Director, Giving Evidence: enabling charitable giving based on sound evidence. Cambridge Visiting Fellow. 'Charmingly disruptive': Nobel laureate Richard Thaler
Dear medical profession,
When you realise that somebody is dying, please tell them that clearly. I know it must be god-awful thing to say, but, oddly, it's a massive gift.
That was my family's experience.
Me, in the
@bmj_latest
:
Giving Evidence today publishes
#research
about Royal patronages of charities: what are they, which charities have them, and whether they help.
It's in today's
@TheTimes
(£).
Our findings include these (thread):
#charity
#Royal
#royalfamily
It's often claimed that the UK's
#royal
family "does a lot for
#charity
". Our analysis could find no effect of royals on charities. Plus a resident royal family doesn't make countries more generous: that was true in our analysis in 2020, & also by this year's World Giving Index:
To become a Companion of Honour, you can either predict the existence of a particle which accounts for all of matter, or you can just be Prince Charles' daughter-in-law. The white daughter-in-law; not the mixed race one, obvs.
#royal
#royalfamily
The Companion of Honour, which recognises achievements in science and the arts, is limited to 65 people - Peter Higgs has just died, and there's therefore a vacancy.
I'm not sure what has Kate done to deserve this honour alongside Sir Paul Mccartney and Dame Maggie Smith.
Striking that Meghan's disclosure of her & Harry's miscarriage gets zero mention or comment on the Twitter accounts of Harry's brother, father or grandmother: nothing on
@RoyalFamily
,
@clarencehouse
, or
@kensingtonroyal
. Surely not hard to mention it & express sympathy.
#royal
Anti-malaria bednets are cheap & effective at preventing a common & fatal disease. It is not OK to write in int'l newspapers claiming they fail. So Prof Paul Garner of the Liverpool School of - !! - Tropical Medicine & I wrote in The Economist in response to the recent letter:🧵
The
@Independent
cites "a source close to the royal family" when reporting the royals' reaction to Harry's complaint that the royals brief the press against him. They literally admit the charge right there.
The irony-o-meter is blowing.
2/ UK charities should not seek or retain
#Royal
patrons expecting either many public events with them, nor an effect on revenue.
We couldn't find any effect of Royal patronages on charities’ revenues, despite multiple sophisticated statistical analyses.
#charity
#fundraising
I've often said: a fundamental problem with the British
#RoyalFamily
is that there's nothing material for the non-monarch to do. Hence Prince Andrew busied himself as he did, Prince Harry saw the problem & quit, and this kind of thing:👇
#royal
3/ We were surprised that three-quarters (74%) of UK charities which have
#Royal
patrons did not get a single public engagement with them during 2019.
Only 1% of charities which have
#Royal
patrons got more than one public engagement with them during 2019.
To be clear, none of the £5m for the mental health campaign that William and Kate are 'backing' is coming from them personally, nor from their foundation. It's government money.
and
#philanthropy
#charity
#royal
#corona
#Covid_19
Harry's central claim seems to be that the
@royalfamily
was (is) using taxpayer-funded press office staff to brief against him. Surely that's an abuse of public money. The UK has mechanisms to prevent that, right?
Will be interesting to watch those wheel into action (or not…)
Hearing all these Royal correspondents talk abstractly about “allegations” that the palace was briefing journalists is infuriating.
Obviously it is true. If it wasn’t the Royal correspondents would say so… and they can’t admit it or the RF will never…
A basic failure of the British
#Royal
Family is not creating anything for those who aren't the Monarch to do.
Their
#charity
patronages mainly involve zero official engagements 👇
Andrew busied himself as he has.
No wonder
#HarryandMeghan
have left.
3/ We were surprised that three-quarters (74%) of UK charities which have
#Royal
patrons did not get a single public engagement with them during 2019.
Only 1% of charities which have
#Royal
patrons got more than one public engagement with them during 2019.
20/ I'm happy to talk to press.
Note to journos: there are several Caroline Fiennes'es.
I was never married to Ralph & Joseph's father, my husband wasn't stabbed, and I don't sell soap...😠
Apparently under protocol, such gifts remain property of the Crown. So, if association with any such gift is so embarrassing, the the
@royalfamily
should just return it.
