SPEAKER_00 0:12

You're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast with Roderick Davis.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, as ever, Rodri Davis, and this week we are in conversation with Marina Jones talking about the history of fundraising. Now Marina is currently uh Executive Director of Development and Public Affairs at the English National Opera. But she has also been the lead on the history of fundraising project that the fundraising think tank Rogare has been running for a few years now. And she's quite possibly one of the few people who is as nerdy about the history of charity, uh certainly in the UK, as as I am. So it's great to have a chance to um talk to Marina about some of the things that she's been working on over the last few years. So yeah, we sat down quite recently for a wide-ranging conversation all about the history of fundraising. So we talked a bit about why this is such an understudied area, even within the kind of wider history of philanthropy and charity, which isn't an area that's sort of massively overstudied in many ways. The particular history of fundraising really is, you know, there are a few sources that you can find that kind of pertain specifically to it. And we talked a little bit about why that is, some of the challenges around kind of archival bias, the fact that you know big institutions or large donors tend to be the ones that uh leave the records behind them, and sometimes the sorts of records that might tell us something about fundraising get a little bit lost. And we also talked about whether sometimes there was a deliberate aspect to that in that people don't you know often don't want to admit that fundraising was a part of the picture when these gifts have been made and they want to focus instead on the donation and what was done with the money. Um we also talked about the fact that quite a lot of uh fundraising materials are sort of ephemeral and might not be seen as the kinds of things that organizations feel like they need to keep. Um then we talked about what we can learn when we can find out things about the history of fundraising uh in terms of you know, maybe what we could do, uh tools and techniques and tricks that we could try, and also very much, you know, things that we shouldn't do, so learning from the mistakes of the past. Um we also talked about the role of celebrities in fundraising and kind of how long that has been a thing, uh, much longer than you'd think. Also about how charities and fundraisers have adapted to new technology when it's emerged throughout history and whether that can tell us anything about the present day as well. And we also talked about the way that fundraising has played a key role in the emergence of women into the public sphere, certainly in the sort of 19th century, and how that sort of fits into the wider story of women's increasing role within society. Um then we talked a bit about criticisms of philanthropy and kind of which of those that you can see throughout history, which seem as though they're cyclical, and what we can learn from them about some of the criticisms of philanthropy and fundraising today. Uh, and then we also talked a little bit about um sort of literature and popular culture as an aspect of history and what that can tell us uh about uh fundraising and philanthropy. So without further ado, let's get into it, start nerding out on the history. Um I really enjoyed having a chance to talk to Marina about this. I hope you'll enjoy the conversation, and I will be back at the end for the usual bit of housekeeping. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Marina Jones. Hi there, Marina. Hi, Audrey. Well, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Um, so we're going to talk about fundraising history, um, which we'll get into a bit is a kind of particularly underserved area of an already underserved area, which is the sort of history of philanthropy and charity. Um, but I guess the uh best place to start is probably just to ask you, you know, why it is that this has ended up being something that you're so interested in? Where did that interest come about and kind of what form has it taken?

SPEAKER_02 4:22

Um, yeah, so I did a history degree, so my background was was in history. And when I did the masters at Kent with Beth Brees, we looked at the history of fundraising and it's so minimal. And as a historian, it just made me kind of cross. You know, why do we not know about this? And having worked all my life in fundraising, you really see that reflected in the practice we have as fundraisers. We don't really know very much about our history in our organization or as a discipline. Um, so that's where the sort of initial drive to find that sort of thing came from. And from doing the MA, then you suddenly find you're you're in a museum and you see something and you think, oh, look, that's a little bit of history of fundraising, and it might be a quirky donation box or uh a flyer, or uh there's a great one at the Imperial War Museum that's the head of a pig that was auctioned for charity. Um, so you see these things in in random places and it just sparks your interest. And then I got involved in the regare, which is the fundraising think tank. Um, they're doing a project particularly about why we ought to study history. So not just the history facts, but also how we then interpret that, how we tell the stories, how we perhaps move from traditional X happened, y happened, y happened, and look at bigger cultural and societal issues, but also how we look at the historiography. So, in a traditional history way, that might be a sort of feminist Marxist understanding of why these things happened, but looking at what we do and how we tell those stories. So, with that project, we really started with creating a timeline because there's a very kind of reductive narrative of the history of fundraising. But we really wanted to make that a richer, more deeper, more understood uh thing. So, working with a team of volunteers, we put together a very glamorous Excel spreadsheet with lots of entries uh to talk about that history of fundraising. And we published those and shared those, but we're also looking at bringing those out into themes around kind of charitable controversies and the first time something happened. And what's really been great with that is you're looking and saying, oh no, we think the first time this happened was like 1980 something. And then you look back and think, no, it wasn't 10, 20, 30 years ago. It wasn't even a hundred years ago. Although here's a great example of when it did happen 100 years ago, it's actually a thousand years ago, and we've been doing it this way or for thousands and thousands of years. So I think it for me it's it's a really interesting in its own right. You know, it's just an interesting thing to look at and study. But as a fundraiser full-time, it's a really good way of sharpening your craft, thinking about how you do fundraising, thinking about what's worked before, what people have done when they're building a building, and you need to think about how you're putting that campaign together, or when you're trying to, you know, uh activate change or influence people. How do you do it and how have people done it? And I think that's really interesting and inspiring. And you see, yeah, an awful lot of things we do now reflected in the past, and the things that we worry about now reflected in the past, and the things that we find controversial now, you know, aren't new. They've they've been there for decades.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Absolutely. And I, you know, I think it's the same as with the broader history of philanthropy. I think there's, you know, in terms of that value, I absolutely agree. There's the kind of the general sense of how much of this stuff is, if not cyclical, at least, kind of often has precedents that we, you know, might not be aware of or or kind of um uh underplay. And and then the sort of practical side of are there things that we can find from the past that are worth doing again or you know worth avoiding because they didn't work first time around? Um, and and as you say then also in terms of the kind of not just the practicalities, but the sort of ethical challenges and some of those sort of deeper questions, um, there's almost always something to be learned, I think, from how they've been grappled with in the past. Um, on that, on the sort of practical one, um, what are some of the examples that you've maybe seen uh in the work that you've done where you've thought, oh, you know, here is something that they tried in the past that, well, either somebody has, you know, tried again in the future and it's worked again, or you thought, you know, why is some why have people not kind of cottoned onto this and you know it's worked brilliantly now?

