SPEAKER_01 0:12

You're listening to the Philanthropisms podcast with Roger Davis. Hello, you're listening to the Philanthropisms Podcast. This is the podcast where we try to put philanthropy in context. I'm your host, Rodery Davis, and this week is another one of our partnership series with ERNOP, the European Research Network on Philanthropy, and this is the fifteenth of those partnership episodes. And in these episodes, what I do is talk to academics whose papers have been featured in the latest release of ERNOP's practitioner-focused research notes, where they try and kind of provide summaries of those papers as the name suggests for practitioners. And this time I spoke to another three academics about some really interesting uh research that they've been doing. So uh first of all, I spoke to Cassandra Chapman, um who is uh an associate professor at the University of Queensland, uh so not based in Europe, but um she was involved in a really interesting paper with two co-authors, uh Matthew Hornsey and Jessica Spence. And that paper is titled Meta-analyses on charitable giving clarify evidence for empathic and effective altruism. So uh it's basically all about the balance between head and heart in philanthropy, which is one of my favourite topics. So it's really interesting to talk to Cassandra about that. Uh and then next uh I spoke to Philene van Overbeek. Uh and Philene is a research fellow at the Gradle Institute of Charity at University of Oxford. Uh, and I talked to her about her paper, Volunteer Value Creation and Distribution, a systematic literature review. So basically looking at all of the different ways in which volunteering adds value and trying to kind of provide a bit of a theoretical framework about that, which is really interesting. Uh and then last uh but certainly not least, I spoke to Katie Adams from the University of Sheffield and I talked to her about her paper Challenges, Choices and Common Applications, Funders Exercise of Power and Its Consequences for Nonprofits Administrative Burden. So this was based on looking at um uh an effort that had been made by the Yorkshire uh funders group of grant makers to try and develop a common uh grant uh application process and some of the things that have been learnt from that. So uh again, really interesting. Um so without further ado, let's get into the episode proper and I will be back at the end for the usual bit of housekeeping. So, first up, we have Cassandra Chapman from the University of Queensland. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Cassandra Chapman from the University of Queensland. Hi there, Cassandra.

SPEAKER_03 3:12

Hi, thanks for having me on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Oh no, it's great to have you on. I can't I almost can't believe that it's taken this long to have you on as a guest. It seems seems weird, but it's great to have you. Um and the paper, particularly that we're here to talk about today, which has been uh turned into one of the most recent Earnop research notes, uh, is titled Meta-analyses on charitable giving clarify evidence for empathic and effective altruism. Um so it's really interesting on this. It's all about that kind of head versus heart uh tension that we all know so well. Um, maybe the best place to start is if you can just say a bit about what the research is particularly about and what some of the findings are.

SPEAKER_03 3:46

Yeah, absolutely. Um well, first I just want to note that this work was actually led by my colleague, Professor Matthew Hornsey, and also involves uh another colleague, Dr. Jessica Spence. So I'm I'm not necessarily the lead on this one, but I have been heavily involved for many years. Yeah, this research was really driven by that exact question. Um, we were curious about the degree to which charitable giving is driven more by the traditional sort of head approach or of effectiveness, or more by this sort of more emotional uh kind of uh feelings-based approach to giving. Uh, and so what we did was we basically went out and sourced every piece of data we could find on these questions that had been published in the last 40 years. Um, and we were able to find 416 different effect sizes where there was a relationship captured in research between either effectiveness in giving or empathy in giving in order to sort of summarize the overall standing of which of those has a stronger uh effect on giving and under which conditions.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

And in terms of empathy, there's a distinction, I guess, that's useful as well, uh, even within empathy. But uh you highlighted between kind of um effective empathy or sort of emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. Maybe you could just say a bit about what that distinction is.

SPEAKER_03 5:00

Well, absolutely. If you really want to nerd out about it, there's actually four kinds of uh empathy that are traditionally studied. But the two most common are, as you say, this cognitive empathy or sometimes called perspective taking. It's the ability to sort of understand the thoughts of somebody else or put yourself in their shoes, so to speak. And then effective empathy, um, sometimes called, now I'm losing it. So what is it? Sorry, I don't know why this is my this is my sick brain. Sorry, I just think I have to pause it. Um, why kind of empathic concern? Okay, sorry. I'll just start that answer again if that's okay. Okay, so yeah, the two traditional kinds of empathy that are studied are cognitive empathy, which is essentially one's ability to understand the thoughts of another person or put yourself in their shoes, and more emotional empathy, which we call empathic concern, which is basically your ability to feel what somebody else is feeling. And so, yeah, in this research, we also were able to disentangle the relative influence of more cognitive uh perspective-taking approaches or more emotional, empathic approaches.

SPEAKER_01 6:03

Yeah, absolutely. Um and in terms of what you found about some of those relationships, um, is it the case that, I mean, as I think you know, we kind of hear elsewhere and maybe feel intuitively, that there's a gap between how likely people are to say that effectiveness is an important factor in motivating their giving and what their behavior actually suggests.