And get Prince Andrew to talk to the FBI.
The Times can reveal that the duchess wore earrings to a 2018 event that were a wedding gift from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said by the US to have approved the murder of the Jamal Khashoggi.
The dinner took place three weeks after the killing.
7/ *The data that the
#Royalfamily
publishes about its "charities and patronages" (its term) has many errors, duplications, omissions, and is hard to use. It took us six weeks to construct a defensible list. So these numbers are from Giving Evidence, not the Palace.
This statement looks false.
The refurb was funded from the pot of money that the UK gives to the Royals, i.e., it wasn't marginal cost to the tax-payer. Harry and Meghan seem to have repaid that money into that pot that the Royals have, i.e., it isn't returned to the tax-payer.
Do other countries send their head of state's grandchildren on fully-paid jolly trips with no political or economic purpose?
#royalfamily
#Royals
#royal
4/ Royals do far more public engagement w/ charities they set up than with pre-existing charities they take on.
The latter (Prince’s Trust, the Duke of Ed Award, etc.) are 2% of their charity patronages, but get 36% of public engagements that they do w/ their patronee charities.
Just in, a message from The Duke & Duchess of Sussex, who are matching your INSPIRING actions by making a $130,000 gift to CAMFED:
‘No better way to celebrate what really matters. Thank you to everyone who donated, Harry and Meghan’
#TogetherWeCan
!
Happy anniversary to Prince Andrew, who 'stepped back from public duties' a full year ago - but who, as far as we know, remains fully on the
#Royal
payroll and hasn't spoken to the FBI as per their request.
(Weird that he quit on his parents' wedding anniversary.)
@RoyalFamily
@ortonheart
@POPSUGARUK
@RoyalFamily
@the_LTA
The problem is fundamental and structural: there is nothing for anyone in the
@royalfamily
except the monarch to do. That's why Harry left. Prince Andrew has busied himself as he has. Giving Evidence showed that their '
#charity
work' has no discernible effect. We don't need them.
5/
#Charity
patronages seem to matter to the Royals. 26% of the Royals’ public engagements during 2019 were with patronee charities.
{So, taking public engagements as indicator of workload, they're 1/4 of the Royals' work. We could find no effect of that.}
Private Eye, which has long had a mole in the palace, says that the Queen is pretty ill: much more so than the palace is letting on. It also says that "in good spirits" means body failing.
#royal
#royalfamily
The
@royalfamily
invents baubles and awards them to itself. This BS has no role in a democracy. The UK should wake up to the waste of resources that they are, and get rid of royalty: it serves no purpose except perpetuating elites & unearned, tax-funded privilege.
3/ e.g., here, it transpires that Kate hadn't visited one of her patronee charities for *nine years*:
*Giving Evidence's analysis of
#charity
patronages of the UK royals is here:
It found no evidence that royal patronages help.
12/ Charities with patronages are disproportionately in London, the South East and South West of England – where the Royals’ main residences are. More deprived regions seem under-represented.
17/ We found no reason to think that charities with Royal patronages are better (more effective) than those without: the selection process and criteria aren't clear, but it looks like history, geography, the Royals' personal interests and serendipity play large roles.
#charity
9/ Re effect on revenue, the complicated maths couldn't find an effect*.
But here are revenue of air ambulances: they go red when they get a Royal patron. You can see that nothing much happens then:
(*note: this ≠ conclusively finding no effect)
6/ The Royals seem to be* patrons of 1187 registered UK charities. Of those, 1064 have one Royal patron, and 123 have multiple Royal patrons.
Their patronage positions have various titles, incl. patron, honorary patron, president, honorary fellow, & in one case, Companion Rat.
14/ We found no evidence of Royalty having any ‘macro’ effect on generosity. There's no correlation between the % of
#Royal
patronages in an English region and the
‘participation in
#giving
’ there (the % people who have given recently).*
#philanthropy
#charity
8/
#Charity
patronages are very unevenly distributed. The Queen, Charles and Anne have 532 between them*: by contrast, William has just 12, Kate 9 and Harry has 8.