SPEAKER_02 8:46

I mean, I often think when you're when you're looking at the the history of fundraising, you could write a whole how-to guide from from the history of fundraising. And quite often it gives us those kind of really good reminders of this is actually how you you've done it. And we've done it for decades, and we understand that's how people think about things. So a really great example is something like matched giving, which there was a big supercharging philanthropy report uh out this week, which really championed you know the power of matched giving and really uh encouraging people to think about that more. And there's scientific proof that match giving kind of multiplies the amount you're able to get by two and a half times. And we understand that now in a sort of psychological way with our understanding around behavioural economics and decision science. But the first example that we see in fundraising history of someone doing a matched giving campaign is Pliny the Younger in AD 79. So, you know, it's been around for a really long time, and we innately as humans understand how to try and influence humans. And Pliny writes a letter that he's seen a young boy in his town who's having to walk to another town to go to school, and he's saying, Come on, people of my town, we ought to have our own school. I'll, you know, I'll match your gifts if you put in with me. And again, using that kind of uh fundraising formula of that peer-to-peer ask, which we know is really effective. You know, I'm putting the money in, join me in making this gift as well, and join me being a really kind of powerful tool. So I think what I love about that is, you know, it's it's really applicable now, and it's really provable now in a sort of scientific way when we can see what's happening inside our brains and understanding more about our psychology and how we react to those things. But we've been doing it for decades in when we've been trying to have conversations with people and persuade them uh to give us money.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

Yeah, and I think it's such an interesting point because it strikes me still today, you know, one of the things about fundraising as a profession is that when it's done well, you know, you have to be able to do all kinds of things, you know. But and very much one thing is that you need to have an understanding of kind of human behavior and human psychology, whether that's sort of at a professional level or an amateur level. But I guess fundraisers have always had to do that, and actually, as you say, in a way, they've probably known things for hundreds, if not thousands of years, that we're only now starting to kind of back up in a scientific way. But actually, the fact that you're the one trying to get money out of people, that that tends to kind of crystallise thinking about sort of human nature and what it is that drives humans. So there's probably a huge amount to be learned more broadly about um kind of behavioural economics from the history of fundraising. Um, you know, if if only we were able to kind of look at it in a systematic way.

SPEAKER_02 11:25

Can I can I just add a one of my favourite ones that has that kind of narrative going through it? Um uh Catherine of Aragon, who was uh one of Henry Gates' wives, died and was buried at Peterborough Cathedral, and her tomb fell into disrepair uh during uh the Commonwealth and Protectorate, you know, Cromwell's troops sort of dug it up and threw it in the kind of cathedral garden, and it was the summer house, uh it became a pavement slab in the summer house of uh Peterborough Cathedral. But in the 1880s, uh a young girl called Catherine decided that we, you know, that a Queen of England ought to be better represented, and there ought to be a campaign to repres uh to repair the tomb in Peterborough Cathedral. And she started a campaign asking all the Catherines of England to donate a small amount to contribute to this campaign. And it was picked up by the Dean's wife, who was also a Catherine, then picked up by the Duchess of Westminster, again, another Catherine. So it became this big uh campaign. Um, and that's something called the cocktail party effect, which was sort of codified in the 1980s, which is in a in a hubbub of a party, we we can hear our name clearly, you know, for since uh we were born, it's the thing we we hear and our neurons fire super fast when we hear our name, but that it's really proven to work in fundraising. So they did some studies around uh hurricane disasters, and if your name matches the first initial of the hurricane, uh then you're 31% more likely to give. So Hurricane Katrina, people with a K-starting name, were 31% more likely to give. And if you put a name on the beneficiary or the person you're trying to help in your campaign, that's been sort of scientifically proven to show that increase. So I think it's a it again, it's that really fascinating way of understanding how we can do fundraising better and thinking about how we improve what we do day to day in our work. But from a historical example, when we didn't really understand the science of why our names were so important, we innately know our name is important to us, but it's not something that was that was codified until you know a hundred years after this campaign, but has really practical implications for thinking about how we communicate with with our donors and how we think about the segments we use and the audiences that we communicate with.

