no guarantee that the organizations that are replacing charities will will always be there to deliver the services that are needed. So I think it's trying about to have a debate and presenting the charity sector in a way that can widen the scope of what we do to welcome in citizen fundraisers so that you know they are part of what we do and not see them as something different to what we do that that that is a threat.

SPEAKER_01 34:09

Yeah, I think that's that's really interesting, as you say, it does require quite a kind of shift of mindset about the the sector and about the fundraising profession as a whole. And I just wanted to move on because I'm I'm aware, even at this point, that we're in danger of running out of time, because there's lots of other things I want to ask you about.

SPEAKER_02 34:24

So before you before you go on, though, can I just there's I think there's an important thing about this intermediation because we're talking about whether it's an ex existential threat to charities, and we uh and but even if it is, there is a question, does it matter? You know, does it matter? And and it does touch on that last point that I made, but I think it's kind of important that I put it this way. Charities exist because there's a there's a wrong in the world, there's an it in the world we want to redress, and that's the focus. It doesn't matter who does it, as long as that is fixed, it doesn't matter who does it, it doesn't matter whether it's a company, it doesn't matter whether it's a bunch of citizen fundraisers or who can solve that. Thing we care about is that that thing gets gets fixed. So all talk about is this an existential threat, do we need to respond to it is not because it's about just protecting charities because we are charities. It is about a question about can we ensure that we can do the things that we need to do, and do charities need to be part of that? And it may well be that if we consider this, you know, you know, one of the things that we're looking at is how do charities reintermediate themselves into the process? What can they provide? But the question also has to be do we even need to? That's the question we have to ask first of all. So this isn't just uh, you know, an uncritical defence of charities, um, it is about how do we best solve the problem, and our charities still have a have a role in doing that.

SPEAKER_01 35:41

Yeah, which I I think is such a fascinating question, and one of the biggest sort of cross-cutting questions at the moment for the charity sector is that whole thing of is there a USP to the idea of you know the traditional idea we have of a kind of registered or you know formal legal structure for charity and the idea of charitable giving, you know, giving with no no uh sense or expectation of return, or actually, if other things are coming in and replacing that and producing the same you know public goods or even better ones, should do we just need to kind of accept that? And I think at the moment there isn't enough of a kind of clear narrative in favour of the idea of the traditional charity that that doesn't tip over into just looking a little bit like self-preservation. I think there are those narratives out there, and I think they're a perfectly good argument, but we need to focus on working out what they are and then making them rather than just assuming people know what they are. Which I guess touches on the next thing that I wanted to ask you about a little bit, which is around the question of sort of the theoretical frameworks for the ethics that we use when it comes to fundraising. And it and it kind of links in the sense of, you know, if if we're going to accept that um charities exist in this sort of wider landscape of doing good, then actually the focus on is there something unique to the way that they do it, I think touches on you know, what ethical principles do they bring to bear. And you wrote a really interesting paper a little while ago on uh kind of normative fundraising ethics. Maybe you could say a little bit about what the idea behind that was and why you sort of felt this was was something that was that was important um and kind of filled the necessary you know gap.

