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You're listening to the Philanthropist podcast with Roger Davis.

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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 we did it. We made it. The end of the year. End of season. The big season finale. That was 2024, and what a great year it was. No, not really. It's been a challenging year, I think it's fair to say. You know, at best a mixed bag. There have been some high points and points of light, but there have been a lot of things I think that, you know, came as a nasty surprise to many people and have presented challenges, particularly for people working in philanthropy and civil society. So what I usually like to do at this point in the year on the podcast is to take the opportunity to think ahead a little bit to what we should look out for in the coming year. I hesitate to frame this as predictions, although that is in the title of the podcast for consistency with previous years' episodes. But I think really what I've come to think of them as more is trends to look out for and just sort of thoughts. In many ways, what it is is really about this year and what we've seen this year, and then kind of projecting forward. You might ask if you're so reticent about the idea of offering predictions, why are you doing this podcast episode? I guess it's a a couple of things, not to feel the need to defend myself too much, but um one is that obviously I'm very fortunate in that a large part of my job is that I get to go around speaking to lots of people who work in philanthropy and civil society who have a huge amount of expertise and insight, you know, both here on the podcast, but also in lots of the other work I do. So I feel as though I get a sort of privileged glimpse into what people are thinking about what are the kind of key themes and challenges and what the good things and what the bad things are. And, you know, I felt as though I might as well relay that to as wide an audience as possible by kind of trying to synthesize and condense some of that down for you here. The other thing is that for the last couple of years now I've been doing a newsletter every month. So, you know, please do go away and sign up for that. But what I do uh in the course of doing that is try to keep a watch on all of the interesting news stories and sort of wider bits out there in what I call the philanthroposphere of things that are going on that are interesting that might kind of indicate, you know, trends that we should be watching out for or that kind of show interesting bits of practice or or kind of slightly left field ideas that might be of relevance to philanthropy. So again, you know, I've been back through all of those newsletters to remind myself what happened this year, you know, and I that's informed what I'm hoping to kind of talk about here in the podcast today. I guess the other thing to say this year is one of the things that I did that was really interesting, um, I created and designed and delivered a short module um for a course at the University of Geneva back in September. And it was specifically on using history to inform you know current practice when it comes to philanthropy. But one of the segments in that module that I did was all about how to look ahead to the future and particularly how you use historical insight to inform thinking about the future. And in the course of doing that, I had to sort of dig into what lots of the frameworks are around futures thinking, you know, kind of cone of uncertainty and the three horizons model and all this sort of thing. And it definitely made me think that, you know, there's huge value in trying to systematically look ahead to the future if you do it with appropriate levels of humility. But actually, what it often does is clarify your thinking about the present and kind of force you to focus in on what are the things that are happening now that might be more signal than noise, and to try and kind of determine what the most important trends are that we should be paying attention to. So even if you think my attempts to actually look out to the future are entirely pointless, hopefully it tells you something about the present. And what I'm gonna try and do this year is keep this a little bit shorter, and I I know as somebody laughingly pointed out to me the other day that I always say that at the beginning of every podcast episode, and it almost never proves to be the case. But compared to last year's trends podcast where I had to split it into two because there were so many predictions in there, um, I'm gonna try and keep this to one episode and therefore, you know, keep some of this stuff briefer. Apart from anything else, quite a lot of it I think, you know, will echo things that I've written before on the Y Philanthropy Matters um website and things that I've reported on in the newsletter or that we've talked about in the podcast, because you know, obviously these are the themes and issues that I pick up on and I'm interested in, so I tend to explore them in all of those various ways during the course of the year rather than just saving them up uh for this end of year bonanza. So, with all of that uh explanatory bump done and sort of caveats in place, let's dive into some thoughts about the year ahead. Okay, so first up, I just wanted to give a couple of framing thoughts about the sort of wider political and economic background. I'm not gonna go into this in in huge detail. I think in previous years I've I've said that before, and then I have ended up trying to talk about it in quite a bit of detail. But I guess the thing is, you know, I know enough about this stuff, but I'm, you know, tend to be just reading it and consuming it in the same way that anybody else would and then reporting it back to you. And that seems a little bit like a waste of time, me trying to pretend that I've got much more informed thoughts than anybody else about macroeconomics or, you know, particularly searing insights into politics. So I'll just say a couple of things that I think are useful as background context in terms of talking about the stuff that hopefully I do know a little bit more about, which is philanthropy and civil society. And I guess the main things to say here are from the economic point of view, perhaps things don't look quite as grim maybe as they did when we were recording this uh this time last year, when there were predictions of the possibility of a sort of worldwide recession, which didn't quite come to pass. It's been, you know, it's been a slightly turbulent year economically, as the last few have indeed, but that didn't happen, and actually the prognosis for for the coming year seems to be you know less bad, or at least that's the consensus. I guess the thing to say is there is still a huge amount of uncertainty within that, particularly because with the incoming um uh Trump uh presidency in the in the US and the promise to um focus on the imposition of trade tariffs and potentially you know picking trade wars with China and other global superpowers, people don't really quite know what that's going to mean in economic terms. So there's a huge amount of uh sort of you know, there's a very big asterisk next to all of those predictions. From a UK perspective, um, I would say the situation is maybe slightly different in that we are very clearly still in the grips of extremely difficult economic conditions. I think even though at least in name we're no longer in a period of policies of austerity, you know, some people are suggesting that despite a change of government, you know, we're still under austerity in in all but name, not necessarily any more out of any particular sort of ideological choice on the part of the government, although again that's you know a separate argument to have down the pub, um, but more because the pragmatics of the fact that public finances are in a very difficult situation means that we're still seeing demands for cuts in spending across all government departments and you know, um similarly kind of changes within the budget that we'll come on to in a moment, but are you know causing uh issues for all sorts of organizations, charities included. And I guess the the other thing in the UK context is again, we have had that change of government, and that's you know, in in many ways probably welcomed by a lot of people, regardless of their political stripe, just because it was one of those periods in which the incumbent government had been there for a long time and it really felt as though it was sort of running out of steam, and you know, a change is as good as a rest um to for many people. So I think the change from the the incumbent Tory government to a Labour government was welcomed by a lot of people. I think maybe you know the honeymoon period was very brief and is probably over, and there's probably you know more criticism and carping um already about Kirst Armer's government um you know than than there was a few months ago. And I guess from the politic from the particular point of view of charities and philanthropy, as we'll we'll talk about um a bit more in a moment, I think a lot of the detail is still to be filled in. We really don't know, apart from you know a few pronouncements and events and sort of warm bits of rhetoric, what they think about it or whether philanthropy or charities really figure in their thinking much at all. Um I guess the other thing just to say on the political backdrop is that wider political turbulence still seems to be very much the the you know the order of the day. You know, we've recently, just as I record this in the last few weeks in all the political uh instability in South Korea where the um prime minister, uh the president tried to uh introduce martial law in order to force through some policies that he couldn't get through democratically, and that then failed, and and you know, it's all the uh subsequent kind of repercussions of that are still being felt. Um and obviously, you know, the political situation in France has been thrown up in the air, the political situation in Germany is complicated and unstable. Um and I think you know, again, I'm not the person to be giving you searing insights on any of those things. I mean, my daughter is an enormous uh K-pop fan, um, but that's about you know the limit of my insights into South Korea, I I must profess. But I think the what I can say is there's a sense that in all of these places, one of the issues seems to be that a lot of the kind of traditional political dividing lines that we've relied on to understand how people are likely to vote seem to be shifting in ways that that you know often don't really quite make sense or we're failing to understand properly. And that means that sometimes the support for political parties is occurring in places that we wouldn't necessarily have expected, um, and that is giving rise to all of these kinds of odd results and instability, particularly in places where you have multi-party systems um or proportional representation. But even, you know, in somewhere um like the the UK or in the US, where it's a you know in all essentially a sort of two-party system, you know, all forms of democracy seem to be having challenges of one sort or another. And that that is kind of has been the backdrop for the last few years, and I think that will very much continue to be. Okay, well, that's the end of my attempts to say anything uh deep and meaningful about the uh the state of global democracy. So let's focus now on some thoughts uh that are much more specifically about um civil society. And first of all, let's focus in on the kind of philanthropy and giving part of things, and I'll offer a few more thoughts just kind of on broader civil society issues in a moment. And I'm I'm not gonna try and weave a very kind of careful narrative through these. They're bullet points on uh the list that I have in front of me, and you know, I will present them as such. Uh hopefully it will flow naturally enough uh that it's not incredibly disjointed to listen to, but you know, just uh bear with me. So I guess the first thing, and uh maybe because it's front of mind um for me, and I think for a lot of people in the UK at the moment, is one of the things we've seen in the world of philanthropy this year, particularly kind of institutional philanthropy in the form of foundations and grant making, has been a noticeable or really sort of seeming trend towards