SPEAKER_03 6:24

Well, yes, absolutely. I haven't actually shared the results of the study yet, so maybe I should do that. Um so what we found overall is that when we looked at both the relationship between effectiveness and giving and the relationship between empathy and giving, we found, as expected, a positive relationship. So that means the more effectiveness was perceived, the more people gave. And also the more empathy was experienced, the more people gave. But where things got kind of interesting is when we sort of broke it down into the different ways that these things could be studied. So when it came to empathy, as we talked about, you could look at cognitive empathy and also emotional empathy. And we did find a difference such that the relationship with giving was stronger for that more emotional kind of empathy than it was for cognitive, though it was still important in both cases. But when it came to effectiveness, this is where we found something quite striking. What we found was there was a relatively strong association between effectiveness when it was measured. And what that means is when we ask people how important is effectiveness for your giving, for example, they said, yeah, pretty important. But in the studies that actually didn't ask people, but rather just varied the degree of effectiveness and looked at the effects on giving, so more experimental approaches, we actually found no overall relationship between effectiveness and giving. And while this is this is pretty interesting because it suggests there's this kind of what we call this effectiveness paradox, where people self-report or tell us and probably truly believe that effectiveness is really important and drives their giving decisions. But we couldn't find any causal evidence that that actually exists.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

And is that because there's some sort of reporting bias because effectiveness is something that we perceive as being a desirable trait? So people kind of, when asked, say, oh yeah, yeah, I'm all about effectiveness, and that's definitely what I'm doing with my giving, because we feel that's what other people would look kindly upon us for doing.

SPEAKER_03 8:19

I mean, that is a sensible explanation, absolutely. Um, the reality is our data can't tell us why that pattern is occurring. And in the paper, we do discuss some possibilities, and that's exactly one of them. It's like, uh, sometimes, you know, the more I study psychology, the more I realize that all of our behaviors as humans are so complex, and many of them are outside of our of our own conscious awareness. And so what happens is we're really good at making what we call post-hoc rationalization. So when somebody says, Well, why did you do that? you think, Oh yeah, why did I do that? And you sort of think back and you come up with a really good story that makes perfect sense. And we think that part of what could be happening is this that people give and they maybe give for these empathic emotional reasons that they're not very tuned into. And then when they give and they get asked, they can think, okay, why did I give? Well, I'm sure I thought that that gift would be effective. So that's absolutely one of the reasons. And also, you know, perceptions of effectiveness can be tied up in notions of identity, self-desirability um biases, uh, social desirability biases where people might self-present in ways that make them look good to others. You know, we don't want to, you know, if you ask me why I gave it, maybe I feel uncomfortable saying, Oh, I just felt like it. I might feel that it reflects better on me to be like, well, here's my list of uh data points that I took into consideration.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

And is there any sense that there's a difference between how people view effectiveness in a kind of general sense? So their view of like how important it is for everyone to focus on effectiveness in their giving and how they view it when it's framed in an individual sense, in terms of like how important is effectiveness as a factor in my particular giving decisions? Because I I noticed at one point in the paper there was some discussion of that kind of the difference between how people view um their own behaviors and how they sort of feel about wider. And it reminded me of other work that I've seen you present in the past around trust, where there's a really interesting kind of difference between what happens when you ask people about, you know, do you trust nonprofits in a very general sense versus do you trust this specific nonprofit that you actually have a relationship with? Um and I wondered if there's any of that going on when it comes to effectiveness as well.

SPEAKER_03 10:28

That's an interesting idea. I think I'm not sure, to be honest. Um, and I don't think our data could speak to that. But one thing that I find interesting, and and before we ever did this paper, you know, I had been noticing research that was coming out that people don't even um, they don't even investigate effectiveness when it's available, right? So there's a lot of cues that it's that people simply are not that interested in effectiveness, but there's a lot of narrative and this, you know, that that effectiveness is critical, right? And there's lots of public debates about this. There's actually entire movements within philanthropy that are all about driving people towards more effective decision making. So whether there's a discrepancy between what each of us individually do and what we perceive others to do, that's that could be true. It's certainly, I think we would all recognize that because of these narratives, that there's like a social pressure to lean towards effectiveness, even though I think increasingly we're seeing data suggest that people don't naturally incline that way. Some do. There's of course individual differences. I work in in a university and and a huge number of, for example, effective ultras and movement proponents are academics, right? They're scientists. Or, you know, naturally we're driven to those kinds of worldviews. So there's certain people that absolutely would be predominantly inclined towards effectiveness. But I would say most people probably, it wouldn't be their major driver, but I agree that they might perceive that it's socially desirable to think that way. And that might affect some of these self-reports.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Yeah, it's really interesting to think about. And then just the other thing I wanted to ask on the kind of content of the paper is there's one bit where you talk about whether there's potentially a difference, uh, because you know, in whether empathy is a meaningful driver only when the the act is relatively low cost in the in the way that sort of giving to charity is. But actually, if there's a more personally costly act like donating an organ, actually then it sort of switches and the um the the kind of um uh cognitive empathy becomes more important or effectiveness becomes more important.