SPEAKER_02 37:15

Ethics is not something that we've given much focus to in the fundraising profession, even in the academic, uh, you know, academic side or the practitioner side. There just hasn't been much space given to that. And most ethics has been considered to be conflated with code compliance. It's about, you know, and I was just speaking to a European, I was at um at the Swedish fundraising conference last couple of weeks ago, and I was speaking to someone from a different European organisation, and and they were talking about how the importance they place on ethical fundraising, and it was all about compliance with the code. And you can't reduce ethics to a code of practice. The code of practice can't cover every scenario, and in between those, it has grey areas, you know, it often it's it's it's uh ambiguous. So, to give you an example, most codes of practice ban commission-based pay for fundraisers, uh, it's prohibited, but is it prohibited because it's unethical, or is it unethical because it's prohibited by the code of practice? You know, what's the chicken egg? What which comes first in that? So we tr we often try and do applied ethics. We try and when we rely on the code and then we come to the grey area in the code and we're trying to work out what to do, but we don't have these normative lenses or ideas sitting behind us. So normative ethics is about guiding principles about how we should try and do the right thing. And in moral philosophy, the two main, there's three, but the two main consequentialism, the right thing is based on the best outcomes, deontology, the right thing conforms to a moral principle, very simply. So, what we were trying to do and what we've been doing at Regari is to try to look is how what what are these normative ideas can we have that kind of help fundraisers to make better decisions, and we had to mine the literature to bring these out. You know, few of them are kind of explicitly articulated. But one of the ideas is that what's ethical is what's maintains and protects trust in fundraising. Another one is what's ethical is how we centre the donor in what we do, so we're honouring the donors' intents, wishes, do what they want to do. Sometimes because this raises money, but other times just because it's that is the right thing to do in itself. But what we have considered and what we think is that in all of this thinking around that, the stakeholder that was not featuring was the beneficiary. And the reason fundraisers do what they do is to ensure charities are resource have enough voluntary resource to be able to provide goods and services to the beneficiaries. So the beneficiary is a key stakeholder in fundraising ethics, and raising money, the amount of money raised is a material consideration in fundraising ethics. So we developed something called rights balancing fundraising ethics, which is to say that fundraising is ethical when you get your duties to your donors, for instance, not put them under undue pressure to give, and get the correct balance with your duties to beneficiaries, which is to make sure you've got money. Key point is so that you've got a mutually optimal outcome for both stakeholders, but neither is significantly harmed. So it's this balancing app of weighing things up. So that's where we why we were looking at that. So if you take, for example, in the UK code, it says it says you can't put somebody under undue pressure to give, which implies that some pressure is due and permissible. You can't work that out from the code of practice, you can only work that out from from your understanding, your ethical literacy in fundraising ethics, but you can't do it through supposition and guesswork and intuitive feeling. You have to have some some kind of theory behind it to help you form those ideas about how to solve that. So that's why we did that work, and that's in a nutshell, our main thinking around it.

SPEAKER_01 40:38

And I definitely I want to to come on to some of the sort of more practical implications of that in a second. My my other question, I think when I was reading that paper, it struck me, and hopefully this doesn't take us too far into the weeds, that there's in terms of the point you were making there about the need for an ethical framework to go potentially sort of above and beyond just what is permissible by law and regulation, because that that's a kind of limiting view of of what constitutes ethical behaviour. It struck me it was it felt like there were parallels to the kind of question, you know, broader question uh about ethics as a whole, which certainly in the early 20th century was a big deal and certainly slightly is now, where people like Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch were kind of arguing that these new rational secular approaches to ethics just didn't work because essentially they didn't have anything to appeal to. You know, traditionally ethics and morality would appeal to religious teaching, you know, the law about what was and wasn't permissible was definable with reference to God or or some kind of deity. And without that, it's kind of hard to know what you base it on. I guess the the parallel question here feels like if the ethical frameworks that we use in the ethical principles around fundraising go above and beyond just what is there in the regulation or in the law, what what is it then that we're appealing to to justify those? Is it do we need some sort of mechanism of common consensus among people involved in the fundraising profession, or is it always going to be something that is slightly disputed?

SPEAKER_02 42:01

Well, we're we're talking about professional ethics. So professional ethics and what you personally view to be ethical and moral, it's kind of not the same thing. And your any profession's professional ethics are driven to helping the profession fulfill its its moral purpose, what it does. So there are legal ethics, there are journalistic ethics, there are all ethics that help you do those things. And so for fundraising, you know, if you start from the end of what is the objective of fundraising, it's to make sure charities are resourced, sufficiently resourced with voluntary income to be able to deliver their services and help beneficiaries, then our ethics has to be delivered to that end. And it has to factor in all stakeholders. So we can take a consequentialist approach to fundraising if we wish to, and we say it's based on outcomes and it's pragmatic. That doesn't mean it's transactional, it doesn't mean it has no soul, it doesn't mean it's devoid of meaning because we're not conforming to moral principles. There are moral principles in there. There's the moral principle of helping people that need help and being able to provide that. It doesn't even mean, I mean, I know this a simplistic attack on ethics and fundraising, it's not about the ends justifies the means either. It doesn't mean that if we are raising money, um, therefore we can do anything we need because we have a worthy goal in the end of helping people. It doesn't. Rights balancing ethics is about weighing up the harm and the benefit and trying to strike a balance. And in doing so, we may decide that in this case the harm to donors is not outweighed by the good to beneficiaries, and we would not do that. But it's providing a framework, um, not a decision making framework that you go through step by step, but uh a kind of a meta framework to think about how do we approach these issues. So I don't think we need to be approaching it from the idea of there are moral principles as fundraisers we need to be thinking about because I think what that intends to do is kind of just reduce it to our own. Moral position as individuals and our own gut intuition about what we feel to be right. And one of the areas in fundraising ethics we so struggle with is the idea of tainted donations and tainted money. And I think one of the reasons we struggle to robustly make decisions about that is because without these kind of frameworks, we just keep falling back on what we think is right and what we think is wrong, and what one fundraiser thinks might be right in terms of accepting a donation, a different fundraiser at a different organization or at the same organisation or from a different part of the organization can can weigh the values and everything differently and draw the line in a different place. So it's really difficult to get consensus around what you feel to be ethical. It's much easier to get consensus on a set of principles and ideas around based around your professional ethics.