organisations announcing that they're kind of pausing or putting on hold their grant making, or that they're actually kind of actively engaged in a process of entirely strategically reviewing their grant making or even taking a decision to uh wind themselves down or dismantle themselves. I think it's important to say that there's a few different things in there, and there is something kind of qualitatively different in my mind between instances where organizations are deciding to spend down or to dismantle themselves, as you know, um the most high-profile case so far being the Lan Kelly Chase Foundation, but there are others, and other organizations that are putting their grant making on hold for more pragmatic reasons because they're simply inundated with the volume of um requests that they've got for grants at the moment, they don't have the capacity to deal with that. So I think you you need to kind of differentiate between those two things, but still overall, what it means is that money that would otherwise have been available from grant makers and you know, um, for grantees, the relationship that they have with organizations that they might have come to rely on has changed quite substantially in nature, and those sources of funding may no longer be available, um, either just on a temporary basis or potentially on a permanent basis. And that is, I think, a real challenge. I mean, it's a practical challenge because funding for charities, it's not like it was sloshing around anyway. So I think in a context where you know we'll see in a moment there are still concerns about a long-term decline in individual giving, um, government uh funding for the voluntary sector has been in long-term decline as well. The remaining sources of funding, such as you know, um grants from trusts and foundations, uh, you know, people will be becoming increasingly reliant on those. So if there's a sense that actually those are potentially under threat or that there's going to be a reduction in the availability of them, that is a big worry, I think, for lots of organizations. I think the other thing is there's a cultural element to this, and one thing I wonder about the coming year is whether if this trend continues, what we'll see is more division and antipathy between grantees and grantmakers, because even where those grantees might well understand the practical reasons why a grantmaker is struggling to deal with the number of the volume of um of requests for funding that it has, or that they respect a decision to review their their overall strategy in light of concerns about um you know injustice and that kind of thing. The pragmatic reality is those charities don't have the luxury of stopping. You know, many of them are basically living hand to mouth or working on a month-by-month basis and just trying to keep their work going and keep the lights on. And they will quite rightly say, well, you know, we would love to have the time and space to be able to stop and think in deeply about what we're doing, but we can't. And so if we have to think strategically, we'd do that at the same time as just carry on doing the work that we're doing, and maybe the sense that they aren't afforded the luxury of doing that, whereas the organizations that have resources and in their mind, you know, uh have much more uh capacity available to them, I think there might start to be some resentment on the part of the grantee organizations. And I think that would a worry because you know it's challenging enough at the moment in civil society in the UK and in other places anyway, without there being sort of further unnecessary division within civil society itself. So I think that's something to watch out for and something that I'm kind of mildly concerned about, and I know other people are. Another thing, and I touched on it already there, um, that I think we need to um uh keep a watch on, and it's you know it's been a trend over the last few years, and it's certainly something that I've mentioned in previous editions of this this trends and predictions episode of the podcast, is about the the potential decline in giving that we're we're seeing in the UK, but also in the US, in Canada, in Australia, in the Netherlands, and in other places. I think the the overall narrative on that hasn't really changed. I think last year I suggested maybe we were shifting from a point of trying to understand what underpinned that uh decline in giving and the nature of it towards taking action. And to some extent, maybe that's happened. I think there have been some interesting things happening this year. So I think the Generosity Commission in the US was pitched quite, you know, quite clearly as a as a response to the perceived decline in giving in the US context. And that was just one example of a wider trend, I think we saw this year, which is um quite sort of large-scale initiatives um designed to come up with policy recommendations designed to boost philanthropy or generosity, not necessarily led by government, although in some cases with governmental buy-in, like in uh Ireland, but very much sort of designed to come up with a mixture of recommendations for the non-profit or philanthropy sector itself and for government as well to create an enabling environment. And you know, in addition to the US and Ireland, also Australia, um, the report of the Productivity Commission um earlier in the year, I think had some really interesting stuff in it as well. Interesting question about where the UK is on that spectrum. I think there have been quite a few policy recommendations floating around in the ether for quite some time, and those have kind of interestingly coalesced into a group of organisations that are trying to develop a sort of shared set of policy recommendations and asks to boost philanthropy, which I think is a really positive thing because I think it will help if there is consistency and and to some extent where possible the sector is speaking with one voice. But I guess as I said before, what is not so clear is what the political reception to that will be in real terms. I think there is an openness to uh kind of talk in warm ways and to give a positive rhetoric about civil society, and we've seen the announcement of a new civil society covenant, which you know I think was was widely welcomed. And there have been good signs, I think, since then in terms of people from the charity sector and civil society being given a seat at the table in policy discussions. But then on the flip side, we've also had you know the kind of harsh reality of measures in the budget that are not intended to punish charities, but you know, they are going to increase costs on charities such as um rise in employer um via uh national insurance contributions, and any special pleading that charities made to be uh left out or you know, for there to be a carve out to protect them from those kinds of uh unintended consequences fell on fairly deaf ears. So I think what the uh the new the Labour government thinks about charities and you know uh what it says about charities and then what it actually does about them is still uh to be determined. And particularly the philanthropy bit of it, I think you know you can ask what uh Labour and the Labour movement's relationship with philanthropy has been historically, and it ha hasn't always been a particularly warm relationship. There has been, you know, some kind of ideological opposition and antipathy, and it's still not entirely clear to me where the current government kind of sits within that that longer term history. But you know, that is something I think might become clearer over the coming year. I guess another thing that I would flag up in the context of talking about some of these efforts to boost the culture of giving or philanthropy is uh particularly around the generosity commission in the US. I mean, I think one of the things that was interesting to me about that, apart from the specific recommendations, was the framing in terms of generosity, which I think kind of reiterated to me that there is a desire to broaden our understanding potentially beyond the word philanthropy, which might be too narrow in focus, and to try and encompass wider um conceptions of and cultures of generosity that include things that look more like mutual aid or come from different backgrounds, um, where it's more about kind of everyday giving and not so much about people who have large amounts uh giving to those who have uh less. Um and I think also you know that's something that we've seen uh in the way that the Giving Tuesday movement has developed over the years in really kind of interesting ways that it's now become a movement for kind of radical generosity rather than just a day of giving in a fairly traditional sense. I think the other thing that's interesting if we're talking about um kind of policies around uh philanthropy is obviously one of the levers that always gets identified is tax relief. And usually it's a bit of a kind of difficult, sticky lever because it's actually very hard to push through tax reforms. And certainly my experience in the UK is that the challenge often is you're engaging with one part of government that might be very receptive to the idea of wanting to boost philanthropy for all kinds of different reasons, but often they are not the ones with their hands on the lever of tax incentives, if I haven't absolutely overdone that metaphor of levers there. And the challenge is then obviously you're not talking to the people in charge of uh the tax authorities or the treasury, um, and they are less enthusiastic, shall we say, when essentially what you're asking them often, um, particularly if we're talking about increasing incentives for philanthropy, is to forego more government revenue for some purpose that they don't necessarily particularly have uh much interest in. I think the interesting thing in the US is that actually the debate there around tax relief for giving has um got much uh louder, I think, over the last year. And it's an interesting sort of critical debate because it is not it's certainly not one that is just about, oh, we need more uh tax incentives to get more giving. It's actually more about, you know, are the current is the current system of tax incentives they have in the form of the charitable deduction fit for purpose, particularly because um since they uh introduced a higher standard deduction in that system, so basically the the bit where anyone who's filling in a tax return can sort of tick a box and say, I'll just take a standard deduction that is a kind of combination of all of the different things that I could take a deduction for, rather than splitting them out into different deductions, including the charitable one, because they introduced the um the value of that in the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act, a much higher proportion of people are just choosing to take the standard deduction. So actually the number of people using the charitable deduction is is really surprisingly low now. Um and so people are arguing, well, actually, you know, is it even a meaningful incentive in that context? And if actually all it is doing is offering a tax advantage to a very small number of people giving very large amounts of money, then that is anti-democratic and uh in the context of concerns about widening wealth ilequality quite problematic. And so maybe they need to think again about that system. Whether those debates will get any traction uh, you know, with the the change in government that's coming in the US, I don't know. Although, as we'll see shortly, um there might be some pretty major political uh developments uh in terms of US philanthropy and civil society. We'll come back to some of the potential travails for US philanthropy in a moment, but I guess in a more positive sense, other things that you know I think we're seeing over there that will also be big features of the coming year. Um yeah, I've been interested in and going on about the the rise of major um uh kind of interesting female philanthropists who seem to be driving developments in philanthropy and challenging the status quo and certain bits of received wisdom um in interesting ways. So, particularly Mackenzie Scott, but then also latterly, certainly this year, uh Melinda French Gates, I think, has started doing really interesting things. There's also others like Leah Hunt Hendricks. Um I think there is some element of it that is actually about