SPEAKER_03 12:33

Yeah, I mean it's absolutely something we speculate in the pot the paper, and I would just stress that that's not based on the data can't sort of answer that question either, but we we propose that it could be. And it's interesting today. I've been just in a complete separate project, been analyzing um data about billionaire philanthropy. And one thing that's really striking is how little that seems to be driven by empathy and how much more it's driven by impact and effectiveness. So that would speak to your hypothesis, I guess, that when decisions are more consequential, um, and I I I'm not a specialist in major giving, but I I'm pretty confident that people that are would say, yeah, people are really asking a lot more questions about what where their money's going and what impact it can have. So that makes perfect sense to me, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

And just zooming out a bit, because obviously the focus of these research notes is to try and do some of that work to connect academia and practice when it comes to philanthropy. What's your own kind of sense of how those connections work? What's your experience been both in terms of working with practitioners in order to kind of find material for your research and also when it comes to disseminating findings? Have you kind of found that that works in both directions or are there challenges there? In both directions being so in both directions, in terms of kind of using um research and you know data from practice and working with practitioners to find material for your research, but also when you have findings, sharing it back into practice and kind of getting those findings out there.

SPEAKER_03 14:03

Uh, that's a great question. Yeah, I mean, I'm personally like a huge advocate for like intersecting the worlds of academic research and practice. I think both worlds can inform each other in very powerful ways. And I I would say, I would argue that at the moment there's quite a disconnect. For me, and I can only speak about my own practice, but as a you know, associate professor, uh focused on donor psychology and fundraising, and my whole, you know, professional existence is to generate data for the nonprofit sector. That's how I see it. And so a huge focus for me is translating that however I can, whether it's short conversations like this or on my um website, uh donorsite.org with little research snippets for people, um, but also just constantly trying to get into conversation with nonprofits wherever they may be about the questions that they're grappling with, and then trying to either provide some sort of expertise or even better, design something to work with them to answer those questions. So I did a lot of work with and for nonprofits. So yeah, I see those two worlds as you know, meaningfully intersecting, and that hopefully people like you and I can help to bridge those worlds a little bit more day by day.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Yeah, absolutely. Agree to hear that you're you're doing that. Because I guess it does take people being proactive. I mean, that's the thing. If you just sort of hope for the best that these connections will magically happen, they probably won't.

SPEAKER_03 15:25

And you know, human nature, we're all very busy. So, you know, fundraisers are so busy with their own KPIs and interests that it's fairly hard for them to go, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go read a really long-winded, complex, jargon-laden research article, right? That why would they? And academics, then we're incentivized with different things, and we're not actually encouraged to take the time to think how do we speak to the people who would use it. So, you know, it's totally natural that these worlds have become siloed, but I just personally feel very passionate that we should like talk to each other and like I want to make that easy.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

Absolutely. And then just finally, before I let you go, um obviously again, in terms of you know, one of the other issues is obviously the sort of timetables that um uh timescales that academia works on as opposed to practice. And I know when I talk to people about these research notes, often we're talking about research that was done and then published a good few years ago. So I'm just interested in what you're working on now. Is it stuff that kind of follows up on these findings or are there other areas? You mentioned the work that you were doing around billionaire philanthropy. Are there kind of other things that are your key focus at the moment?

SPEAKER_03 16:25

Oh yeah, I'm always working on, I think I have around 30 active projects at the moment. So plenty of things. And yeah, these are long journeys, like this this particular project, this paper started in 2019, so you can see six or seven years of work there. But yeah, right now, I think the big, big themes I'm working on are around ethical fundraising, especially how uh the kinds of images that organizations use in their fundraising campaigns can be perceived as ethical and also can be effective and the whether there's any kind of trade-off between those two ambitions. I'm also I uh just starting a major project looking at doing field research, so where I take psychological principles. So I'm trained as a social psychologist, so I take these sort of psychological principles and then I work with nonprofits to embed tests within fundraising appeals in the real world to make sure that these kinds of um practices translate and how they would work for nonprofits, and then a bunch of stuff looking globally at how what how generosity manifests around the world and trying to get a much broader um perspective on generosity beyond the traditional Western context where it's studied, and also how we can understand and capture and analyse them the very complex set of motivations that donors have for their giving. Um so that's that probably the major projects.

SPEAKER_01 17:47

It all sounds absolutely fascinating, so I'll definitely keep an eye out for all of those things.

SPEAKER_03 17:51

Um plenty coming out the door soon.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Yeah, it does sound like it, very busy. Um just remain to say thanks ever so much, Cassandra, for coming on the podcast. It's been great to finally get around to having you all as a guest. Um, really great to hear about the work and wish you all the best with uh it in the future.

SPEAKER_03 18:04

Thanks. I hope you'll have me back back real soon.

SPEAKER_01 18:16

Next, we're gonna hear from Philene van Overbeek from the Gradle Institute of Charity at the University of Oxford. Okay, great. Well, I'm here with Philene van Overbeek. Hi there, Feline.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

Hi yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

Uh and Felene, yeah, as you said in the intro, um, you are currently working at Newcastle University Business School and you have a paper that was uh featured in the latest release of research notes, and the paper is titled Volunteer Value Creation and Distribution: a Systematic Literature Review. Um so I've got lots lots of questions to dig into, but maybe the best place to start is if you could just tell everybody what the research is all about, how it came about, and what some of the key findings are.