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Yeah, it's really interesting, and it reminds me of lots of examples from the donor side of bequests and sort of funds that were set up where there was some name linkage. So I know there's one of a kind of a donor called Green who set up a fund to provide clothing and and um and and food for women in the local area, but it had to be green clothing, and similarly there was a grey one. And there's a um one I roll out every Christmas about a guy called Cornelius Christmas in uh Norfolk who set up a fund to provide coals and bread for the poor of the local area. But again, you know, you sort of think if his name hadn't happened to be Christmas, would he have picked a different time of year? Um so I guess you know they're individual examples from the point of view of a canny fundraiser, knowing that that's a a link that can you convince people to give is is really interesting. Um, in terms of of trying to understand, you know, why it is that the fundraising is it I mean really is poorly served as an area of history. I mean, you know, the once you start digging into it, there is a reasonable body of the history of philanthropy and charity, although I think there are some some still some pretty major gaps. But I mean I agree with you, apart from the work that you've been doing and sort of various papers here and there, there are very few sources I can think of that are kind of actually positioned directly as a history of fundraising. And there's Scott Cutlip's book, which is from the 50s originally, I think, and it's almost impossible to get a hard copy of because it's very much the you know the holy grail for me. I still don't have one and I can't get hold of one. Um, but other than that, there's really nothing. And I was I was really interested in your sense of why that is, you know, is it just something that people haven't thought was worth studying, or that are there kind of other challenges in that the further back you go, the harder it is maybe to define exactly what it is you're looking at, because the line between, for instance, sort of individual appeals and fundraising, as we might think of it, where somebody's doing it on behalf of an organization becomes blurrier because you know we don't really have kind of formal charitable organizations back past a certain point, or because so much of it's being done in various ways through the auspices of the church, does it become kind of mixed up with other things? You know, in the work you've done, how easy have you found it to kind of define what it is that you're looking for when you go back into the past?

SPEAKER_02 15:59

I mean, I think in terms of why it's really poorly studied, I think within a fundraising community, you you're you're often asked to make the donor the hero. And when we're thinking about what philanthropy enables the good to happen in the world, we think about the good that's happened. So we think about the vaccine that was made, the cathedral that was built, uh, the change in the law, um you know, uh the theatre, the arts experience. We think about the results and we champion those things happening. And then quite often, within a fundraising context, you either then thank the donor. So it's because of Andrew Carnegie we've got all of these libraries. It's because of the Ford Foundation that grants were made helping the civil rights movement. You we talk about the outcomes that come. Uh, you know, we talk about Dolly Parton making a contribution to the vaccine along with you know hundreds of other people making that philanthropic communication, but we don't then ever ask, well, you know, someone had to ask Dolly Parton to put some money in. There are people there who are organizing that behind the scenes. And I think we we centre in the narrative the results rather than the process. And that's why I think fundraising often gets hidden. I think also the challenge looking into the past is it's not something we particularly even even now, I would say uh organizations don't prioritize an archive of their fundraise material. They would focus on other aspects of their work, other governance, governance or business organization critical information, but they don't centre, well, actually, maybe we should keep the leaflet from that capital appeal or our friends' leaflet from 20 years ago, because it might be of interest and importance to future historians about how we organised what we did. Um, the Salvation Army is one of the few that has an archive that includes um some of its fundraising collections. And I got to go and look at you know legacy brochures from 90, you know, 100 or 90 years ago to see how they they promote it. But most of the time we don't think it's an important part because we're focusing on the outcome. I think the other challenge quite often is you know, in that church history where you know it's we've got lots of donor records and we've got lots of the people who you know made the gifts and we're very good at donor recognition through the centuries, but also lots of records get lost, get burnt. When we're looking at perhaps um fundraising around social change, um, the work of sort of Madame CJ Walker and against Jim Crow and um racial uplift, there was, you know, you weren't supposed to write things down because you're at threat of um arrest or suspicion. So there is also a literacy kind of bias. Um, I suppose we can also go into how when we're generally talking about the history of fundraising, because we're trying to find things, we're very reliant on literature and paper, and that some uh cultures and traditions don't have that tradition. So history is, you know, what gets written down, what gets written down by the victors. Um, so that also impacts on what we can find. I think there's a lot out there still to find, which I think is really exciting because people are particularly looking into archives in a different way and being able to look at it through that lens, or it's written about because it's written about how did we, you know, this cathedral was built. And if you read it through the lens of a historian interested in fundraising, you can see, oh, look, they, you know, they sponsored a candle. You could you could sponsor a day's labor, we, you know, they could sell and they didn't raffle. So you can find these things if you're looking for them in other historical documents, although sometimes you kind of want to shake them and kind of go, but you you haven't answered this bit. You've just sort of said, and then they raise some money, uh, and it gets uh reduced to that level, and you want to say, but how and who? And sometimes you get a really clear sense of, you know, there was this committee, and there were, you know, eldermen of the of the town who were really involved in in organizing this, and other times, yes, it's and they got some money and they made a thing happen.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Loads I want to pick up on that, but I think that final point you're making there is such a good one, which is, and again, it's sort of, you know, I find this more broadly with trying to read about the history of philanthropy. There there is some literature, I guess, when it comes to the history of charity in philanthropy, but it also feels like this absolutely vast, sort of untapped resource of interesting material in other areas of historical study where the people, you know, the people doing it will touch on things that are very relevant to charity but won't be writing about them with that perspective. And so actually having to kind of read find those sources and then read them with you know with the the eye of somebody interested in the history of philanthropy or fundraising in your case is incredibly rewarding when you do it, but the challenge of finding it in the first place and and trying to sort of sift through this massive, nebulous mass of potential sources is really difficult. Um, I was always interested in what you were saying there, um a little bit before, about the way I think, particularly when it comes to fundraising, obviously there are kind of written archives and there are issues around there being sort of gaps in those and archival inequalities, but it also feels as though sort of material archives are particularly important. And one of the challenges when it comes to fundraising is so much of what's produced is essentially ephemeral and not really designed to last. Have you seen anything kind of interesting in terms of efforts to try and recapture some of that material history and that ephemera?