SPEAKER_01 44:48

Yeah, and I I mean that's a really good point. And I think the example of tainted donations, which is something we've talked about a lot on the podcast before, is a really good one there, because it makes that point that actually a lot of the challenge when you bring in the word ethics to any of these discussions is the danger that people then think it's about the application of their own ethical and moral values on a personal basis, whereas that doesn't work in the context of an organization. And as you say with tainted donations, often a lot of the difficulty is the tension between people's own personal views of what constitutes you know acceptable uh wealth or sources of wealth and you know what is in the best interests of the organization or what they have the kind of legitimacy to do on behalf of the organisation. And I think without having that theoretical understanding, that is very difficult to do. One of the things I wanted to ask about to follow up, you kind of touched on it there in the context of talking about taking a rights balancing approach to fundraising off the back of your work on ethics. I guess that has become in a in one way a sort of relatively big issue in the fundraising world, in that there is this debate these days. Um, and one of the things I'd like to talk about is whether it's correctly framed as a debate or whether actually it should be seen as slightly less polarizing. But between donor-centric uh approaches to fundraising and community-centric approaches to fundraising, a big topic in itself, which I'm sure we could cover an entire podcast episode on. But I guess there's a couple of things I'd just like to talk about. I mean, maybe the first thing to say is just you know, what is this debate? You know, what what is what what is being positioned as kind of the donor-centric approach and what is the community-centric approach, and why has it become such a divisive issue?

SPEAKER_02 46:28

Well, the way I see it, and obviously I would hesitate to speak on behalf of community-centric fundraising as I'm not part of their movement, but I will say as I see these things, I've I have a take on it. So donor-centred fundraising is the way that most many people, a lot of people, practice fundraising. It's all about, you know, the idea of relationship fundraising, centering the donors' wishes, making sure that that they get that, you know, we do what they they want to do. We always address our practice in terms of what their wishes are, what they need. Uh in the 1990s, somebody said that fundraising should always consider what the donor wants, ask them what for what they want, when they want it, how they want it. It was all and that may not get you the money that you need to to deliver the services. So sometimes you need to overs not do what they necessarily donors always want, but that's the idea of donor donor-centred fundraising. Uh, a few years ago, just after the fundraising crisis, the Direct Marketing Association here put out a paper that said the donor is the most important person in the entire charity process, you know, more important than beneficiaries. I think that's that's a misinterpretation of of how charities ought to see donors. So that's donor-centred fundraising, is the way we have done fundraising traditionally for probably the past 30 years. Community-centric fundraising is a different approach to fundraising that has grown out of the critical theory uh critique of power dynamics and imbalances in the sector. So it's really a structural critique of fundraising. And it's also part of the whole decolonization of wealth idea that philanthropists have a lot of power and sometimes use that power inappropriately, and maybe they shouldn't even have the power in the first place. So community-centric fundraising is a way that looks at fundraising not from the perspective of what donors would like to do and how they would like to give, but from the perspective of what is best for the community that organisations represent. And it's important here to think about this that it isn't the community with with with an initial capital. It's uh it isn't about talking about uh a community of people, because I've heard fundraisers are talking about, oh yes, but but donors are part of a community. They're not part of the community. That's not what community fundraising is centred fundraising is talking about. So and the trouble is I think that these two ideas have kind of come into conflict because one is all about centering what the donor wants and always trying to fulfil what the donor wants, and the other one is about challenging the way the fundraisers do that. And I think we kind of haven't helped ourselves with one very predominant idea of fundraising being is that it's the servant of philanthropy. So that immediately puts it into a subordinate role to philanthropy, and we've got to do what philanthropists want. So it's a challenge to the dominant way of how fundraising has been done that's come out of this critique of power and privilege.