SPEAKER_00 18:56

Thank you. Um the research kind of started as part of my PhD project on the value of volunteering. And as I was writing that, I found out that in academia, but also in practice, we use a lot of different definitions for value and also for volunteering. So I figured a good way to start for myself was to find out when we talk about volunteer value, what do we talk about? Um, and so I figured a systematic literature literature review would be the best way to do that. Uh, and that's where this project started.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Yeah, great. And and in terms of what some of the findings are, I know there's lots of them, and particularly I think there's it like at the top level, there's this kind of important framework that you establish in terms of the different um levels at which we can understand the idea of um uh value as it applies to volunteering, the kind of micro level, the meso level, or the macro level. So maybe you could say a bit about that.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

Yes. So I I found that when researchers look at volunteer value, they do on um usually one but sometimes multiple levels, and it all comes down to that micro level where they describe either the value for the volunteers themselves, for the beneficiaries of the volunteering, or for the paid co-workers that that coexist in an organization with the volunteers. And on the meter level, they look at either the nonprofit organization, what value is created for them, or the organization that sends volunteers to the nonprofit organization. So we call them third parties usually or sending organizations. Those could be corporations or schools or universities, for example. And then on the macro level, um we see that the searchers look at either value for a specific community. So that could be a neighborhood, but it could also be, for example, the disabled community or the LGBTQ plus community. Um, and on the second level, the society level. So that's usually a country, for example.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

You you talk about this in the paper, but is there has there been a tendency, I guess, both in sort of research, but also just more broadly in the discourse around volunteering to focus on that kind of individual level and to talk about the value, often in terms of things like sort of personal development.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

I found that actually one of my interesting findings is that when we talk about volunteering, both researchers and practitioners talk a lot about how important it is for others. When I look at the research, I found found that actually most of it focuses on the individual level for the volunteers themselves, not so much for others or for bigger groups. My impression is that it might be because that's just the easiest uh to research, because you can just ask volunteers or you can just send them a survey. It's a bit more difficult to find ways to I guess measure the value for an organization or for a society. But I think we could maybe do a little bit better in focusing on value for specifically beneficiaries, uh seeing as that they're the recipients of the volunteer work. So that that's that's one of the things I found really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Yeah I thought that was interesting as well and certainly chimes with things that I've kind of heard or seen elsewhere. And I won I wondered whether that um that fact that it's more difficult to measure certainly at that kind of macro level in terms of the societal value of volunteering. Do you think that's part of the problem when it comes to how the organizations doing it and particularly those funding it view volunteering because that that aspect of the value is just seen as an externality because it's hard to measure. So they just sort of think, oh well I you know we're not even going to focus on that.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

Yes and and when we do measure it we measure it in monetary value, right? Because that's also quite easy to do. It's usually just a simple calculation. I I did find a couple of studies that that have tried to work more with stories. And when they work with stories that's where they can find a qualitative societal value as well. But it it remains difficult. And I also won't have the solution to this issue unfortunately not yet.

SPEAKER_01 23:06

No, I mean that would be it would be a big ask for you to to do that. I wondered as well actually because you touched on this I think in the discussion part of the paper on whether we need to be clearer about the relationship between the the value that comes through volunteering and the specific nature of the volunteering. Because again I wondered if there are kind of important we talk about it often in quite homogenous terms, but it strikes me there are differences between individ you know highly individualised tasks versus group-based tasks, for instance, or kind of short-term tasks and long-term volunteering, or importantly between kind of skilled tasks where people are kind of bringing professional expertise or relatively unskilled or sort of physical tasks.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Is that something that you saw there in the re in the research or is do you think that's something we kind of need to think more about I definitely think we need to think a lot more about this because one of the things I found in my research as well is that in many of the studies it's not actually specified what type of volunteering people were doing. So it was it was just a questionnaire for example that asked are do you volunteer yes or no? So that doesn't really help us establish whether certain types of volunteering create value A or B and other types of volunteering will create value C and D. So I think that's definitely something that will be important to look at in the future. Specifically if we want organizations to think more about this, think in in a value-based approach of volunteer management, for example, then we need to figure out what what creates what yeah absolutely and and I I wondered as well actually whether again I I think you touched on this in the paper and I hope I can kind of phrase the question so that it's clear what I'm asking but whether the the value of volunteering from particularly from the point of view of the sort of beneficiaries or service users is is primarily that it kind of enables there to be just more provision.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

So the value is kind of created by by the volunteering or whether um there's kind of additional value by using a volunteer approach. So even where a service might otherwise be provided through alternate means actually the choice to provide it through voluntary through through the provision of volunteers brings value just because there's something inherent in that.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

Is that kind of clear hopefully yeah yeah definitely clear and exactly um I I guess what I mean when I talk about a value based approach of volunteer management is is looking at when we see a task and we have a paid staff available and we have a volunteer available on the other hand what do we need and where does the value need to be created because they are just different. So we see that in some organizations yes it's just more hands when you add volunteers and that's fantastic because you know we need we need more people doing a certain thing. But we also see that specifically when it comes to work with for example beneficiaries that they see volunteers in a different way that they see paid staff and that makes them perceive the service very very differently. And we see that as well actually when volunteers are not working directly with beneficiaries but are for example in a fundraising capacity people that they ask donations from perceive their ask differently than when a paid staff would ask that. So in that sense volunteers can add both the extra hands but also sometimes a different kind of value.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