SPEAKER_02 21:45

I mean, I think there's something really interesting about the nature of fundraising and that intangibility of when someone does a face-to-face ask and says, you know, will you join me and will you give me a million pounds? There is no way that that is. Recordable, I suppose, and and because it is a personal interaction or you know, the difference that a thank you card makes or a thank you letter. So there is, I suppose, to acknowledge within that there is a bit we can never capture in terms of history. In terms of people who are trying, I think there have been some projects that sort of try and sort of find the missing pieces. I think the challenge for some organizations is everything gets stuffed in the archive and it's all just in one box and it's not catalogued, and therefore it's it's hard to unpick and find the things that might be there. And, you know, in that way you find, you know, lost paintings and lost concertos of people. It's probably in a box somewhere, and that box might be in someone's garage rather than in a beautifully conditioned storage unit. So I think there's definitely more that organisations and charities can do. I know a lot of trusts and foundations have actually invested in their archiving projects and looking at keeping that. And I think that would that, from a fundraising point of view, would be really interesting to see the letters that are there to trusts and foundations over the years and the relationships. And you know, I remember from old paper files of capital campaigns from foundations, you know, we've got the shoe size of trustees and you know, the head size, so they can wear a hard hat when they come on a project visit. So it's, and I suppose the other question is also with history, you know, what do you need to keep? What is a useful thing to keep? You never quite know what might be useful in future years for people studying what's gone on or what lens they want to look at. Knowing the shoe size of a trustee from 30 years ago is probably not going to, you know, revolutionize how we tell the history of fundraising, but it gives a a flavor and a context to perhaps what we're doing at that time.

SPEAKER_01 23:52

Yeah, absolutely. Um the other thing I just wanted to pick up on what you're saying, as you were talking, I was thinking, you know, I absolutely I think there is an issue in terms of a huge amount of what happens when a fundraising ask is made not getting captured for sort of practical and pragmatic reasons. But I wondered if you had any thoughts on whether there's actually a kind of a deeper underlying issue, which is there's almost an active desire to pretend that that hasn't happened, in the sense of it kind of, you know, even today, I think, in a lot of contexts, I think there's a sense that fundraising is at best a kind of necessary evil and at worst a sort of slightly grubby little secret. And and actually what people want to do is to get the money in and to get the end result, but then almost to sort of expunge the whole history of how the money was raised in the first place. So does the fact that it's difficult sometimes to determine that history actually tell us that there's an attitudinal problem as well, in that people aren't, they don't really want to put that stuff at the forefront. They'd rather kind of keep it in the background.

SPEAKER_02 24:52

Yeah, and I think there's something about people like to think they they just gave because they need they they saw the need and they take out that middleman of of the fundraiser in that conversation, and that that sort of squeezes the narrative as well. And I suppose it's yes, how we like to think about money, and you know, there's a lot of psychology of how do we think about money or you know, pots of money, or my money, or your money, or tainted money, and all of these things are are playing into that. So, yes, I think that that is a really important bit within within the whole process that yes, we probably don't like to center, you know, how the sausage gets made.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

Which is all every time I hear it is a phrase that you can't help but actually visualize. Um, and the other thing I was going to ask actually is is one of the other challenges that, I mean, as in a lot of other areas of history, the the bit where maybe there has been some effort to tell the history of fundraising, I mean, if you look most places on the internet, you'll very quickly get the individual stories of people like Charles Sumner Ward and a couple of others, because it's there's such a tendency to go towards that kind of great man theory of history, which is let's find one inspirational individual, preferably a man, and then just kind of credit them with inventing all of this stuff. Do you do you think that sometimes kind of gets in the way of the true complexity of what was going on?