SPEAKER_01 49:29

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a fascinating thing. There's a couple of things I wanted to pick up on. One is that it feels as though often in the the sort of counters, the discussion or debate about this, the the argument in favour of donor-centred approaches to fundraising tends to focus on the the pragmatics and say, well, you know, this is just we do this because it works. This this is the way to get money out of people. If you you know meet the interests of donors, that that is the best thing for non-profits to do. Whereas the argument in favour of community-centric fundraising tends to be more a one, you know, one that it's the right thing to do. So it meets the needs of equity and and justice and addresses kind of structural inequalities. I guess what I'm interested in is actually are there you know the the converse types of arguments on both sides? Is there a practical, you know, pragmatic argument for community-centric fundraising? And on the flip side, is there a principled argument for donor-centred fundraising? You know, that's that's the right thing to do, and community-centric fundraising is the you know the thing that would would be of most value to organizations, or or or does, you know, does it not work that way?

SPEAKER_02 50:34

It it can work, but I think the I think a way to reframe the way you asked, it's not around pragmatic and principled, it's about consequentious and deontological. So does it have outcomes or is it about a moral principle? And I think it's slightly disingenuous of the defenders of donor-centred fundraising to be saying, but it works in raising money, because for years people have been saying to me fundraising is not just about raising money, it's about building relationships, and you know, and all of a sudden faced with a threat to it, they're saying, but it raises more money than the other one does. You know, I mean, let's let's stick a lane, stick to a lane on this. And but with the community-centric approach, you know, there are different criteria and different relevant things other than just how much money it it it raises. There are material considerations about stereotyping, about othering, um, uh uh about saviouries, and they are important considerations to take in. And they're they're principled, but they're they're pragmatic, they're about outcomes as well. So it is about I think it is possible to try to um to balance those two uh approaches. I think you can come to some consensus around how you do that, but I don't think it helps by s it doesn't kind of advance, as you say, by saying debate by saying one is more principled than the other. They both are focusing on two different sets of outcomes and reasons for doing it, and what we need is to find a consensus to make those outcomes overlap. But if we talk about them in terms of uh principles, it's almost like principles that are that are in conflict. And there is a conflict between the two approaches. It's you know, d a lot of donors and philanthropists do have power. They do have uh privilege and it does set up a dynamic between the people in the communities communities that don't have that power and privilege. But if we don't accept that and don't see it, we're being willfully blind to what is actually there. And I think from the donors the donor centred side, well, I think we just have to accept the critique and the challenges and and uh you know and say, this is a fair challenge, this is a fair point. And I would also say that we should have been doing this ourselves for the past twenty years. All the times that we were censoring donors because we thought it was the right thing to do, because we thought, you know, it's appropriate to be their servant, to help them be agents of change and that, we should have been saying, okay, we're doing that, but is it right? Should we do it? Does it have any unintended, unforeseen consequences? And if we'd been doing that ourselves, we may not be in this position now where we're having this kind of clash of ideological approaches to fundraising.

SPEAKER_01 53:09

Yeah, really interesting. And and I wonder as well, uh as with sort of wider debates about things like you know decolonization, whether there's some element of you know, the the difficulty in practice is that it's uh a a structural and it's fundamentally a structural critique, the the critique that's being um leveled by the the community-centric fundraising approach. But at an individual level, if you are the one on the receiving end of that critique as a donor, it feels slightly more ad hominem. And that's always the difficulty isn't it, is that it takes quite a lot of it takes quite asks quite a lot of the individual to sort of accept structural critiques that they are on the wrong side of and to do so with equanimity, because actually people quite often get relatively defensive about it. So I think finding a way of navigating that challenge is and and finding that middle ground, as you say, is kind of really important here. I just before we we run out of all of the time that I've allotted for this, I just wanted to make sure we had time to squeeze in um uh a little bit of discussion of the history of fundraising project that you've got going, which um I will probably come back to and do a whole episode on at some point because I know I I love this stuff and I'd like to dig into it in detail. But it'd just be really interesting to hear a little bit about what that project is and how it came about and sort of where it's got to so far.