Yeah absolutely and and I guess I mean slightly linked to that there's another point you you touched on in the discussion which I think is really interesting where you say actually we you know we talk a lot about this kind of value of volunteering in positive terms but there is potentially also a sort of negative side to volunteering that maybe isn't touched upon as much in the the literature. I'm just really interested in kind of what you mean by that and what you think are some of the questions that we should be addressing when we think about this this value of volunteering.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

Yes. So in the literature in my review anyway I see a couple of mentions of this negative value is is what I would like to call it. Not everyone agrees with that term by the way but that's fine. So in this this systematic literature review it comes up as for example one study where they found volunteers working with um beneficiaries that have HIV aid and that would sometimes lead to the volunteers having uh heightened stress levels um uh but that also happens with with sorry let me rephrase this um we we see this in different types of volunteering where it can create stress there was a study with um for example older volunteers who then feel excluded from the volunteer pool in the organization that they're working that would create feelings of sadness uh of of feeling left out but we also see it a lot in this third party volunteering specifically when people volunteer abroad where actually they might they might feel like they're doing a good thing and the volunteer you know they will create positive value for themselves like developing skills making friendships seeing something up the road but the people that they work for in the community that they work in actually they create negative value for them for example by reinforcing stereotypes um by not actually helping there's you know there's stories of people building houses but because they don't have experience those houses then need to be taken down again there's the case of orphanage volunteering where we see a lot of negative um effects from that so in the in the end I think this is also really important because volunteering especially us in the research community I think we like to think of it as mostly a a positive thing and it can be as long as it's managed well and that's also something that when I call for that value based approach it's something that is part of that as well is it really only positive and how can we make sure those negatives go away yeah and I suppose that's that that word there management is important because volunteering always requires management and actually if you're aware of both the positive potential but also the negative potential it's easier to manage for the former and try and avoid the latter.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

And yeah what you're saying there I guess about sort of voluntarism and the the ongoing concerns about that definitely sort of rings very true. And and actually I I mean it reminds me as well I guess in the case of corporate volunteering everybody knows those stories about charities that kind of keep a building or a wall somewhere so that corporate volunteers can come and paint it and then they just paint over it again and it's kind of it's sort of you know that's the reductio ad absurdum of the whole thing. But I I just wanted to ask finally this sort of slightly more speculative question in a way which I know academics sometimes hate but it kind of struck me in um in reading the paper that it's really interesting particularly at this moment in time because there are sort of growing concerns around polarization and societal division and and I I see a lot more emphasis in the charity world at the moment on the kind of the idea of volunteering and kind of participation as a way of teaching people you know skills of civic engagement and bringing them together. Do you think that could you know if people are more aware of this context it might reframe some of this discussion so that we do talk a bit more about the the kind of societal or macro level value of volunteering as well as that individual level.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

So on on the societal level these are the things that come up in the research right so it's it's supposed to be people who volunteer um they they change their societal behaviors for for the better or at least what we find better uh as researchers right because I think this is important when we when we talk about this as well so I think if if we look at how can volunteering help creating a better society we also have to think hard on who are we asking what a better society is. I've been having this conversation a lot actually in the past few weeks where I keep hearing people say um you know volunteering is great it brings people together and it does it really does it's one of the best ways to get people from different backgrounds together so they can actually talk about what is happening which is fantastic. But at the same time I think that we shouldn't forget that peop there's also people volunteering for the causes that we might not believe in and that we might think are actually not making a better world. So that's not that I don't think that's really in the paper, but I think that this is something that I would be really interested in looking into more and just kind of a word of warning maybe as well that as a research society we really need to keep reminding ourselves that what we think creates a better world might not be the same as what other people might think create a better world creates a better world.

SPEAKER_01 32:05

Yeah no I think that's a really important point and it reminds me of of something I can remember I think Joan Roloff wrote in a book years ago about this idea that if you fall into the kind of Robert Putnam idea that all that all forms of participation are sort of an unalloyed good, it ignores the fact that you know participating in the Klugwux Klan is technically taking part in civil society activity. And it's kind of you know actually what the organisation is doing is important as well as the fact that it enables volunteering participation. Exactly I just want to zoom out actually for a minute and just just because obviously the focus of this research notes series is to kind of bring together practitioners and academics and kind of connect those worlds. Just just to get a sense of what your experience had been so far in your work um either kind of engaging with practitioners for your research so kind of you know it the way in which they can inform it and provide data and also in the other direction how receptive you'd found practitioners as an audience when you're trying to kind of share findings.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

Oh I'd love to start with the last one actually if that's okay. Because it's I one of my I guess core missions as a I guess young academic that's fun right I can get I get to call myself young still um because I'm uh I'm what now two or three years out of my PhD is to to really focus on this connection. So what I've been doing since even before I started my PhD is I run workshops with nonprofit organizations and I luckily get invited to give talks for nonprofit organizations and I sit on a couple of advisory boards um where I can really you know share what I've learned um from my research and it's been the reception has actually been really good. I think sometimes volunteer managers for example understand my research better than other researchers do. And it's it's a two-way street. So I I share my knowledge with them but during these kind of sessions I also always ask them for input on what I should research next. And that that has been a great kind of cycle of of research and and putting the output out there seeing if people agree with it and seeing if they see the same happening in their organizations. And especially on this paper I've tried to work with organizations to look at these different types of value that I found for the different levels and how can nonprofit organizations then use that specifically their volunteer managers to recruit more volunteers to keep their volunteers within their organization and to even restructure their volunteer tasks maybe within the organization. So that's been pretty cool.