SPEAKER_02 26:09

I think it does. And I think one of the challenges for both sort of historians and fundraisers is you want to create an arc, you want a narrative that you can help people understand big complex societal changes or big complex things that are wrong with the world, you know, how do you fix poverty or water provision for someone? So you have to reduce it down into a story form, and that by its very nature means you you lose some of the nuance. And I think also in this Regarde project, thinking about how we tell history and it's it has evolved from great man did something, you know, or X got shot, so Y happened, Michelangelo woke up and said, I'm going to do the Renaissance today. You know, that it's moved from that to a greater, richer understanding of societal cultural issues, but also that a lot of our history hasn't been told because it has been centered on great man did something. So one of the things that we've really tried to do with this project is centre some of the stories of um of other people of both hidden history, but also uh women working in philanthropy and the role that women have always played uh in that space in fundraising in communities and uh across different levels of society.

SPEAKER_01 27:27

Yeah, and I know that's something that you've um written a bit about. And actually, I guess going the other way as well as the role that uh women played in fundraising. Do you think there's quite an important story to be told about the role that fundraising played in developing sort of further freedom and bringing women into the public sphere? Because actually, you know, if you think back to certainly the early 19th century and and mid, there weren't that many opportunities for women to have any kind of voice in the public sphere because the domestic sphere was kind of seen as the only appropriate one. And and charity work and fundraising was really one of the few things that they were was deemed to be appropriate. And it just feels as though that that's a story that needs to be told more widely.

SPEAKER_02 28:07

Yeah, definitely. And I think you see, you know, women, you know, early in the sort of 17th century with the church bizarre movement and sort of which were kind of like glorified jumble sales, being actively out of the house, doing things, organizing for the community. And by the time we get to sort of late Victorian times, there's evidence there's about half a million women working in organized uh auxiliary societies trying to raise money through various different ways. And yes, it definitely gives women both position and opportunity to have a life and experience outside of the house. And it sort of ties in, I suppose, to the sort of uh Victorian domestic principles of charity being a female virtue that is as a safe space to be able to do that. But also there's an argument that actually all of those women being involved in temperance movements and missionary movements and the organization of charity during that time helped set the seeds for the suffrage movement because there was that tradition of being organized, getting money, being able to do something with that money and having the structures of fundraising in place to try and use political influence to change things.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

And I guess the other bit of that actually made me think I was going to ask before, um I guess that gets captured again more in the sense of sort of middle class and upper class women um raising money in a more formal way for organizations that have some sort of structure. But I know people like Frank Pachaska and others have written quite widely about actually, you know, what tends to get missed is the vast quantity of sort of informal giving. I mean, I know Pachaska talks about the giving of the poor to the poor, but you know, that sort of stuff that we would think of as people of similar levels of means actually kind of mutually supporting each other in one way or another and not necessarily through kind of formal institutions. Is you know, does does that tend to get missed as well, even when we can kind of turn up information on the history of fundraising, that actually that kind of fundraising is very difficult to identify and capture?

SPEAKER_02 30:10

I think it does because again, we're kind of biased by what we've got evidence for, and some of those things because they're they're not written down or they're so hidden in, I suppose they're somewhere in a charity organization society book, there is, you know, half a penny here, half a penny here, half a penny here, and you know, they're the kind of organizations that love a list and love to write everything down. So it does exist, I should think, but I think it's also the challenge when you're doing the history of fundraising of money talks, and we tend to be excited by big flashy numbers and big flashy things that happen, and therefore we give over-dominance to some of those bigger gifts and bigger stories, whereas sometimes it's those lots of little gifts that actually went towards something uh and made a difference. And one of my favourite examples of that um is in uh Rouen during Lent. Uh, the people of Normandy love their butter and they weren't allowed to eat butter during Lent. And the Archbishop of Rouen gave them special permission to have butter as long as they donated to the cathedral fund. And to this day, there is a tower in Rouen Cathedral called the Butter Tower that was raised through all of those contributions through Lent. So that kind of collective action that lots of small gifts do make a really big difference rather than some bearded philanthropist coming in and doing one big thing.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

Which I think is really, I think, in terms of that overall narrative arc about the history of fundraising, I think, you know, if you ask me to, in a hand wavy way, tell that, I would probably fall into the trope of saying, oh, actually, you know, the big thing about the latter half of the 20th century is you get the growth of mass giving and fundraising and kind of live aid and that sort of stuff. But actually, it's always there. It's just, you know, it's harder to determine. And it's kind of a later on, I guess, because um the technology and the communication technology allowed, you know, the people, everyday people and their giving to become more apparent to us that we just sort of see it more. Um, which also brings me on to there's definitely, I think, a couple of um really good examples of things that we often might assume to be quite new developments when it comes to fundraising, and actually they very much have kind of historical precedence. I just wanted to talk about a couple of those. Um, one of them is the role of celebrities, because again, that seems very much like you know, quite a new development, the idea, oh, let's get a famous person and use them for fundraising purposes. But actually, that goes back quite a long way. Have you seen some good examples of of that in the work you've done?

