Is your donor clean? Meaning – would you accept a donation from them? We are used to carrying out due diligence research on companies, but now there is the challenge of how to do this for individual philanthropists. I’ve written a piece on this for Reinier Spruit’s 101Fundraising blog, and will be giving a workshop on Due Diligence and Major Donor’s at IFC later this month.
Author: willw
Islamic philanthropy
The World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists have announced a conference in New York on 2nd November, part sponsored by the Save the Children Fund, to discuss Muslim philanthropy and the Millennium Development Goals. At Factary we have been increasingly interested in Muslim or Islamic philanthropy, and have been involved in a number of studies and reviews in the area.
We hate to boast…
…but can’t resist including comments from the evaluation forms at this year’s Institute of Fundraising Conference:
- “Very interesting and engaging – thank you”
- “Brilliant session from someone who is clearly an expert. Very professional and friendly.”
- “Best presentation I have been to in ages”
- “Relevant, thought provoking and delivered by an expert”
Thanks to all the participants who gave this lovely feedback!
Our new website
Thanks to the hard work of a team at Factary led by Shaun Gardiner we’ve got a lovely new website. We hope you’ll find it useful, and easier to navigate.
Take a look at our published research papers – like this one, on UK law firms. Or our free white papers on philanthropy – such as this paper on the UK foundation sector.
Our full range of services is described here.
Try out our Prospect Value Chain – follow the chain from prospect to donor, and work out what research is needed, when (just hover your mouse over the Prospect Value Chain steps.)
And find out what people say about Factary Phi – our online database on 339,000 (and counting!) donors in the UK. Click on Testimonials, here.
We hope you enjoy the experience. Let us know if you have any comments or suggestions (write to Shaun, at shaun@factary.com).
Thanks for taking a look at Factary!
Chris
Soliciting Gifts: top law firms give £50m
A report published today by Factary shows that the top 10 UK law firms donate £50m per year to non-profits (charities, arts organisations, universities…)
Key findings in the 130-page report include:
The top 10 UK law firms donated more than £5m in cash to charitable causes in the last year; firms give eight times as much in pro bono work as they give in cash.
Causes
Law firms stated CR themes are, in order of preference, Education & Training, Housing & Employment, and Rights/Law & Conflict. By contrast, we found that publicly reported donations are focused on Health, Children/Youth and Arts. We analyse these differences and suggest reasons in our report
Fundraising
Crisis UK appears to enjoy the widest support from UK law firms, reporting donations from 9 of the 20 leading firms. Amongst Universities, the University of Sheffield leads the field, reporting donations from 5 of the top 20 firms.
Recognition
The recognition won by some law firms for their donations far exceeds that of others. Slaughter and May achieve more public recognition for their donations than any other law firm. Clifford Chance, Hogan Lovells and Freshfields win little recognition for their generosity. Comparing amounts donated by the firms and public recognition, we report that DLA Piper achieve the highest level of public recognition per £1 donated.
The report – Soliciting Gifts: Donations by Leading Law Firms in the UK – is published as a special supplement to Factary’s New Trust Update report. It is published by Factary at £125 per copy, with a discounted price – £100 – for subscribers to Factary’s New Trust Update or Factary Phi.
To order a copy contact Shaun Gardiner.
Transparency and foundations
Chris Carnie has an article published in today’s La Vanguardia newspaper about the need for transparency in foundations in Spain following recent scandals.
Read the article, in Spanish, here – or a translated version (via Google) here.
The End of the New Trusts Recession
New research from Factary reveals that during 2009-10 there was a “New Trusts Recession” – four consecutive quarters in which the numbers of newly registered grant-making trusts declined.
That recession is now over. Our latest research paper reveals some of the patterns of grant-making by new trusts.
The research is based on cross-analysis between our New Trust Update database and our Factary Phi database.
AU$600m in philanthropy
Philanthropy in Australia just became easier to research, thanks to FR&C and Factary.
FR&C, the leading prospect research agency in Australia, has developed Giftsearch, a database of public domain information on donors to Australian nonprofits.
Giftsearch currently holds information on 60,000 donations, representing $600m in value. It’s growing, with new records added every month.
The database is hosted by Factary, using the software we developed for Factary Phi
For more on Factary Phi, or to arrange a demo, contact us.
To learn more about Giftsearch or FR&C, contact Charlotte Grimshaw.
Venture Philanthropy hits £1bn
I was honoured to chair this year’s annual conference of EVPA, the 141-member association for venture philanthropists in Europe. The conference included a wide range of speakers and new data on venture philanthropy, showing that it has now reached a cumulative £1bn in philanthropic investments.
Martine Godefroid, Managing Director of Factary Europe, attended too – and we combined our impressions for this article in Alliance magazine.
We’re bigger than NASA*
Factary Phi – our online, searchable database of philanthropists in the UK – has now reached 287,472 records and a total of £17 billion in recorded donations.
(*For comparison, £17 billion is more than the total budget for NASA for 2012, US$18 billion [source: www.whitehouse.gov])
Every single record is searchable, and subscribers can see who has given, to whom, and find the original public-domain source we used to find the record.
We’ve just uploaded over 23,000 new records to Factary Phi with a total value of £482m, equivalent to over half the total value of the Factary Phi database when it was launched in 2009. At the top end of philanthropy, we are currently reporting on 829 donations of £1m or more. That’s a lot of giving to UK organisations by people, trusts and foundations, and companies.
You could be using Factary Phi to
- Find new prospects
- Understand prospects’ philanthropy – who gives, to whom
- Build lists of prospects with specific philanthropic interests
- Analyse the competition – see our report “Thanks for £1” as an example
Here’s what users say:
Factary Phi is a unique tool, which has been a great starting point for much of my research & certainly saved me a great deal of time. As a new product to the market, it can only become stronger as more and more data is added.
— Arts organisation
Factary Phi is a great resource which helps our team get the fullest view of philanthropists’ giving, and helps us in prospecting.
— Social welfare organisation
Factary Phi makes my job easier and is a much quicker way of searching on a donor’s philanthropy.
— Arts organisation
Phi has been very useful and I now use it on a weekly basis.
— University
If you like a nice graph, here’s our growth in numbers of records:
And here’s the growth in total value of donations recorded:
Read more about Factary Phi here, or contact us to ask more or arrange a demo.