SPEAKER_01 34:50

That's yeah really good to hear as well that from the outset you've kind of found that that relationship works really well. And then I guess the final things just to ask I know often when I talk to people on the podcast about their research actually the research we're talking about they've done a few years ago and people are almost always working on other things now. So I'll just be really interested to know what your main focus is at the moment whether it kind of follows on from this work around volunteering or whether you're looking at other areas.

SPEAKER_00 35:14

Yeah well actually whilst we have been talking um funnily enough a couple of things that I'm working on right now have have come up quite organically so one of the things is I continue to look at this difference between paid staff and and volunteers and how does that work in in management and in the value that they create. I have hopefully a paper coming out soon with a fantastic co-author about um orphanage volunteering uh orphanage volunteer tourism specifically and kind of the mechanism behind why that continues to go on even though we know that it's a bad thing. So my colleague Isabel de Braun wrote about the nonprofit halo so we combine the nonprofit halo with my research on volunteer value which has been a lot of fun. I continue to work on what we call the volunteer ecosystem uh trying also to connect um uh the ESGs to volunteering which uh is fun but also difficult. Um and yeah so most of what I'm doing it is focused on the volunteer value and the difference between volunteers and paid staff. And then I guess one last project that I'm excited about is um a larger project with multiple co-authors about volunteer substitution. So when volunteers take over paid staff tasks or the other way around when does it happen? How does it happen? Why does it happen? When does it become contested and when not uh and in the end hopefully we might we might find that in certain sectors certain tasks should just be done by volunteers or by paid staff uh to kind of help again with that that value-based volunteer management.

SPEAKER_01 37:03

Well it's really great to hear it sounds like really interesting topics and I'll look forward to seeing some of the the outcomes of those just remains to say thanks ever so much Feline for finding time to come on the podcast. Yeah really great to hear about your research and wish you all the best for the future. Thank you and in this final segment we're going to hear from Katie Adams from the University of Sheffield. Okay great well I'm here with Katie Adams. Hi there Katie.

SPEAKER_04 37:35

Hi thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 37:36

Yeah no problem great to have you on the podcast and we're here to talk about a paper of yours that is featured in the latest release of Earnop Research Notes and that paper is titled Challenges, Choices and Common Applications Funders Exercise of Power and its consequences for nonprofits administrative burden. So best place to start um what is the paper all about and what are some of the key findings?

SPEAKER_04 38:00

So the paper is based on some research I did last summer with Yorkshire Funders which is an organisation in in Yorkshire and in the UK which brings together funders and helps them to um connect with each other. And they had brought out a common application form which they were seeking to apply and to get their funders to adopt and it had been going for a while and once I got into conversation with them I realised that they didn't really know how it how it affected and the funders work for the nonprofits. So I ran a series of interviews over that summer and brought them together into into that paper the findings from them and it came out I guess what it showed mainly was that the form succeeded in a lot of ways. It helped reduce I talk about the administrative burden it helped make it easier for nonprofits when filling out that form to know what they were meant to put in, how long they were meant to spend on certain things. It also helped the funders because it helped them compare applications nice and easily because they were using the same structure. The application form obviously had the same structure but what it really highlighted was this power hierarchy which is talked about so often between funders and nonprofits and how the benefits of the form for nonprofits were very much the the consequence of funders decisions that nonprofits had very little control really over the benefits that they could expect from these common applications from this common application form. And the reason for that was that when funders were using the form they invariably or almost invariably tweaked it and personalised it. They didn't cut and paste as the idea was which would then obviously let the nonprofits cut and paste their answers help hence the reduction of their administrative burden but they changed it they altered things they added things to make it align with what they wanted to know to help them strengthen or continue to grow their their relationships with the nonprofits and what that meant was that that benefited them but it didn't benefit the nonprofits because obviously it it it almost made it harder in a way because they then had to check where it was the same or where it was slightly different. And so those decisions whilst benefiting the funders actually did the opposite for the nonprofits. And so what it really brought out is that this attempt to help nonprofits succeeded to a certain extent but what we really need is for funders to come together and to work together and to accept that maybe they have to relinquish certain benefits they have to change their opinion on a few things if they truly want to help the nonprofits.

SPEAKER_01 40:19

Yeah absolutely and and and I guess sort of picking up on some of that the as you said this kind of came about through work that Yorkshire funders which is a collective of kind of grantmaking organisations had done. So given that they decided to do this what in this case were the main drivers for them wanting to have developed a common application form? Because it sounds like the the end result is you get to a place where it doesn't necessarily quite meet the goal of making life easier for nonprofits or lifting the administrative burden but was the starting point one where that was the main goal?

SPEAKER_04 40:50

I think it was albeit with the expectation that they wouldn't fully succeed. And that is something that came out and it was this I I guess frustration this of just stasis of people staying still because they couldn't find the perfect solution and so it was a desire to do something rather than nothing and to push it forward and to say well at least if we get this little bit further at least if we help it in this way and get people starting to think about it and benefit um both parties to a certain extent at least we've done something and we've brought it on a bit further. So I think it was that it was that impetus to do to do something rather than rather than nothing and just this sort of acceptance of the status quo if you like.