the fact that they are women because the the research that's available shows that women do tend to take a different attitude towards philanthropy. They perhaps approach it with slightly more humility, if that's possible, than male philanthropists. Uh they're also quite often interested in collective approaches and things like this. There's also, you know, understandably uh quite often a focus, uh at least you know, partial focus on giving to causes that um benefit women and girls to overcome historic inequalities. That's certainly um a uh a big focus of Melinda French Gates' uh philanthropy. But I don't think it's necessarily all about them being uh female philanthropists. Um I think you know it's not entirely coincidental, but I think they do also uh represent something wider that's interesting as well, which is a certain strain of radicalism within philanthropy that has has always been there historically. There are lots of examples one can point to of philanthropists who have struggled with questions of how their wealth relates to concerns about inequality, and whether you know their philanthropy is symptomatic of that inequality and therefore part of the problem or part of the solution, and whether they can ever use philanthropy as a means to uh address inequality and to empower people and to overcome what they see as kind of systemic problems with society. But I think there are more and more people thinking like that now. So, I mean, in in the US, as I say, there's some of the people I mentioned, there are lots of others elsewhere. I mean, this year the Austrian heiress Marlena Engelhorn um sort of became quite high profile for the project that she had where she decided to allow 50 randomly selected Austrian citizens to form a panel to decide how to give away her money that she'd inherited, which was around, I think, sort of 26 or 28 um uh million dollars. Um and uh they did that, and the project was very interesting, and you can read the write-up of it and and various sort of bits of uh of coverage of it. Um, you know, some of it I think is really positive and amazing. There's also some interesting kind of critiques that that came out from within that work. So you know, if you're interested in that stuff and sort of participatory approaches to philanthropy, I definitely would recommend checking that out, and I'll uh put some links in the show notes to that if I remember. Um I think the other thing that we'll see over the coming years is you know more of this radical uh philanthropy that is done in the context of being aware of issues around inequality and injustice and sort of aimed at finding ways of doing philanthropy that minimize the harms and kind of maximise, maximize its ability to do good. Because there is also this generational shift happening. I think we're you know in the early stages of this huge intergenerational wealth transfer that people in the banking and wealth management industry tend to get very excited about. But one of the things that we're seeing as a result of that is you know, money is starting to make its way into the hands of a younger generation of donors. Um, there's a much higher proportion of women within um that cohort than there have been historically. And also, you know, the these donors, I think it's difficult to say that they're they're homogenous or that they you know next-gen donors have X, Y, or Z views, but definitely at an aggregate level, the sense that I have, and it's certainly I think other people have, is that there are some quite interesting differences in terms of how they think about their philanthropy, their their kind of desire to put that philanthropy in context and to think about how it relates to how wealth is created and how it's invested, and also in terms of the cause areas that they're interested in. I mean, obviously, understandably climate tends to come a lot higher up the list than it might have done for previous generations, and also the the approaches that they're using to do in their philanthropy, which again I think you know they're more interested in kind of um methods that shift power as well as financial resources and things like sort of participatory uh grant making. So I think that's definitely something to watch out for. Another trend that I think um US focused, but also relevant more widely, um, that we should keep an eye out for is the continued growth of donor-advised funds. Clearly, DAFs meet the needs of some donors because there seem to be more and more donors using them. There are criticisms of donor-advised funds, uh, the main one being a sort of concern that actually they're very good, certainly in their US form, in getting money in uh to these structures, but not necessarily as good or very well incentivized to get it out again. So there's what gets called a warehousing effect. And there's a concern that actually on top of this, you also have situations in which some uh very wealthy donors have their own uh personal private foundations and also DAFs and are able to give from the one into the other and therefore get tax benefits without the money or other actually making its way out to to end recipients. I mean, obviously, as with all kind of foundation type structures, once the money has passed a certain legal threshold, it does have to go eventually to a charitable cause. I think the concern is m tends to be more one of timescales, which is you know, there is an enormous amount of need and urgency right now. So the thought that there's all of this money potentially being locked up in these structures and then kind of slowly trickled out um in dribs and drabs uh really angers some people. So there's some quite sort of vociferous criticism of this. You know, then on the flip side, the thing I always find interesting is when you look at some of the most kind of radical and uh progressive forms of philanthropy that are out there, actually, some of them are using DAF structures to do that precisely because they they don't really want to set up their own foundations because they feel that there's an unnecessary amount of administration or duplication involved in doing that. So I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the idea of a donor advice fund, certainly. I think it's it's just about ensuring that the uh the right structures and incentives are in place around it to ensure that the money gets out as quickly as possible and that um that the the incentives are there to do that. Okay. Let's just move on to have a think about a few sort of broader themes and trends within civil society that are worth keeping an eye out for. I mean, here in the UK, without being too depressing, I think one of the things that we will undoubtedly see over the coming year is more charities closing. Just in the last few weeks, as I record this, we've had Relate, the big relationship counselling charity, has announced that it's insolvent and going into bankruptcy proceedings. GMCBO, the Greater Manchester Council for Voluntary Organizations, um, has literally just in the last day or so announced that it's uh doing likewise. And that is just the the tip of an iceberg. And I think the problem with this, well, I mean, obviously, you know, it's very clear what the problems are, but the the real challenge is that the loss of all of this infrastructure that, you know, has often been built up over decades, if not hundreds of years, it's it's very difficult once it's gone to build it back up again. So there is a huge sort of opportunity cost here, and it's you know difficult to know what to do. As I've said, the funding environment for charities is very difficult, and many of them are struggling enormously because, as I say, you know, the funding is not available, but at the same time, it's not like the demand for their services is going down. If anything, it's going up at the same time, because precisely the same difficult economic conditions that are making it harder for them to bring money in are economic conditions that are often leading to you know the problems that they're dealing with in terms of you know poverty or relationship breakdown or that sort of thing becoming worse. So actually, you know, they're being called upon more than ever before, and so there's this kind of double, if not triple, whammy going on. In the US context, I think the thing to watch out for is uh more to do with some of the political challenges that will come to civil society freedoms. I think we've seen over the last few years the phenomenon of the sort of closing space for civil society, where governments in various places around the world have taken an authoritarian approach where they've they've kind of limited the freedoms of civil society, you know, freedom of association, freedom of speech, you know, right to protest and this sort of thing, in a bid to kind of stifle the ability of of civil society to speak truth to to power and uh to kind of act as a counterweight to to the government. And I think unfortunately that same playbook has now seemingly been picked up and may be um kind of used in the US. I think just in the last month or so um we've seen uh you know very real concerns about the passage of a bill called HR 9495 uh in the US, which actually sort of builds on existing legislation. And there are some arguments that that I've seen from people saying it's not act it's not necessarily worse than the situation that was already in place. If if anything, it might just be a clarification of rules that were otherwise a bit unclear. But it's certainly brought it to wider uh public attention and it's made more people in in the non-profit world aware of the risks. And essentially what it does is it gives power um to politicians, to the Treasury Secretary to decide that certain non-profit organizations might be deemed as terrorist supporting organizations and therefore stripped of their tax exempt status. Now, they're not stripped of their non-profit status entirely, they can still exist as organizations, but obviously, you know, being stripped of your tax exempt status is uh challenging uh for many reasons. I think both in practical terms because you lose the the benefits of having tax advantage status, but also in terms of the messaging then about what it says about your legitimacy as an organization. Although I I have also heard some people saying, well, you know, in the context of uh an incoming Trump presidency, actually organisations might find if they're singled out for um this kind of treatment by uh by the new um administration, actually people might be inclined to sort of give to them more because there's this whole phenomenon of rage giving where people kind of give in order to show their opposition politically to the government. I think if it was just this one bill that you know at this point may or may not even make it through the Senate, that would be one thing. But I think the concern is that it's that it's again just indicative of a sort of wider antipathy towards the non-profit sector that the new Trump administration is likely to have, and that it is going to choose these attack lines uh aimed at sort of civil society organizations or kind of certain elements of civil society that are going to cause all sorts of challenges. Again, you know, Elon Musk and uh Vivek Ramaswani, who've been appointed to oversee this new Department of Government efficiency, they are already kind of trying out various different lines of criticism of um of non-profits, including just in the last day or so, I saw um an odd one where they were arguing that homelessness non-profits that get funding from government were a real issue because they've got a perverse incentive for there to be more homeless people on the streets, so they are somehow managing to make you know perpetuate the problem of homelessness, which seems odd to me, and claiming, you know, that therefore this obviously shows that government money is being wasted. Now, this is interesting because it kind of ties together lots of different lines of argument, a sort of critique that you know charity only ever addresses the symptoms of problems and not its underlying causes. There's a critique that you know charities are in danger of becoming overfinancialized when they uh seek to kind of take on contracts and work with government. Um but it's also then sort of reframed in a populist way that is very much designed to underpin a critique of the professional classes and institutions, um, weirdly, you know, by those who are in