(*= half of the single-patron patronee charities).
19 UK Royals have charity patronage positions.
10a/ Of course, revenue isn't everything and Royal patronages may have effects on other things, eg., beneficiaries, staff morale. But we're trying to do science, and there's no analysable data on those other outcomes.
We tried to analyse press coverage, but couldn't.
16/ And internationally, it is not the case that countries with resident
#Royal
families (the UK, Cambodia, the UAE, Morocco, etc.) are more generous than countries without. No country with a resident Royal family has been in the top 8 most generous countries over the last 4 yrs.
10/ Much the same for revenue of children's hospices. And for all the other comparator groups that we looked at.
(The report has more graphs - many more!😉.)
3/ To be clear, our analysis included ALL UK charities with a
#royal
patron. We had literally three million data-points. Sure, there are the odd exceptional good story, but seven different regression analyses don't lie about overall patterns.
The research is here:
(
#royalfamily
)
To be clear, none of the £5m for the mental health campaign that William and Kate are 'backing' is coming from them personally, nor from their foundation. It's government money.
and
#philanthropy
#charity
#royal
#corona
#Covid_19
ICYMI:
Dear medical profession,
When you realise that somebody is dying, please tell them that clearly. I know it must be a god-awful thing to say but it's a massive gift.
That was my family's experience.
Me, in the British Medical Journal
@bmj_latest
2/ When Giving Evidence read the Court Circular (daily listing of all activities of each
#royal
) for an entire year, for our analysis of their charitable activities*, it was clear that some royals choose to do a lot & some choose to do little. Their system tolerates idleness.
19/ Our research is here, with some explanatory videos🎊🎉:
It was funded by the Belgian Red Cross, Flanders,
@RodeKruisVL
(see also )
Cambridge University was not involved. Many others were - thanks! 👏🤜🤛 - eg,
@DrSylviaMcLain
.
18/ Giving Evidence takes no position on the
#Royal
family (or Royalty more broadly). Our interest is providing sound
#evidence
to inform decisions by charities & donors to improve their
#effectiveness
.
Yeah, both these charities have had
#Royal
patrons for years.
BTO has had just two Royal engagements in the last *ten years*; FFI not even that - it's had just one.
Methinks most Royal
#charity
patronages are not really a thing:
Today The Duke of Cambridge has become Patron of two wildlife conservation charities,
@FaunaFloraInt
and
@_BTO
, handed to The Duke by The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh.
Klaxon!
New project: to rate grant-making foundations on their
#diversity
, accountability and transparency. It's unprecedented. We'll rate them without their permission, using only info that is public. We'll publish all our findings.
Next year, we do it again.🧵
#philanthropy
11/ Charities with patronages are generally large: their revenue is (on average) nearly 30 times larger than the average UK charity.
The charities with multiple Royal patrons are huge: on av. >80x the ave revenue of UK charities:
15/ (*I'm well aware that we are here using English regions as controls / comparators for each other & that that is not perfect b/c there are loads of confounding factors. I do not need a lecture about that from anybody! We looked from many angles to try to get a line of sight.)
The Telegraph claims that a
#charity
flew
#PrinceAndrew
, its then-patron, to New York (presumably not in cattle class) to attend a
#fundraising
event.
We suspected that
#royal
patronages carry a cost - so it matters that we found no evidence of benefit.
So it may be that neither
#charity
had a choice in whether Prince William became its patron.
Reminder: we couldn't establish what a
#Royal
patronage comprises nor find evidence of effect on revenue, but did find that most (74%) patronee charities got zero visits last year.
Today The Duke of Cambridge has become Patron of two wildlife conservation charities,
@FaunaFloraInt
and
@_BTO
, handed to The Duke by The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh.
Recently spoke to a new foundation, just getting set up. They want to fund "innovatively". Honestly, the best
#philanthropy
is just evidence-based or evidence-generating, unrestricted, long term, easy to apply for, and low maintenance. Sadly that is still pretty innovative.