SPEAKER_01 41:30

Was it entirely driven by the funding organisations themselves or was there involvement from some of their grantee organisations in the process of designing and deciding what that would look like?

SPEAKER_04 41:41

Yeah so the task force which brought it together was a mix of of your funders of the trust of um nonprofit organisations of a really wider people who've been sort of seconded in so I I think that was a very conscious choice. It was very much driven by um a wonderful lady called Carla Marshall who's a grant maker now there and and so it brought together this wide range of voices and experiences and that was I think that was a very conscious thing to do um to bring together all the all those sorts of different experiences. So yeah it wasn't solely the funders or solely the nonprofits it it was intended to be that collective collective piece of work.

SPEAKER_01 42:17

Yeah absolutely and having met Carla a few times I can absolutely uh see how that works. She's a real kind of uh driving force behind lots of things. So yeah and one other thing you you talk about in the paper a couple of times the idea of compassionate bureaucracy which is an idea that you sort of referenced from elsewhere. Maybe you could just say a bit about what that idea is and how it relates to to this particular context.

SPEAKER_04 42:36

Sure. So compassionate bureaucracy was something I found in an article which was talking about individual nonprofits working um with specific individuals and they they found that obviously often these individuals were overwhelmed by sort of the administrative side of recovery this this administrative side of of being supported and so they took that load off them. So they took that that form filling that calling up all of those things often so that the so that the individuals could focus just on on their recovery. And it was that idea that the nonprofit would deal with that with that admin for them. And so I translated that onto the collective level to say that we've got these nonprofits and it's such a well trodden path isn't it that nonprofits there's so much admin for them when they apply to the for these funds um you know filling out all these forms spending all these spending all these hours on it what we need is for the funders to um take that upon themselves in this idea that they're that it's compassionate they that they take it on that they add to their load as the funders as the as the professional funded the the the well resourced organizations and remove that from the nonprofits as far as they possibly can so that the nonprofits resources are focused on the work on on that you know work working with the people and and achieving their mission.

SPEAKER_01 43:52

And I I wondered in reading that whether there was a a slight difference that sort of explains part of of the the reason that this doesn't quite pan out in practice between Between those instances where we're talking about compassionate bureaucracy, where it's a non-profit or an organization of that kind helping an individual with an administrative burden that is imposed by the state, so by a kind of separate party, as opposed to the situation in which a funding organization or foundation is being asked to list lift an administrative burden. That's actually a result of their own processes. And is it kind of harder to self-analyse in that way?

SPEAKER_04 44:26

Yeah, it is because you're not fulfill just fulfilling someone else's criteria. You're actually removing or reshaping or reducing those criteria in the first place. And you've got the understanding as to why those criteria have been put in place. And also you, as the funder, have got that responsibility for making sure that they are fulfilled, and it's your neck on the line, isn't it? If they're if they're not and you don't get that information, which when you're doing that with a third party, with the local council or whomever, it's you're a bit more detached, so you don't have that pressure on you. Um and very much, you know, very much appreciate that the funders themselves have got these roles to fulfill and that they will also be held to account, which is what makes it so hard to shift, doesn't it? Because you can't just have an individual funder sort of deciding what they want. They're going to have to go back and have that sort of okay by the whole, the whole sort of infrastructure that they're working in. So yeah, it does, it does make, it makes that, it does make it harder, definitely.

SPEAKER_01 45:19

And did you get a sense through the conversations that you're having and the and the research of what people felt could be done or could be done differently to mean that you didn't have this gap between the ambition and the reality where actually you know there's this ambition for everything to be more standardized and have this kind of common framework and the reality where everybody just tweaks it to the point where you're not quite back where you started, but you're sort of getting it. I mean, is it just that you kind of have to get everybody to agree beforehand to genuinely commit to using only the common application form and not, you know, allowing any leeway for any of that tweaking?

SPEAKER_04 45:52

It's really tricky, isn't it? Because one of the things that came up was that they were the task force was willing to allow a certain amount of personalisation to get the take-up. Because there's no point in saying it has to be totally cut and paste if then nobody takes it up. So I guess it's fine, it's finding that balance and sort of nudging it, I suppose, in in the right direction. I think there was a s a resignation, if you like, that the funders will remain in power, but how quite how far can we push them in this direction to sort of reduce it just as far as we can? I don't think we're ever going to get to the sort of nothing, to the nothing point, but how how far can we get? And very much this feeling of it's almost a rolling stone, and there is that peer pressure and there is that shift in expectations and the shift in the in the wider culture. And so it's you to a certain extent, you need you need to get that ball rolling somehow. Um, and by being very sort of dogmatic and black and white about it, you're not you're not going to do that. So again, it kind of it comes back to that appreciation of the reality, I think, in which in which people are working.

SPEAKER_01 46:52

Yeah, and I guess I mean that gap between the world as it is and the world as you would like it to be is always, you know, always. Exactly. Exactly. And and just by kind of highlighting the phenomenon and sort of spelling it out, you would hope that that kind of does some of the work of getting people to reflect on on you know what they could do differently.