power but who somehow manage to pitch themselves as you know anti-elite, despite it being hard to think of many people who are more elite uh than Elon Musk. Um, and it you know, this is a weird one because you know I I and lots of other people in the last few years have been worrying about the potential influence of tech billionaires on philanthropy discourse. I mean, particularly Elon Musk, it must be said, because of his kind of ponch on for troll-like online behaviour. But now, you know, it seems as though we should be less concerned, probably, about their sort of direct uh impact on philanthropy in terms of um you know themselves being philanthropists and more on the influence that they're going to be able to wield through the political arena in the second Trump term. And that might have a sort of quite a determinate impact on non-profits. You know, and just to add to the mix, it's not just Trump himself and and Elon Musk are the problem. Also J.D. Vance, who is the incoming vice president, you know, he's got a long history of uh pretty strong antipathy, particularly towards foundations and and certainly you know progressive foundations that he sees as part of a kind of vast, you know, liberal elite conspiracy. Um and he certainly at various times in the past has threatened to take quite radical action to again sort of strip them of their tax status and certainly very much kind of questions their their legitimacy. I think the interesting question, or one of the interesting questions in this context, is what non-profits do about this. You know, certainly for many there was a sense in the immediate wake of Trump's re-election that they needed to gear back up again to uh act as a resistance of of some sorts in the same way that it they had seen themselves doing uh when he was elected in 2016. But I think the question in a way that some people have raised is whether this is a good idea or not? Not that it should be a case of just kind of capitulating and saying, okay, well, you know, let's just work with them and go along with everything that um the administration is doing, but what is the best way of challenging uh policy and kind of defending the rights of the groups and communities that you're working with? Does the pitching of non-profits and foundations as an active resistance actually play into the hands of some of these critics because it allows them to paint non-profits and foundations as deliberately anti-democratic actors or representatives of a of a kind of progressive elite that are subverting the will of the people, or you know, do you just need to lean into that and accept it? And I think this sort of idea that among some people that actually acting anti-democratically is justified in the sort of longer-term service of democracy itself is a really interesting challenge. You know, it's I can certainly see the argument for it, but I can also see both pragmatically and theoretically why uh you know it might have some unintended consequences as well. And I think also the thing to say is that you know this is not just a US phenomenon. Things that happen in the US tend to echo elsewhere, and certainly when it comes to philanthropine civil society. And as I've said already, this is itself an echo of a wider phenomenon that we've seen around the world already in terms of the closing space for civil society. But I think in the process of being reflected in the US, it will then reflect back out again and probably be amplified. So I would suspect we will see, unfortunately, more efforts by regimes elsewhere around the world to impose new restrictions on civil society because they feel emboldened by these kinds of moves within the US. I think we sort of touched on it almost there, but I think the two other things that I wanted to mention in terms of civil society. One is the issue of pluralism. Again, I won't go into this in huge detail because I've done an entire episode on it and it's quite complicated, but it kind of links to that question I was just uh saying there about whether or not uh pitching non-profits and philanthropy as the resistance is a good idea. I think there's a debate brewing at the moment, um, well, that there has been a debate that's going on over the last year, and I think it's it's getting um sort of stronger in in the kind of new political context, about whether pluralism within philanthropy and civil society is something we should aim for and whether it's an inherent good, or whether actually we need to just accept, you know, that there are boundaries to to what we should deem uh okay within civil society and be willing to draw those and then willing to kind of call out things that don't fall within those acceptable boundaries. Um, and I think this is uh a really interesting one because you know some people might argue that pluralism has in part kind of led to the problems um that US democracy finds itself in at the moment, um, you know, in terms of the kind of polarization that we've seen and and the triumph of right-wing populism. But then other people would say, no, actually, it's the opposite, it's that we haven't had genuine pluralism for too long, that actually we need to learn to, you know, to disagree well with people whose views we don't necessarily agree with, but to make some efforts to understand them. And I think this is you know a really interesting and complicated debate that we're going to be having over the coming year. It's certainly something I've uh got coming up on the podcast in the new year, some uh interesting guests to talk about. Um so I think it's definitely something to watch. The other thing I'll just finally say on civil society that we should be watching out for in the coming year is another debate that I think has come to the fore this year but has been brewing around for a few years now, which is about the it's a few things tied together. It's it's essentially about whether rationality and the idea that philanthropy needs to be sort of strategic and data focused and and kind of centered around measurement, whether that uh that kind of paradigm has gone too far and whether it needs to be rebalanced in the other direction with more acknowledgement of the importance of you know heart and elements of value that can't necessarily be measured in those same terms, or certainly not in economic terms. I think you know there's been all sorts of things. Um there's a a New York Times article um just in the last week or so, got a lot of traction, and that was pitched as a sort of critique of effective altruism along those lines. Um it heavily quoted Amy Schiller, who listeners to the podcast might remember, I had another guest earlier this year talking about her book, The Price of Humanity, which I think is uh one of the most interesting books about philanthropy that's been out in in recent years and is very much a kind of critique of this overly rationalized uh approach to philanthropy and and again a sort of need for a rebalancing. But then also this year we've had the Stanford Social Innovation Review article um all about trust based versus strategic philanthropy and you know, proclaiming strategic philanthropy might be. Dead. Similarly, The Economist right back at the start of the year had a whole sort of section on philanthropy in which it argued again that actually the shift towards trust-based philanthropy might sort of spell the end for strategic philanthropy, or at least that there had been a kind of necessary correction to that trend towards strategic philanthropy. This kind of idea, you know, this push back on the relentless drive towards optimization and efficiency through measurement and strategy. As I say, it's been going on for a few years now, but I think it will uh, if not come to a head, it'll certainly become more mainstream and we'll have more debate about it in the coming year. The other thing I will just chuck in before we go into a section looking at some tech trends, I mean it's kind of linked to tech, I guess, but it's not specifically about tech, so I thought I'd put it in here, is something I've been mentioning for the last few years, and I think I've often thrown in as one of my predictions, which is I think a big area of debate over the coming year is going to be about the intersection of concerns about population and birth rates and the sort of growing pronatalist movement, you know, the idea that people need to have more um babies in order to overcome some of these challenges, and also the area of sort of individual life extension. Certainly, pronatalism and population is going to be a big part of sort of mainstream political discourse, but I think there is an important element of this for philanthropy as well, partly because I think these are, you know, there's a long history of philanthropy getting involved in population issues and uh well, you know, on both sides of it, both in terms of um uh kind of questioning whether there's overpopulation and also at times sort of whether there is there is underpopulation. And also I think the other thing is that lots of individual wealthy philanthropists uh have expressed an interest in this, and again, you know, without getting too fixated on Elon Musk, this is something of a hobby horse of his, but also lots of in in uh individual wealthy people seem to be very interested in the idea of life extension technologies as well. So I think this whole question of birth and death and you know length of life and how these things all intersect is going to be a pretty big topic over the coming year, and I think one where increasingly, you know, philanthropy and philanthropic organizations will probably have to decide where they come down on some of these issues. So I would definitely have that down as one to watch. Okay, at this point, let's take a short break and then I will be back to talk about some tech trends in just a moment. Okay, we're back. Uh well the good news is we're moving on to the uh tech trends section if you were waiting for that. The bad news is I've literally got through, I think, four pages of my notes out of about 12. Uh, so I'm not going at the sort of pace that I promised at the beginning, but I am going to do my best to try and keep this reasonably brief because I've talked about a lot of these things um in uh in detail on the podcast and in written form many times before. So I will try and sort of reference things where uh appropriate. So let's dive into some tech trends. So the first one I wanted to talk about is the impact of platforms on philanthropy. And again, it's definitely something I've written and talked about plenty of times before. I've been sort of arguing that there's a kind of platformization of philanthropy that might bring benefits, certainly, in terms of allowing people more direct connection with the causes and even the you know end recipients that they're giving to, and therefore might drive more giving. But it's also going to bring lots of challenges, I think, in terms of sort of unintended consequences. But this year we've certainly seen some interesting developments in terms of, for instance, you know, new partnerships between GoFundMe and Meta, uh, trying to kind of bring GoFundMe's crowdfund uh crowdfunding model and linking it up with the sort of social media capabilities of Meta to make you know the shareability element of it even stronger. We've also seen, and we'll come back to this in a minute, um, a new partnership between just giving, the UK fundraising platform, and the giving block, which is a kind of crypto giving platform designed to allow people to give crypto and digital currencies. So I think there are all sorts of ways in which these platforms, both kind of non-profit specific ones, but also commercial ones, are starting to think about how they make giving part of their sales pitch. Because fundamentally, what platforms, certainly commercial ones, want to do is as far as possible for you to do everything when you're in the digital world on the platform and through the platform rather than leaving it. So what they don't want you to do is to go off somewhere else and look at a website, they want you to be able to do all of the things that you want to do through the platform. So I think adding, giving functionality into what they're already doing is really important. I think another interesting thing has been the growth of Chinese uh tech platforms. They're all they're already huge in China itself when we're talking about sort of social media platforms, and