Americans sometimes think that when a UK royal is a patron of a
#charity
, they give it (lots of) money. We've never heard of that. That's not basically what it is. Our royals are not the Medici! Rather they, er, use the charity to do photo-shoots & try to look busy, & relevant.
@lukusem
@carolinefiennes
I never thought the point of royals' participation in charities was to get other people to donate money. I always thought it was a charity they gave significant amounts to.
I'm asked to teach some
#charity
people about measuring
#impact
.
Most shouldn't: they lack adequate sample size, funds, skills.
Instead, they should use existing lit to design the intervention; ensure it reaches the right people; & everybody gets it all.
Interesting aspect of this 'scandal' around Royals raising money for
#charity
from dodgy people, is that Royals' (alleged) ability to raise money for charity is PRECISELY a key justification for their involvement - and indeed for the monarchy*. And the purpose of patronage is...
Prince Charles’ Foundation under statutory investigation. Latest from
@eroohi
and me in
@Alliancemag
with the allegations against the Prince’s Foundation and what it all means for philanthropy
There's a debate on
#econtwitter
about the merits of difference-in-difference vs two way fixed effects analyses.
Giving Evidence's analysis of
#Royal
#charity
patronages used both: six types of TWFE with various input variables*.
None found an effect.
We are interviewing loads of grantees of a big fdn whose grants are mainly unrestricted. They all have tons of stories of that flexibility proved essential and enabled them to do waaay more than the same amount restricted.
Who knew? Well, lots of us. But still🙄
#philanthropy
?! letter in
@TheEconomist
, claiming that Gates Fdn's funding of bednets distribution had no effect on malaria incidence, because thet were (all?) used as fishing nets. It's BS. MASSES of rigorous evidence finds that nets reduce malaria cases, eg,
cont'd
FUNDERS. Every time you ask a
#charity
or other grantee for some 'monitoring &
#evaluation
' data which neither you nor they will use, you waste resources, impede the work, and probably make 'beneficiaries' waste their limited & valuable time on answering useless Qs.
#eval
All researchers and funders should think about the harms of doing studies that don’t yield value for decisionmaking. “Uninformative trials squander scarce resources, divert participants from better research, and dilute the evidence base.”
@goodmanmetrics
@KateWilliamsme
Also, Friday was Prince Andrew's anniversary of 'stepping back'. I may have missed it, but I didn't see anything about that in the press.
Happy anniversary to Prince Andrew, who 'stepped back from public duties' a full year ago - but who, as far as we know, remains fully on the
#Royal
payroll and hasn't spoken to the FBI as per their request.
(Weird that he quit on his parents' wedding anniversary.)
@RoyalFamily
Britain's "honours system" is so corrupt. Take no part in it: don't accept them, don't use the titles when referring to people, don't nominate people for them. Like civil disobedience. We can ensure that the whole charade is associated only with corruption & hence discreted.
Delighted to say that I have been appointed a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, in its new Centre for Strategic
#Philanthropy
.
Look forward to working with
@CWoodcraft
,
@KamalMunir5
et al to understand & improve philanthropy in emerging markets:
@aidybarnett
@craigcook3
Craig, your comment is so brilliant. I pity the poor person who has to count every single person in Australia, to establish that there are 24m of them. Or count every USD produced by Australia to establish that there are 1.32 trillion of them.
I agree, that is a lot of work.
@ByRobDavies
And who is preparing (&shopping for) those meals? Doesn't sound like he was.
Doubtless some magical fairy who doesn't warrant being cited 🤦♀️
About UK Royals' involvement in
#charity
: implication that it helps the oligarch laundro-mat: "Donations to charities - esp those headed by members of the British
#Royal
family - are a key part of reputation laundering by the Soviet elites" - so says Chatham House, no less:
You know how
@IDinsight
is really awesome? - creating / curating / providing rigorous data & evidence *on demand* to help
#policy
bods make
#evidence
-based decisions?
Well, I've just joined its advisory board. Hoorah! Pretty august company, tbh 😮
@xtophercook
Hello. I didn't know that
@tortoise
had done a piece on the Royals. Our investigation might be relevant / useful. It's at and in the thread above.