SPEAKER_02 32:40

Yeah, I definitely I think probably a lot in sort of church history and cathedral building, um, there's a sort of you get an archbishop in, or you get the pope in, or you get a ultimate celebrity, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:55

Uh but that those sorts of things and having them as a royal patron in that soft power way and that sort of celebrity presence can really kind of galvanize a campaign. There's a great example um from 1813 when the Theatre Royal Drawy Lane was being rebuilt and their fundraising committee, like the board, was sort of slightly struggling, and they were like, Well, we need, you know, we need someone really good to come on and really help us with it. Who's like the the best person, the most kind of on the art scene? So they got Lord Byron to join the board, and that their fundraising just went and you know, then they're seems risky, but you know I mean it could have gone either way, but um, but he was in sort of it's before he was well, I think it was his reputation helped.

SPEAKER_01 33:40

Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. And and I know later on, I mean, I was gonna ask, because I know um the arts and culture is sort of your, you know, certainly with a professional hat on, your the your area of expertise and one that you kind of have worked in and continue to work in. Um and it feels like there's a particularly interesting history around fundraising when it comes to the arts. I mean, both because there's the whole kind of long history of patronage and that form of philanthropy, but also in terms of this question of celebrity. Have you seen sort of interesting examples when we get more into the modern age of celebrity of you know actresses or or singers and people involved in in the theatre and the music hall and the arts doing anything kind of interesting when it comes to fundraising?

SPEAKER_02 34:21

Yeah, and I think they're they're very helpful. I think what's what's really important always with that celebrity presence is that sort of authentic connection, because then otherwise you go into the other charity trope of they're just doing it to kind of launder their reputation and why is that person connected with that cause? Um, and obviously, kind of uh actors and singers are famous and therefore asked to do things. So it's also about that alignment, and I think that's what's really important when thinking about what those things are. I mean, historically, Jenny Lind is a fantastic example of a singer who used her gift to raise money, not for the arts and culture actually, but quite often for children's hospitals and getting very involved in fundraising in that way. Uh, but also with singers, you see it um quite often again in Victorian times because of the sort of association with if you're on the stage, you might have a slightly dodgy home life and uh perhaps uh not be the most uh virtuous, that the people used it as again a reputation laundering thing that if I if I do a charity concert and I tell my story and I'm doing this, then therefore I'm I'm I'm showing myself to be a good person, both a good person and a good Christian person and a good moral person, um, that you don't think I'm I'm you know a lady of the night in other respects.

SPEAKER_01 35:42

Yeah, well, I've I think um there's certainly something about the way that actresses uh were written about as fundraisers. I know of just something I came across were actresses and their involvement in sort of charity bazaars that talks about them as you know the highway women of charity. Um and I do think, I mean, it's kind of easy to you know laugh at the terminology and think, oh, that's very funny. But it maybe again it sort of says something more serious about as women became associated with fundraising, it did also become quite highly gendered, and it's sort of there's an unpleasant undertone to some of the criticism that that's that's then made, um, you know, that that is very much also sort of tied in with a discomfort about women taking on this greater role in in uh society. Um, and I think, yeah, that's maybe a kind of interesting to think about how that plays out even today, because again, there is, I think, sort of all kinds of gender issues in the fundraising profession still, unfortunately. Um one of the other things I wanted to ask about as well, in terms of kind of new new or developments that are thought to be new, you know, we hear quite a lot often when there is a new technology or something out there about you know how it's being used in exciting new ways by charities for fundraising. Um, again, have you come across any good examples of how kind of previous new technologies, you know, whether that's the printing press or radio or the telegraph, how charities got on board with that and used it in canny ways for their fundraising.

SPEAKER_02 37:03

Yeah, there's a great example from uh Dr. Bernardo's um, so the uh children's home, and with the advent of photography as a new medium that could be used. So every time a child arrived at a Dr. Bernardo's home, they took a before photo and then took an after photo. So you can see, and then they published them as postcards to you know maximise the profit and you could sell them for to earn more money. So you have a sort of before of a scruffy child with a hole in its trousers, and then uh uh a child with a profession and a craft and a trade having been helped. And actually, Dr. Bernardo's uh he got taken to court because the images were not genuine, they were manipulated because it wasn't exactly as they arrived. So they were staged images. And now, as we have controversy over AI manipulated images and what we're doing with images and how our donors can trust the images that they see, I think it's really interesting that this controversy, you know, was in the 1890s and we were looking at if it's not a true representation of the need that a person has, how should we trust you? Do you need our help? Is that something we need to be thinking about? And that we think about that now with the choice of images that we make. Um, there was also controversy over in Victorian times, you know, the exposure of skin that you could see, you know, a bit of shin and a bit of elbow in these, in these children. So it was felt to both be exploiting the children and also a false representation of what state they were in when they came. Um and it it went, you know, it went through the courts, he was sort of ticked off, but you know, not not charged. But there was sort of a lot of kind of commentary on we don't think this is right. And if you're going to do it, you you need to tell us that this is you know a manufactured image, um, which I think we see with quite a lot of AI things now of set say it's been doc, you know, altered, augmented, and then we know what we're looking at, and then we can trust what we're seeing. But I think it's that challenge that anything that disrupts and makes our potential supporters question the validity of what the offer is in terms of support can be really detrimental to the fundraising we want to do, the trust we need to build, and the duty of care we owe to using their money for the greater good.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