SPEAKER_02 54:23

Yeah, so I mean it came about. I actually I love the Beatles. People who know me won't be surprised me to say that. And I read a book a few years ago, and it was written by a historian who was actually writing about the history of how the historiography of how people have told the story of the Beatles. And as I was reading this, I thought, oh my god, this parallels the history of how people talk about fundraising. It wasn't fundrais, it wasn't it was it was written by the media, they were taking sides, they were being partisan. I thought this so parallels, it's amazing. So what I did was I I quickly read a few books, I read some, you know, there's not much on the history of fundraising, and I did a paper that looks that that kind of pulled out what what the history of fundraising is. And there's not much of it, you know, it's all quite superficial, it's a few book chapters. It kind of takes the great man lens of history that history happens because a few influential people, but they're almost always men, um, have done a particular thing and it and everything follows because of someone with influence has has done something. And we thought that let's look at other ways that we can look at this. Let's look through social lenses, let's look through cultural lenses of history to see um whether um we can look at a different approach, a different that brings out insights that we don't have. And I think it's important that we have this because it helps us understand our profession better by knowing how we came to be. But also kind of, as I was saying, almost at the start of this, that fundraising is also in the history, it's just that most of the history of is a history of philanthropy, and fundraising is at best an adject to that or or worse than it any relevance. And so Paul Vallelli's book of of the recent 800 page history, fundraising is mentioned on 23 pages in that book, and it fundraising doesn't even have an entry in in the index of its own. So I think this is all about helping us to understand our history better, but actually saying, you know, it gives a richer understanding of the history of philanthropy as well, if we can better understand fundraising's role in in doing that. So where we've got to, we've started by doing three timelines of history: modern day, recent modern period, middle ages, of 1500 up until the start of the 20th century, and now we're working on the antiquity timeline. And the reason we're doing that is that we can poke into there, see where we got gaps, see where we can do more research to provide a richer understanding, and I think that's what the project's greatest contributions are going to be. We're going to delve in into those things. And the thing that's already come out though is unsurprisingly, women have had a much greater role in the development of of the modern profession of fundraising throughout the 19th century than have been credited for, because the way we see it is usually people like, you know, Lyman Pierce and Simon Award who have created modern fundraising at the start of the 20th century. But of course, they built on stuff that was already there.

SPEAKER_01 57:11

And I guess on that, I mean, again, this could take us down a rabbit hole, but that's absolutely fascinating because again, it maybe goes to that tension or distinction between fundraising seen as a sort of you know a formal profession, which men were probably the ones that that made themselves prominent and promoted that idea, and fundraising as a more informal activity, which women had been doing for a long time and taking the lead on. And that's that's something that kind of runs throughout the history and probably hasn't even really disappeared today. Um, so I think, yeah, and and certainly I've seen so far some absolutely fascinating individual stories, which you know, everybody loves interesting sort of historical examples that are just quirky, but also things that do point to to deeper themes that I think tell you something more about, you know, the kind of what's cyclical about fundraising and its relationship to philanthropy that are coming out of the project. So um I'll definitely I'll put links in the show notes to places where people can find you know more detail and have a look at the timelines because there's loads of really great stuff in there. Just remains to say and um thanks ever so much for finding the time to come on the podcast. It's been really great to have a chance to talk. I think there was a lot of stuff there that we could have gone on and talked about and in far more detail. But it's really good to get an overview of the work you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 58:20

We could have certainly ended up down a CCF rabbit hole, couldn't we? If we and we and we may never have come out of that if we had done.

SPEAKER_01 58:26

But yeah, and and you know, certainly um you know it'd be good to potentially get you back on at some point, you know, um, a little bit further down the line where we can catch up on some of these things and sort of see how they've developed. Yep, love to. Thanks. Great. All right, brilliant. Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Ian for finding the time to come on the podcast. Uh, it was great to have a chance to talk to him. Um, as I'm sure you can tell, there were lots of areas uh that we covered there where we could have gone into a lot more depth. But I think it's good to have those sort of conversations where you touch on some of those things and you know leave plenty still in the tank, and I'm sure we'll follow up on some of those in future. Um, I will put links in the show notes to places where you can find uh various things that Ian's written that we discussed there and some others that are relevant, and things like the um history of uh fundraising timeline that Regari's pulled together that we talked about. I'll also put links to various things that I've written that are relevant to some of uh the things that we discussed as well. If you're interested more broadly in issues around philanthropy and civil society, do just check out the website at whyphilanthropymatters.com where you can find all kinds of articles and updates and uh bits of news about speaking gigs and things that I've done and all the back issues of this podcast and a whole bunch of content that is broadly just about uh philanthropy, hopefully, from uh lots of interesting perspectives. Um, if you want sort of shorter updates on things, do follow me on social media. Best place these days is LinkedIn by uh a country mile. I'm not doing a huge amount on any others at the moment, although I might, if I find any time in my life at some point in the future, uh, try and expand into some others as well. Um, if you've got ideas for people that I could talk to on the podcast uh or topics that you'd like to see covered, I'm definitely keen to get back to doing a few more sort of in-depth uh explorations of topics. Um so if you've got thoughts on that, do let me know. Um, but you can find my contact details on the website. Other than that, just like, subscribe, follow the podcast, uh, do tell any friends or colleagues that you think might be interested about it so that they can check it out too. And other than that, I will see you next time. Bye.