actually what they've been doing in terms of philanthropy is often quite a long way ahead of what's been happening in the West, and the growth of digital philanthropy in China has been uh you know absolutely uh stratospheric and kind of really interesting to watch. I don't think those social media platforms have necessarily cut through to the West understandably because of sort of language and cultural barriers, but commercial platforms definitely have. So there's been a huge rise in usage of platforms like TMU and Shine and you know AliExpress and these others over the last year or so. And I wonder if this is a sort of you know early warning sign that actually the the growth and influence of Chinese tech platforms will spread out into other areas as well, and whether they will bring some of that already well-developed capability that they have for allowing um online giving to to a Western market as well. So, you know, keep a watch out for that. But I think there are sorts of lots of questions that this raises, as I say, potentially there's some good things in terms of it driving more giving and making the giving experience more rewarding for individuals, but there are also all kinds of questions. So there's the question of who gets to be on the platform in terms of which causes a non-profit. I think in the context of what I was saying before about pluralism, an interesting additional dimension of that is to what extent are digital platforms increasingly acting as gatekeepers, sort of de facto gatekeepers for the boundaries of civil society, if they are the ones who get to decide what does or doesn't end up on the platform. You know, obviously to some extent that might be dictated by the, you know, the legal situation within the country that they're operating in. But often what you find is that above and beyond that, they will make determinations about certain causes not being ones that they want to support on the platform. And this is occasionally proven quite controversial because people then say, well, with what authority do they have to make those those choices, um, particularly if they're not especially transparent. I think there are also practical challenges for non-profits in terms of you know picking which platforms to put their efforts into. And then, you know, once they have done that, there's the risks of platform dependency. So once you've sort of put all your eggs in the basket of a particular platform, what then happens if there are future changes in cost or terms of service, or you you lose access to that platform for some reason, you're sort of denied it or removed from the platform. What if the platform itself closes or there's a change of ownership of the platform? God forbid, imagine you know, a situation in which a previously popular social media platform got taken over by a billionaire owner who uh changed it and ran it into the ground and turned it into a um uh dustbin fire of right-wing extremism. I mean, obviously that would never happen in reality. So it's you know, it's just a hypothetical, but you know, it does make the point, doesn't it? But I think you know there are all those challenges as well. And then I think increasingly, you know, there are really interesting questions about in the context of divisive issues and uh situations like the you know the conflicts um in Ukraine and the situation in Israel, Palestine and Gaza, you know, in the age where people are increasingly able to give via these platforms to unregistered groups or even to individuals, to what extent does this sort of test the boundaries of what we're willing to call philanthropy or what we're willing to accept if people are you know giving to support the purchase of ammunition or that kind of thing, or kind of activities that some people might think are absolutely right and proper in the context of what they see as freedom fighting and other people might see as terrorist activity. And again, you know, how then does the platform make those determinations? Because you know, either way, it's probably damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. So I think there are all kinds of interesting questions there about um this sort of platformization effect. Another interesting question, I think, around technology that we need to be keeping an eye out for over the coming year is the extent to which certainly within technology, although I think the phenomenon goes wider than this. The lines between commercial and non-profit are getting blurrier and blurrier. Um, as I say, I don't think this is unique to technology because actually, you know, this this you know, people have been blurring those lines for a long time. And I think certainly in the last 10 years or so, with the rise of impact investment and also social investment uh and social enterprise models, you know, those lines have sort of deliberately got blurrier. But one of the interesting things that's been happening over the last year is a big debate that's sort of developed, particularly centered around OpenAI, the company that makes Chat GPT, where originally that was set up as a non-profit, um, which then oversaw a kind of commercial subsidiary, which is the company that has become vastly successful, um, at least on paper. It doesn't actually deliver uh real returns at this point in time, it loses large amounts of money. Um, but that's by the by. But it, you know, that is a very successful commercial subsidiary, and actually there was a big sort of power struggle uh earlier this year or possibly even at the end of last year, where um the CEO Sam Altman was ousted and then quite hastily uh kind of uh taken back on board. And lots of analysts said that the essential issue was there was a division in the company between those who thought that it should stick to its original founding non-profit mission of sort of safely developing artificial intelligence, and those who thought that actually the non-profit structuring was a an unnecessary constraint on its ability to grow commercially. And actually what's happening now is that you know the the latter side won out, and not um OpenAI is in the process of trying to work out how it can transition from its original non-profit structure to a sort of fully commercial structure. Now that is more difficult than it, you know, than I think lots of the people who propose doing that first thought for various legal and and practical reasons. And one of the suggestions now is that actually what OpenAI will do is sort of transition to a uh a sort of social purpose structure, maybe like a kind of benefit corporation or a B Corp. And you know, again, that raises, I think, all kinds of interesting questions about you know the extent to which the development of technology is in itself a social purpose, which the people doing it will often tell you it is, and you know, or whether actually it needs to be doing something else to justify having a social purpose, and that's just the commercial element. And I think there are all kinds of you know aspects of this debate that we're gonna have to thrash out through uh throughout the coming year. Another thing I think on tech that you know probably people will be keenly aware of is what's happened around social media. I uh certainly one of my predictions at the end of last year, I think, was the death of Twitter, which may not yet have come to pass, but I think I feel vindicated in that it's it definitely feels like you know something substantive has has happened there. And particularly from a charity non-profit point of view, there are a lot of charities uh and kind of campaign groups now leaving X, as I suppose we have to call it. So, I mean, here in the UK, um Akivo, the uh Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organizations has left, NPC, um the uh philanthropy consultancy's left, groups like Health Poverty Action, Race Equality Foundation, Children First, that they've all left. Even the Guardian newspaper made an announcement, you know, some people thought slightly sort of pompous. Um, but again, that's just because the Guardian tends to attract that sort of opprium. But it said that, you know, it was refusing to post on X anymore and would be leaving. And I think a lot of that is framed in the context of you know concerns about the the direction in which X is going under the leadership of Elon Musk and you know the fact that it had been sort of opened up for hate speech and it'd essentially become a place where you know people espousing really objectionable views were allowed free reign in the in the name of sort of free speech. I think that the other side of it that's interesting is I I think that absolutely is the driver, but if X or Twitter was still a useful and good place in which to communicate, would people feel more of a bind? I know I certainly did for a long time. I kind of would be, would have been quite keen to leave X or Twitter, you know, a number of years ago. And I didn't for quite a while because it was still uh had utility to me and I kind of had value out of it. And then suddenly and over the period of about six months, it just stopped having value. It's it was very hard to cut through the algorithms, things that you put out would get little or no engagement or traction, and the things that you would get in on your feed just became a sort of you know uh absolute dustbin fire of kind of um you know grotesque people uh shilling crypto and then people espousing awful opinions about things. And so it just didn't really feel either like a place that I particularly wanted to spend time or that was very useful. So actually, the eventual decision to wind down my presence um and to to essentially leave was much easier. And this I wondered if it was an example of um what Corey Doctorow, the writer, rather wonderfully calls um enchitification, which I believe I'm justified in using because it's uh at least one dictionary's word of the year. Um but it's essentially this idea that over time what happens to sort of tech products and platforms is that they just twiddle and fiddle with them to the point where they just get rubbish and then everybody has to leave and move on to something else. I guess the interesting question right now is what is that something else? You know, we had a period where you know everybody thought it was Mastodon and then it was threads for a bit. Blue Sky seems to have emerged as the um as the the main kind of uh challenger to Twitter, and there are a lot of people who've left Twitter or X and are now using Blue Sky, and I'm I'm certainly using it and finding it pretty good, um, you know, in addition to using LinkedIn as a sort of more work-focused platform. There are criticisms, I think, from some people so far that Blue Sky is essentially just a sort of echo chamber for you know self-congratulatory people of a more liberal frame of mind. And I think you know those kinds of criticisms are worth taking on board and being aware of. And obviously, echo chambers do have a bad reputation, but I I mean, going back to what I was saying before, I would still rather spend time in a place where people are generally nice to each other and where they're not trying to sell me bad crypto or the concept of Nazism. Thanks very much. So, you know, I'm fine with using Blue Sky for now. Will it stay like that? I think only time will tell. It's you know, it's already apparent that there are sort of bots and and uh those kinds of accounts coming on there, and they are being you know cleared out and picked off by the people moderating it, and there is the fact that it's got a sort of fundamentally decentralized nature that might protect it in ways that that Twitter or X never was uh capable of being protected. But I'm not naive enough to think that it will stay perfect forever. So I think we'll just have to wait and see over the coming year whether it proves to be a feasible long-term replacement for lots of people for X. Sticking on social media for a minute, kind of. Um one of the other things that I have been interested in for the last few years, uh, as many listeners will know, um, and I think will be another, you know, will be a big trend for the year ahead, is about the impact of influencers. My interest up to this point is sort of focused on Mr. Beast and his philanthropy, because I'm sort of grimly fascinated by it. And um, certainly I had a journal article out about Mr. Beast trying to kind of work through some of the issues around his philanthropy earlier on