Yeah, I mean that's so interesting. And I think, yeah, the relevance to that question around use of kind of generative AI images is a really interesting one. Because again, I guess there's that you can argue from the point of people, point of view of the people producing the images, oh, okay, it might not be strictly speaking a representation of reality, but it does tell a truth or the truth because it's you know it kind of definitely reflects the issue. But then from the point of view of the public or a potential supporter, they might quite rightly say, Well, how can we have faith in what you're saying about this issue if you can't even find an example of it and just produce, you know, a kind of accurate image of it. Um, and I guess the other side of it as well, with a view to that, what Bernardo did there, you know, kind of probably long before we could get on to talking about um AI, which is much more recent, I I would guess is some of that, those sort of ethical questions about the representations of people in need or the potential beneficiaries of charity, which obviously you know kept going over time and probably got more pointed as we started to see fundraising for organizations in the global south and obviously all the controversies about how children in Africa were were portrayed. So, was there any element of that as well around Bernardo's? Have we seen some of that in kind of uh Victorian era?

SPEAKER_02 40:50

Yes, I think it it's it's that, yes. How are you? I don't think there were any questions at the time of you know, how should we be, you know, representing you know beneficiaries with dignity. I think it was definitely the the hard sell. And there's there's some examples of um in America again of here are some scruffy boys, and now I've you know they've been to church and they've got new suits and definitely doing that before and after photo becoming a real staple. And I think we would think that that's sort of always think of like the dieting before and after, but that it's something we've been using for sort of 150 years since we've had photography and been able to show it. But I think it does also speak that you know fundraisers jump on what the new technology is and think how how can we do that, and whether that's it might be um an ethical product. The Salvation Army did a um a series of matches because the um the match girls and the phosphorus that was in the production of what's in matches um gave uh fossy jaw, which was sort of disintegrated your your face. So Salvation Army made a kind of ethical brand. So we see kind of ethical products coming, you know, 150 years, and we would have thought, oh, that's quite a recent thing that we've we've kind of thought how we'll shop more ethically and more in line with our values, but those things were were were a lot earlier.

SPEAKER_01 42:11

Yeah, I think they were called lights in darkest England when they sort of tie in with William Booth's whole uh sort of book about you know the moral degeneration of the the country. Um and he was not a man who was afraid of of kind of commercialising approaches.

SPEAKER_02 42:26

Um he had some I mean the whole salvation army catalogue of the of the merch you could buy. I mean, I think you know, we're yeah, we all need more, you know.

SPEAKER_01 42:34

And he put his name to anything. It was like car tires, you could buy phonograph recordings of William Booth giving sermons and all kinds of stuff, wasn't it? It was amazing. Yeah, I the other one of the other things I'm aware that we're gonna come up on the amount of time we've got, and I I want to kind of tie this all together a bit. But before before I come back to uh sort of a final couple of thoughts on the fundraising, um, the other thing I wanted to ask, we talk mostly here about kind of you know actual historical sources of what happened. I guess the the other bit that to me seems really interesting, and I know where you have an interest as well, which is you know, to some extent historical, is literary sources and kind of um the representations of philanthropy in popular culture. I just wondered if you could say a bit about kind of why you know that's interesting and what we can learn from from that and what you've found, you know, in in your own kind of explorations that you think you know should be more widely known.

SPEAKER_02 43:24

Yeah, I mean, I think there is something about how we we learn from stories and the literature that we consume informs our opinions on things. So if we see philanthropy or fundraising told to us in in certain tropes and certain stereotypes, then that reinforces perhaps the opinions that we might have and how we engage with that. And it's really when you start thinking about whatever you're watching on TV or whatever books you're reading through that lens, you can see it in all sorts of ways. So I think a lot of like US tends to be kind of you get big in. Endowments and you get big kind of like uh multi-family kind of generations of of what's going on. And in the UK, you get lots of uh in in literature, it's more you know, I'm gonna take some clothes to the charity shop, um, but you you see the kind of cultural reflection of philanthropy and fundraising through those things. So if you think of something like the cartoon of The Simpsons, there are lots of representations of how fundraising is through PTAs, through different events and happening all the time. Um, and um Alice and Boddy and Jane Lancey did a study about how we tell it through children's literature and what therefore we're telling to children about how we fundraise, how we interact with society, what's accepted or expected behaviour. And then you find all sorts of examples of of how we culturally reflect back to ourselves, what what we're thinking about culture, about fundraising, about what's going on, about fundraising being a necessary evil or being a sucking up or being just an ingrained part of life and expectation. Um, and then again, you find stories which are told uh you know, people have jobs in fundraising and they're just part of a novel. Uh, and then you feel your own respect uh experience incredibly reflected back on writing a grant application or doing the preparation to meet donors.