(BTW, you & I met at the Royal Institution quite recently)
Today, am working against the two most dangerous beasts in the
#evidence
world: HiPPOs and ZEBRAs!
- HiPPO: Highest Paid Person’s Opinion
- ZEBRA: (person with) Zero Evidence But Really Arrogant
:-)
#research
#impact
#philanthropy
It's nonsense that Harry and Meghan must drop their
#charity
patronages. Charities can invite as patrons whomever they want.
Remember: many charities get a Royal patron whether they want one or not: will be interesting to see who chooses to have one, who thinks one will help.
Prince Harry is allegedly relinquishing his
#charity
patronages... but, as we showed, the
@royalfamily
doesn't know which charities those are(!) e.g., its list didn't include Diana's beloved Halo Trust. So they may not twig if he doesn't!
#royal
#HARRY
You know how Post-Its often curl upwards, rendering them illegible? Evidently if you peel them off the stack horizontally (from the side), rather than vertically (from the bottom), that doesn't happen.
{Top insight from an HCD workshop...}
For example, implying even in that short statement that she / they have made it up / misremembered it. They can't even write 4 sentences without trying to undermine her. That encapsulates the whole problem. Many many people who have tried to report discrimination recognise this.
As a psychologist, as someone who specialises in trauma, as someone who can pick out what people are not saying, and as someone who can see abusive family dynamics - everything playing out around Meghan is deliberate, & designed to destroy her because she is a whistleblower.
Tis not every day that one gets to email two foundations to say 'You know that thing that you funded a while ago on my suggestion? Well, it just got the Nobel Prize!' :-)
#philanthropy
The UK Royals are giving up many chary patronages. Reminder: in the sole analysis of those patronages, Giving Evidence could find no effect of them on charities' revenue* (= the sole 'outcome' for which reliable data exist). See:
Not one but TWO articles in Nature this week about
#evidence
synthesis. (Both by Brits, am proud to say).
1. Four principles for doing it:
2. A new approach where data are sparse:
#impact
Great letter in
@TheEconomist
about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. So important to get proper data & identify real causes, rather than assume a cause & grab onto one 'solution'. Important to do
#science
, in other words.
Ht
@hans_zollner
:
Re this blah about
#Djokovic
being (nearly) the greatest of all time:
He & Roger have 20. Rafa has 21. Steffi Graf has 22 (+ uniquely the Golden Slam), Serena has 23 (one of them *whilst pregnant*, + a stack of Olympic golds), & Margaret Court has 24.
Women do also play
#tennis
.
"Funded by royals" here means 'funded by a foundation of which royals are patrons but not even trustees, ie, by donors to that foundation and very possibly no Royal money at all.'
#charity
#Royalfamily
#philanthropy
We are researching & analysing Royal patronages of charities, to see:
- what charities they're patrons of, by sector, geography and size, and
- whether Royal patronages have any effect on charities.
Stay tuned:
#royal
#charity
#philanthropy
#volsec
This is utterly brilliant. One of the world's best choral groups does the mighty 40-part Spem in Alium, from their various homes, with a Periodic Table-type visual showing which of the eight 5-part choirs is doing what when. Bravo 👋👋
We are so proud to share our socially distanced performance of Spem in Alium, Tallis' amazing 40-part motet, to mark 40 days of UK lockdown. We hope its beauty and confidence inspire you as we travel together through these uncertain times.
#40parts40days
Reminder for people at
#geis2018
:
Impact isn't a verb. You mean affect.
Evidence isn't a verb. You mean demonstrate.
Impactful isn't a word. You mean consequential.
justsayin' ;-)
Today is the anniversary of Apollo 13 returning to Earth = excellent excuse to listen again to the whole tale as told by
@Kevin_Fong
& co. in "13 Minutes To The Moon", ace podcast series.
This is what the severely damaged Apollo 13 Service Module looked like after the separation from the command module, exactly 52 years ago
#Today
[read more: ]
Our
#research
about charities applying for ££ just uncovered a foundation whose form for a £3k grant is...60 pages long!
Reminds of
@bengoldacre
's law(!), that the less £ you want, the more detail you have to provide on your org & plans.
We are a bonkers species.
#philanthropy