in the year. But also I'm increasingly aware that there is a whole world of sort of influencers on TikTok and other places that I don't even know about, but are, you know, have huge audiences, certainly among younger people. And I'm really interested in kind of what impact, if any, they might have on philanthropy. I noticed, you know, on which note there was an article just yesterday as I read this in the um, as I record this in the FT, talking about uh celebrity Gen Z or Gen Z um philanthropists, um, you know, saying they don't necessarily use the word philanthropy, but a lot of them do have an element of giving and activism in what they do, and they're they're very much sort of part of this world of of influences. Um I guess, you know, what what I'd be interested in keeping an eye out for over the coming year is in terms of what this means for how young people view philanthropy, there's definitely a positive version, which is, you know, they're aware of it for a start, and maybe they're inspired to kind of do something themselves, whether that's in terms of giving or social action or activism, even if they don't use any of that terminology. But then there are also questions about whether it might have a more negative effect. So certainly with Mr. Beast, one of the questions is, you know, does the model promote a certain sort of passivity? Because people are being told that by watching these videos they are doing something good for charity. And so does that reduce their motivation or inclination to go off and do anything else? Um, in terms of what the videos themselves are showing, Mr. Beast and others, what works in that context of social media tends to be kind of quite individualized acts of charity, and where there's often a relationship between an individual donor and somebody receiving a gift. You know, it might be, as say, Mr. Beast going and curing blindness for a thousand blind people or building a well in an African village, or it might be one of the many people recording these kind of random acts of kindness videos where they surreptitiously film themselves going up and you know giving somebody at a bus stop flowers in a way that's you know definitely not entirely creepy. You know, and if that is the model, are younger people who are watching this being fed, you know, often well-meaning but potentially quite problematic, individualized models of philanthropy that contain, you know, assumptions about gratitude on the part of the recipient that we might want to get away from. I guess the other question is, you know, if people are looking at these videos and even if they get motivated to want to do something good in terms of giving or social action, are they going to bypass traditional charities or non-profits when they do that because they they increasingly sort of seem irrelevant? Um, and the the additional element of this that I've kind of been thinking about just recently and have become aware of this year is the growth of, I think what in um an Extension report that I read on sort of trends they call the impatience economy, but you could also think there's other things like hack culture and the concept of duguard, which is you know kind of doing stuff that's just good enough to kind of solve a problem. And it's the idea that you know people increasingly and younger people, they're sort of looking for quick, you know, imperfect solutions and are quite often willing to look, you know, to try and find sort of non-traditional roots or sources of information. So you look in finance, you know, there's a whole trend of people on social media offering financial advice, particularly around, you know, kind of passive income, ways that you can essentially make money by doing nothing. Um, but also around health and well-being. Um, you know, there's lots of sort of wellness hacks and this whole sort of wealth cult uh wellness culture. And again, around money, you know, crypto has a large part of this again, sort of, you know, people being told that actually you can bypass all of the, you know, the the sort of pro difficult um realities of having to sort of get a job and make money if you just uh get into crypto and you can make you know X million dollars per year or whatever just by doing this from the comfort of your own home. And when people are kind of buying into these um this sort of hack culture, they're often looking to social media and to influencers or to people that they see as their peers rather than traditional sources of information like news outlets or companies or you know organizations. And I think there's something really interesting there in a question for charities and nonprofits, which is if they traditionally have traded on the idea that they are trusted voices and sources of advice, how, if at all, do they kind of insert themselves into that world and get themselves listened to by people who perhaps don't really look to those sources of advice anymore? You know, just as an example, if there are all these sort of uh younger influencers out there giving financial literacy advice or talking to people about passive income, is there a possibility for nonprofits to team up with some of those influences in order to try and get them to help people think about? And understand giving to charity as well as sort of part of what they're they're doing, you know, and what might the potential risks be of those sorts of partnerships. So I think there's something really interesting there that I want to kind of keep an eye on for the coming year. Another area, just thinking about younger people, and it makes me sound awfully old, younger people, oh, they're all very different, aren't they? But putting aside that kind of nonsense for a moment, there is something I think really interesting as well about younger people's relationship with with technology, which is obviously, you know, the the kind of um uh caricature is that younger people are just absolutely glued to their phones and that's all they want to do. And there is some element of truth in that, I say, as the uh father of an 11-year-old daughter who's just got a phone this year. And but I think from from two different sides, maybe one of the interesting trends will be a sort of be a sort of D-Teching effect where you know younger people increasingly are moving away from technology and and digital experiences towards more kind of real-world experiences and pastimes. And as I say, from two directions, because in one sense that's being driven by parents like me who have concerns about the impact of this technology on their children and on young people more broadly, and there's a desire to sort of protect kids from it. So we have, you know, there's a whole uh new law in Australia designed to prevent people, uh young people under the age of 16 from using social media, but they're also in certainly in the UK and I know elsewhere, lots of calls for schools to ban social media use and phones outright and to try and you know prevent children using them until they're of a of a certain age. But I think it's also there are some interesting signs that uh when younger people get a bit older and have their own agency, actually they might be rejecting some of this for themselves because they sort of realize the the problematic elements of it and the harms it's doing. So um I was reading in one report uh identifying as a trend the idea of sort of social rewilding where there's kind of young people have this real desire for real-world experiences and to to kind of get back to things like hiking or you know, activities like knitting or woodwork or that sort of thing, as a way of kind of partially rejecting the idea that everything needs to be done in a digital way and online. And I think this is interesting and one to watch because I guess the practical implication for charities and non-profits is do they need to make sure they don't go too far in assuming that everything is just going to end up being online? And actually, do you need to think about how you retain elements of sort of you know real life experience and engagement within that? And also, can you potentially sort of sell the value of what you're doing, certainly in terms of things like you know, volunteering, on the basis that it is a real life experience that allows people to sort of create and and uh maintain real life connections with people? And might that be something that might kind of draw younger people towards volunteering and getting engaged with charities if that's the kind of thing that they're looking for. So I think there's something really interesting there. Another trend that I think is worth noting is around digital currencies and and cryptocurrency, which I've sort of touched on at a couple of points already. But I'll just say very briefly, I mean, I've been I've done loads of work on cryptocurrencies over the last decade or more, and I've gone backwards and forwards in terms of you know what I think about them and how positive I feel. I think I was pretty down on them this time last year, sort of saying actually it feels like you know the charity sector has cooled on it and maybe it's just not really worth paying too much attention to. There might be a bit of crypto philanthropy out there, and if you want to tap into it, great, but you know, it's probably not that worth bothering with. I think the situation has changed somewhat, particularly because the value of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin in particular is riding sky high in the wake of the Trump election. So I think the sense once again that actually there might be quite meaningful pots of money out there for charities to tap into if they can convince people to give crypto might make you know some organizations interested again. Um, particularly, you know, as we've already covered, at a time when other sources of funding are maybe harder to come by. And also, you know, as we mentioned, there might be sort of some of the barriers to doing so have been lowered to the point where organizations might feel like you know there's not really much cost involved in in making it possible for people to give crypto, particularly the team-up between just giving in the UK and uh the giving block, which you know certainly will allow uh organizations to enable crypto donations without actually having to hold any cryptocurrency themselves so they can kind of tap into that pool of donors, but without all of the issues that are out there. Another tech trend I think that we should watch for the the coming year is more around kind of immersive technology. Again, I've been sort of keeping a watching brief on this one for a few years, and every year I'm like, maybe this is the year. And it hasn't been, but I do think the um what we're gonna see over the coming year is a real sort of growth in the uptake of wearables, um wearable technology, and that this will drive a sort of meaningful shift in augmented reality and virtual reality. So I think the the collaboration, for instance, between Meta and Ray-Ban to create uh smart glasses that don't actually look rubbish and and by all accounts you know function relatively well, might finally bring this sort of stuff to um to a kind of meaningful mainstream audience. And I think that will raise all kinds of interesting questions. I mean, as ever with tech, there will be some interesting opportunities, I would imagine, for charities to do uh, you know, interesting things in terms of applying this technology to their cause areas, but also thinking about you know uh offering new experiences to potential supporters and fundraising. I think there are potentially also some you know issues to address. Um, you know, one to me would be there's already a challenge for charities in terms of cutting through the noise within what gets called the the attention economy, you know, where everybody's kind of vying for our increasingly short supplies of attention. But imagine what that's gonna be when everybody's got you know wearable tech as well as everything else. Um I just read a bit from one report that I was looking at in doing the research for this, and they say, you know, imagine a user with their five elements of wearable tech on, notifications on their phone, alerts on their wrists, conversations in their ear. How are you gonna keep them focused on what you're providing? Which, you know, I think is uh kind of a good question. And also a nightmarish vision. I mean, I feel overloaded with information and stimulus uh as