SPEAKER_01 45:21

Yeah, absolutely. It feels like, I mean, there's definitely a big gap in the market somewhere for something that kind of pulls together uh lots of sources from kind of particularly popular culture. I guess there is some academic work looking at kind of early 20th century literature and this sort of stuff, although not loads, but actually just a repository where you could go to and say what are the interesting representations of philanthropy fundraising charity in TV, movies, you know, modern day books and that kind of thing. Because as you say, it's kind of I often think you know, you can say things a thousand times over, or you can write it a thousand times in a sort of dusty policy report or something like that, but actually one good representation of it in fiction that captures the public imagination has much more impact. And if that kind of shapes the the cultural narrative about philanthropy or about fundraising, that is probably going to have much more of an impact. Um, and I guess on that, the the sort of the final question I wanted to ask was you know, often I guess some of those cultural representations, particularly around fundraising, tend to be quite critical ones. Um, and and that's the you know, I think the case when you look at the historical sources. So, in terms of those recurrent themes that you found looking at the history of of fundraising, what are some of those sort of critical narratives about fundraising that maybe we still hear today that actually we can find interesting historical precedents for? You know, people always seem to have complained about fundraising just being annoying or being kind of harassed and about the cost of doing it and all these sorts of things.

SPEAKER_02 46:54

Yeah, so I think you it some of it is the same as it ever was. We keep having and coming round, as you said, cyclically, to some of these issues around um, I think the particular thing of once you're you're known as a philanthropist, that you're just going to be a marked man and that you're going to be consistently stalked around things. And what you see occasionally is some really bad practice in the past of when people literally followed someone home because they said they'd come to a meeting and make a donation and they didn't turn up. So this fundraiser just went to their house and like knocked on their door and you know followed them home, which obviously we wouldn't encourage that sort of behaviour now with people. I think the other challenge, as always, and we hear it again and again, is that events fundraising of you know, you're spending all this money to make a little bit of money. And how is that a good use of time and resources? Um, and then I think you look back and you think, how on earth did they do that? You know, they used to parade children through the centre of London as part of the sort of like the foundling hospitals and those sorts of institutions where they were looking after um found and uh adopted children, and that you could buy a ticket to go and watch them walk through the city to see your work in impact, or you could go and buy a ticket to go to Bedlam and like look at the people in the institution. So we we we obviously see a good progress as well as some of the questions that we we keep coming round to.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

Yeah, absolutely. And it yeah, hopefully nobody get sees those examples or hears about this and thinks, oh, actually, things that we haven't tried for a while that maybe we could try again. Yeah, I think there are definitely plenty of things from the past that are interesting, but a reminder of, you know, very much ways not uh to do things. Um Marino, it's been absolutely great having a chance to talk. Before I finally let you go, um, I'll put links in the show notes to places where people can find um lots of the stuff that you've written about history of fundraising on your own um uh webpage and blog, uh stuff about the Regare project and the timelines. But is there anything else you'd like to direct people's attention to or any sort of pleas that you have for what you would like to see people doing when it comes to this type of history?

SPEAKER_02 49:05

I think I think it's really important as a fundraiser just to know a little bit more about your own history and think about what you could be keeping for future fundraisers in your organization, but also how it might help you going forward, because actually looking at an old appeal might give you inspiration about that founding mission of your charity, which then really connects with your donors and supporters. So I think it's a really useful tool to know your history. It was interesting, I did a benchmarking survey on legacy giving in the arts recently, working with 80 different arts organisations. But there's a real lack of knowledge of even a benchmark of your performance from four or five years ago. So actually knowing your history really helps you know if you're doing good fundraising now and where you were and where you could be going. So I think it's a it's a really important thing to do to keep your history, to know your history, to explore it, because I think it will connect you better with your donors. And I think the other thing I'd say is to look at the Sophie website because there's lots of other fantastic historical examples there.

SPEAKER_01 50:10

Great. Yeah, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Um just say thanks ever so much for finding time to come on the podcast. And yeah, look forward to seeing lots more interesting bits and pieces about the history of philanthropy and fundraising.

SPEAKER_02 50:21

Thanks, Roger.

SPEAKER_01 50:31

Okay, great. Well, my thanks again to Marina for coming on the podcast. Um, as you can sure, I'm sure tell, I've really enjoyed that conversation. It's great to have a chance to nerd out about the history of fundraising and charity. Um, I'll put links in the show notes to places where you can find more information on the Regare project on the history of fundraising, Marina's blog, where she writes lots of really interesting um sort of short pieces about different aspects of what she's found. Um, I'll put links in the show notes as well to some other things that you might find interesting that I've written and other people have written that are relevant to the conversation. If you're interested more broadly in just reading around philanthropy and civil society issues, certainly with a healthy dose of history in there, do check out the website at whyphilanthropymatters.com. Uh you can find lots of articles, sort of short guides, all the back episodes of this podcast. Uh, you can also find details to get in touch with me if you've got ideas for topics we could talk about on the podcast in the future, or people that I could have on as guests. If you want to follow me on social media, if you can bring yourself to be on social media these days, uh you can find me on LinkedIn and on Blue Sky. Uh, other than that, just remain to say like, subscribe, do tell all your friends if you think they might enjoy this podcast, and please do leave us a nice review wherever it is that you uh pick up these podcasts because that all helps. And I'll see you next time. Bye.