SPEAKER_04 47:08

I hope so, yeah. And I think that there's a big you know, funders are, I'm I'm sure they always were, but there is a lot more focus now on how funders are becoming very thoughtful, aren't they? And the way that they're funding and how how they can better help nonprofits. And this is just you know another another thing for them to consider and and and to throw into the mix and to hopefully shift that that that culture and that and those accepted and usual ways of working.

SPEAKER_01 47:31

Yeah, absolutely. Um I just wanted to zoom out for a moment and ask, um, obviously the focus of the Earn Op research notes is on kind of trying to get better links between academia and practice around philanthropy. Obviously, the the research that you've done here is very much rooted in practice, but I wondered what your general view is of how good the links are between academia and practice. Um both, you know, as an academic working with practitioners as a source of research, and conversely, when you've got findings, how easy you find it to kind of disseminate them or get practitioners to listen?

SPEAKER_04 48:04

That's that's that's a really interesting question. I think I would say, so I guess I've got sort of two strands to my research. This is the trend of things. I find it, I mean, because this was done through Yorkshire funders. I thought that was obviously quite a simple way of getting it out to people. I went to the members' day and presented all of that. And I think more broadly there are wider avenues for that. For example, the VSSN conference, which is coming up um in a couple of days' time, that is very, very, very varied in terms of who goes. It's not solely academics. There is a good, there is a good range of practitioners there. Um, and so I think there are there are avenues. The challenge is obviously translating it into a language and a format which is un which is understood um and which and which and which is relevant. So I think that's that's one side. On the other side, in my in my other sort of um research research area, my my my full-time work is with a cross-institutional group which works directly with the public and the voluntary sector in relation to prevention, um, headed up by um Professor Joe Cook at the University of Hull. And that that is working very, very directly with practitioners and it's very much equipping practitioners with the tools. We've just done a big project which has been about training um a variety of local authorities in how to use our tools so that they can go out and evaluate their own prevention programs without needing to pay for sort of a big research team to come in. And I think so I think that really is the way, is the way to do it, that you come in and it's it's it's co-developed the work. We have sort of our basic tools, but we align them and we and we work with the people that we're working with, and we leave them with that legacy of being able to do that, being able to do that work for themselves. And so I think there are those opportunities. There are, there is obviously sometimes the reticence of the the academics coming in and you've you've you've got to work with that. But I think philanthropy work in particular, voluntary sector research in particular, is so it's it's so aligned with practice that there are that there are avenues, but it very much needs to be done in that collaborative sort of way and not the parachuting in, doing the research and coming out. It's really important that you work with people, you give them something that's a benefit short-term, short-term and long-term.

SPEAKER_01 50:11

Yeah. And it's really interesting, and it feels like there's, you know, it definitely to me makes me think there's a a gap still in in some of that very clearly kind of co-designed work where there's a an idea, you know, definitely a view of bringing academics and practitioners together and that the end result will be using academic insight directly to inform practice. There's still more of a sense of, let's just hope that happens at the end.

SPEAKER_04 50:32

Exactly, exactly, because it's it's I think that there's often the focus, isn't there, that the researchers need to get the results that they want, that they need to write their reports. But what doing this work and gathering this data and analysing it, it can help practice as well, not just to know what it's doing, but how it's being effective and where it's not been effective and where the gaps are on a very you know day-to-day basis. We need to do more of this or we need more resources here. So it's it really is mutually beneficial. It's about it's about sharing that and helping people to realize that that academia has a has a real life, a real life use as well. Can be can be yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:05

Yeah, absolutely. Great. Well, that's really uh interesting to hear. Um so yeah, certainly wish you all the best with with that in the future. Um, yeah, I would love to hear about any kind of more uh research that follows up on it.

SPEAKER_04 51:16

Fabulous. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 51:27

Great. Well, my thanks again to Cassandra, to Philine and to Katie for uh coming on the podcast. It's really great to hear from all of them about their work. I'll put links in the show notes to places where you can find the papers in question and also the research notes that are based on them. Um if you're interested more broadly in issues around philanthropy and charity and civil society, do check out the website at whyphilanthropymatters.com. You can find all of the back episodes of this podcast, including all the uh 14 previous partnership episodes with Earn Ot. So loads of interesting stuff there. You can find some long form articles uh that I've written over the years, you can find some shorter form guides to kind of key issues and topics around charity and philanthropy, find lots of news updates about things that I've been doing, you can find back issues of the newsletter that I do every month, you can sign up for that newsletter so you get future issues every month as well. You can do all kinds of things on that website, it's a cornucopia of philanthropy and charity content. Uh, if you want uh to hear from me more regularly, you can follow me on LinkedIn. Uh, I post quite a lot on there, lots of stuff about charities and philanthropy, so do check that out. Uh if you've got ideas for people that we could talk to on the podcast or things that you'd like us to cover as topics, do get in touch. You can find my contact details on the Why Philanthropy Matters website. Other than that, uh just like, uh, subscribe, um, leave us a nice review wherever you get your podcasts if you've got the time to do that, because it really helps bump us back up the algorithms and get it in front of more people. Um if you don't like algorithms but do want to make a recommendation, why not just tell somebody in person if you think they they like this podcast? Because word of mouth goes a long way as well. Other than that, I will see you next time. Bye.