it is. The idea of also you know, I don't even have uh an Apple Watch or anything like that, but the idea of my glasses also sort of starting to bombard me with information makes me feel physically sick, if I'm entirely honest. So I'm not sure why I'm gonna be on board with this one, but even if I'm a slow adopter, I imagine some other people will probably uh get on board much quicker than me. And then finally, I just want to give a few thoughts about artificial intelligence, because it's obviously the sort of big technology trend and topic of discussion uh of the moment, and something that I've done a bunch of work on. So I thought I would just throw out uh a few ideas. And again, I've done entire episodes on this and written plenty about it, so I I'll try not to go into too much detail and you can do follow-up reading if you want, but I'll just give you a sense of what I'm thinking about. I guess the thing to say is, you know, was 2024 the year of the large language model, or was it the year that AI height peaked and then begins to decline? I think is an interesting question as you look forward to the coming year. I think in terms of you know how AI is having an impact at the moment, um, certainly on the world of philanthropy and nonprofits, I think there are all sorts of things. I mean, there are kind of productivity tools that are out there that people are using to you know make all sorts of tasks within their work easier or quicker or more efficient. There are accessibility tools that are being used to overcome language barriers or sort of barriers around uh visual impairments or hearing impairments. There are obviously tools that are being used for creativity uh to kind of create new content, whether that's written uh content or um video or imagery. I think what's interesting is that we're just at the point where we're starting to have to think through what where where are the right places to use some of these tools and how should we be using them? And how should we be doing that in a way where we're aware of their limitations and where it might be, you know, not such a good idea to use them. There's a really interesting paper that I um read by a whole bunch of academics from Harvard Business School. They did a study on consultancy firm and they were looking at the use of generative AI tools and particularly sort of Chat GPT. And in in the course of doing that, what they found was that there was clear evidence that when these tools were applied to the right sorts of problems, the people using them clearly outperformed people who were in a control group who weren't using them. The interesting thing is when they were applied to the wrong sorts of problems, the people who were using the tools not only didn't do any better than the control group, they actively did worse because they became over-reliant on those tools and they sort of trusted them even when they weren't, you know, weren't being used in the right way. And this creates the idea of what these researchers call the jagged frontier, which is where there's basically a sort of curve of problems of um similar level of difficulty from our point of view as human beings, but where AI tools as they currently are are very inconsistent in how well they apply. So there's there's you think of this sort of wiggly line, and some of these tasks sit inside the curve, and so they're things that AI can be applied to and it does very well at, but there are others that sit in places where they're outside the curve, and so actually, and it's hard to know because as you say it's a jagged curve, so it's kind of inconsistent. So we need to be very careful about that. Um, and there was just a an interesting blog I read a couple of days ago by Ethan Mollock, who's a uh academic and he's at Wharton Business School, and he he was one of the people involved in the paper I've already mentioned. Um, but he writes a lot on AI and its kind of uh uses, and he's did this interesting blog where he gave kind of ten use cases or kind of types of activities where AI LLM tools are genuinely useful, but then also five use cases where they're not. And one of those I think really chimed with me because it echoed something that I have thought for a while, which is they're not so useful as he says, when the effort is the point. In many areas, people need to struggle with the topic to succeed. Writers rewrite the same page, academics revisit a theory many times. By shortcutting that struggle, no matter how frustrating, you may lose the ability to reach the vital aha moment. And I think that's really important because too often we we lose sight of the fact that the process is the thing that has value in a task and that we kind of focus only on the output or the end result and think that actually, you know, if we can take a shortcut or automate to get to that same end result, that that's the same thing. Actually, if you're losing all of the value for you as a human being of having to go through that process of kind of clarifying and structuring your own thoughts, that that to me would be you know a huge loss. So I think we do need to think through how we're using some of these tools and what some of those potential unintended consequences um would be. In terms of how these things are currently being used in the world of philanthropy, just quickly, I mean, without going into too much detail, I think there are all sorts of interesting conversations about it and examples that have been emerging over the last few years. Um, you know, for instance, AI being used in grant making, and certainly on the side of people making grant applications. I mean, I think one of the very low-hanging fruit of AI is um using Chat GPT or other specialist tools to automate some of the process of writing grants. Obviously, one of the challenges there is that it produces potentially a huge volume of new grants. So maybe this is you know contributing to the problem we've already talked about of grant makers being slightly overloaded with applications. So then on the flip side, you start to ask questions about well, can you automate some of the elements of the process of choose, you know, identifying, choosing, sifting, and assessing these grants? And I think we're seeing some examples of that um already happening where organizations are using you know Chat GPT and and other tools um, first of all, to kind of do a first cut of applications to just for the very basic uh test of do these meet our grant criteria? And if not, you know, should we filter out those that don't? And then after that, you know, can they be can these tools also be used to do things like provide summaries of grant applications to allow, you know, a first pass from a human uh grant assessor to work out what they are and then kind of you know allocate uh the resources uh accordingly. Obviously, you know, I think most people would sh stop well short of suggesting that the process of deciding how money should be or like how grants should be allocated should be automated and that there's a real need to keep humans in the loop, as they say. But it'll be interesting to know where organizations think that that line needs to be drawn when it comes to the application of AI, because again, you know, you don't want to not use these tools at all for fear of getting things wrong, because if you miss out on you know potential efficiencies, apart from anything else, you might be limiting the amount of money that you can get out to to good causes if you're a grantmaker. But equally, you don't want to just go from you know naught to a hundred percent usage of of AI and and open yourself up to all of the challenges that come then if you uh kind of paint humans out of the loop and and all of the issues that might therefore arise. I think there are also interesting ways in which AI can be used uh more in the sort of fundraising size, not just thinking about kind of grant applications for things like prospect research, so finding out you know information about people who might be potential donors and doing due diligence on them as well. I think the other thing that's interesting, and you know, I've suggested over a few years that we might see the creation of sort of special purpose chatbots that that deal with fundraising. And the idea of AI agents has really come into its own this year, where we create sort of autonomous systems using AI that are designed to undertake certain tasks essentially kind of independently or at least semi-independently. And certainly it was announced earlier in the autumn that there's a startup in the US that's created a sort of prototype fundraising uh uh AI agent, um, which is really sort of interesting, I think sort of limited in functionality at the moment, but I suspect, you know, again, this is just the start of something that we'll see a lot more of. And I guess what this goes to in kind of in terms of sort of wider, you know, issues and themes that we should watch out for is this is there a demand increasingly for people from people to have sort of personalized and tailored information and and recommendations? It's certainly suggested that when it comes to searching for information on the internet, one of the things we're seeing is that because these tools are available in the form of sort of Chat GPT and other LLM tools, people increasingly they want answers, not results. So they don't want to put information into a search bar and then be served up pages and pages of results. They want to ask a question and then be given an answer. And I think what's interesting there, I mean, one question is what does this mean for websites? I mean, what is the purpose of a website in that context? And again, from uh a report that um that I was reading the other day, it says, you know, with declining traffic from all corners of the internet, the value of original content, written video and imagery, is being depleted. The value of a website and its content now exists through its distribution on other portals where users already naturally visit. Add to this how your website's results will be sucked into large language models and spat out as AI conversations. The worth of a website transforms to becoming the tip of the sword for an organization's branding. In a world of unreliable third-party information, an organization's website must create a unique experience with fans with clear interaction points. So there's two things in there about this. I mean, it will shift. The value of a website then becomes, you know, your opportunity to provide correct information about your organization and its work in a world where, as we'll see in a moment, you know, myths and disinformation and and kind of incorrect information is increasingly a problem. And your opportunity then to tell a story above and beyond that information about your work that might cut through. And because that's the thing that the AI is, you know, these AI tools are not able to do, they can't craft that narrative, or where they do, you know, they will m make it themselves on the basis of sort of syntactic, probabilistic um relationships between words. Whereas you as a human being and as an organization might want to craft a narrative that is, you know, designed uh with your own goals in mind. So I think there's going to be a huge value to storytelling in this context as well. Of course, there are all sorts of criticisms and critiques of AI that have been uh swirling around for the last few years, and people are kind of well aware of issues around kind of algorithmic bias and misinformation and this sort of thing. I think some of this has come to the fore a bit this year, and I think we'll continue to in the coming year. And I think one of the things we've seen this year, as I said in the start of the section, is and why I raised the question about whether this was the peak of hype about AI, is that there's a growing sense of sort of ambivalence, if not scepticism, about some of what has been claimed for AI, particularly in terms of large language models. Partly because some of the, despite what I've said about there, you know, there being productivity benefits, and there clearly are, some of the massively overclaimed productivity benefits definitely haven't materialized at at scale. And so, particularly in certain companies and industries that have experimented with AI and thought it was going to kind of transform them and their their whole operations, that hasn't so far proven to be the case. The other thing that's been interesting is that the combination of the capacity of generative AI to produce new content, written, you know, audio and visual, together with the way in which algorithms determine what does well on the internet and what we see, has meant there's a sort of growing convergence of those two things and a growing amount of content that is clearly kind of produced by generative AI and designed to optimize against algorithms so that it is kind of maximally shareable. But often this results in sort of quite ridiculous things. So there's this whole idea of the rise of what's called AI slop, which is essentially just kind of nonsense images and text that you know is kind of we just weirdly not quite right and clearly produced by generative AI and does very well and gets sort of shared very widely. But as soon as a human being looks at it, they're kind of like, what is this? Um the the image of shrimp Jesus, I would recommend Googling if you haven't already seen that, which is a kind of prime example of this sort of AI slot. And interestingly, you know, young people are not stupid and they're kind of aware of this stuff. And I was reading a thing the other day saying that actually there's a growing kind of trend for making fun of AI created imagery. And I think if you wanted any sense of, you know, this uh of where this is going, actually they call it boomer art. So, you know, again, kind of in the way that younger generations have decided that baby boomers are uh, you know, the the easy way to to kind of make fun of of anything. If you associate AI art with uh baby boomers, that inevitably kind of uh delegitimizes and and kind of undermines it. And I think you know that's telling if if the kind of the the much vaunted capabilities of generative AI are being made fun of in that way. So it's a sense in which I wonder whether 2024 was sort of peak algorithm, and now people are slightly starting to push back on algorithmically determined and optimized content. I think the other side of that is you know, that's the kind of accidental version of it where what's produced by the AI is just not very good. And so people sort of think, oh, this isn't quite, you know, the the uh digital utopia that we were promised. There's obviously the the more pernicious elements of that, which is you know, both about deliberate misuses of this technology for misinformation and disinformation, and the wider way in which the um the ability of the the technology and generative AI to create you know deep fakes uh in the form of sort of audio and visual uh material that's uh indistinguishable from real um material but shows things that never actually happened. And also, you know, the the problems with sort of digital astroturfing where people are able to create online identities for individuals or kind of organizations in order to make it look like there's something credible going on when there actually isn't, is all contributing to a sort of erosion of trust and authenticity in the online environment. And we've already seen you know a few um nonprofits fall uh fall foul of this, where they've tried to use AI imagery, for instance, to illustrate stories or campaigns or sort of fundraising asks, and people have realized that and and not not claimed that it was necessarily done with malign intentions, but you know, pointed out that it it kind of undermines the authenticity of these organizations and their claims on behalf of their cause. I mean, the the famous example in the last few years was one of the branches of Amnesty, I think it was Amnesty Sweden or Norway, was uh put out a social media post about um a report that they had on police brutality in Colombia, and they used an AI generated image of a woman being manhandled by uh by a police officer. And, you know, like a lot of AI images, it just wasn't quite right. So you could clearly tell that it had been made using AI, and in fact, I think they had openly put Put on the bottom a little label saying image created using AI. So people didn't think it was necessarily wrong that they'd done that. But what they did say was, hang on, it feels a bit weird if you're making a claim that there is this big problem with police brutality in Colombia and asking us to believe that this is a problem, that you couldn't find a real image of that and instead chose to illustrate it using a you know a generative AI image. And I think, you know, that relationship that we have with these uh AI generated images and other AI generated content is going to be something, again, that is going to be a big theme of this this coming year. I think just to add on to that, the two other things um that are worth uh noting around particularly large language models, which is the form of AI that underpins um uh uh Chat GPT and similar tools. One is increasingly I think people are aware that there are some pretty significant concerns about the way in which these things trample all over intellectual property and copyright, and some big class action lawsuits uh that have already been started, and and we'll see more of over the coming years, where you know, uh artists and writers and creators and other have launched them claiming that their work has been improperly used for training data that has created these these algorithms and they're sort of benefiting for free off of the hard work of human creatives. And I guess linked to that is actually there's a concern that despite the fact that for a few years now it seemed as though the inexorable growth of these large language models would just continue up and up, we might have hit a point where for various reasons they're actually gonna plateau, both because the uh the kind of uh the hardware limitations of being able to run these things, which are vastly energy and sort of computation um intensive, and also the data that you need in order to train them is is gonna become a limit. A few years ago that would have seemed impossible because it seemed like we had more data than we ever would have needed. But to make these things work and to make the new iterations of them better and better, you need more and more data. And we're actually starting to run out of data. And one of the problems is that because there isn't necessarily enough human-created data, they're actually starting to create synthetic data, what's called synthetic data, which is you know, data that is intended to replicate data that a human being might have created in particular contexts in order just to be able to train an AI. And the problem here, you know, as some people have have argued, there's a few interesting papers, is that there's a risk of what's called model collapse, which is when you have these large language models and you sort of feed them data that's also generated by an AI. The the problems that you have with an AI in terms of bias and this sort of thing, you get into an unfortunate feedback loop. You know, it's almost kind of digital inbreeding, and very quickly the model kind of collapses and starts just churning out garbage. So, you know, it'll be interesting to see whether there's um more emphasis on needing to kind of shift away from putting all of our eggs in the basket of large language models and whether other forms of AI might be um might be you know more profitable as places to look in the future. And then the the final thing I'll add, because it's a just a bit more speculative and future-looking, one of the things I'm really interested in in terms of the potential impact of AI longer term, is whether it will have a big impact on our ability to model certain situations uh in the world. So we've already seen the use of AI very successfully to model things like how proteins fold and used it to kind of uh create new drugs and pharmaceutical products. And there are lots of other examples where people are creating what are called digital twins, so sort of a digital version of you know a real uh world physical object and then being able to act on that digital object using AI and kind of test it in all sorts of different ways or to make predictions. And I wonder, you know, at what point this will start to become relevant to the sorts of social and environmental problems that philanthropy often deals with. And one thing I've seen recently is an interesting suggestion that we're maybe going to move from large language models in AI to what are called large action models, where instead of talking about a model that operates on language, so sort of on the syntax of a representation of the world without there necessarily being the underlying semantic link, so the link between this the symbol and its meaning and what it refers to in the world. Because there's this huge growth in wearable technology and sort of sensors that are going to be generating data, actually, there might be just real-world data that artificial intelligence can be trained on. And so you have these models that are based on data, you know, unintermediated data essentially about the real world. And in that context, could you start to potentially do things like test out social interventions so that instead of, you know, uh what you traditionally would have had to do in philanthropy is go and fund somebody to do a pilot project or fund an organization doing something in order to test and to innovate. Could you instead test and innovate in a digital way to see what was likely to work and what wasn't, and thereby kind of, you know, make the allocation of resources more efficient? I don't know, we might be a very long way off that, but I've seen some interesting indications this year that we might be sort of starting to tip towards that. And I guess the the other thought is if the impact of AI is not entirely, you know, overhyped and overblown, and any of the sort of predictions about the impact that it might have on the workforce and on the nature of our economy prove to be true, what will that mean for civil society and for philanthropy? I guess on the one side, if that's going to happen and there's gonna be large numbers of people who are no longer required to work in traditional ways, what role will civil society play in sort of helping people to manage that transition? And also conversely, if we get the utopian version of this and and this sort of mass automation frees up um, you know, a huge amount of people's time to do things that aren't necessarily paid work, will this open up the possibility for them to do uh you know the sort of work that would have traditionally been as seen as volunteering? And will they also be seeking a sense of purpose um and identity? And could this kind of voluntary work offer it to them? That might be one for a few years down the track, if if not at all, but I think it's you know an interesting one to have in mind as we move into uh 2025, which definitely sounds like the space age future, doesn't it? Okay, well, thanks very much for listening to that. If you made it to this point at the end, uh well, well done. Uh I hope it was interesting. I might have uh tested the boundaries of everybody's patience in terms of the uh length of a podcast, but I did my best to keep it short. Um I think as we can all agree, I absolutely abjectly failed, but uh, you know, uh not for lack of trying. Um I'll put links in the show notes to various things that I've talked about um during the course of this podcast. Um, but if you're interested more broadly in issues around philanthropy and civil society, just check out the website at whyphilanthropymatters.com. Uh you can find all sorts of articles there, you can find back issues of this podcast, you can find lots of news updates and other things. You can follow me on social media, as I mentioned. I'm there on Blue Sky now, having uh shifted from X. I'm also on LinkedIn, so you can come and find me there. If you've got ideas for people that I could talk to on the podcast or topics I could cover uh next year, do get in touch. You can find my contact details on the Y Philanthropy Matters website. Other than that, it just remains to say I hope you have a good Christmas, Hanukkah festivus, or however else uh you celebrate um uh whatever break you're having. If you listen to the podcast and like it, uh please leave me a nice review wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell other people about it, preferably in real life rather than digitally, because I think we're agreed that that's uh better these days. And other than that, I will see you after a short break in the new year. Bye.