In tumultuous times, how do you effectively encourage and lead philanthropy? In the latest in the new series of blogs from More, Joanna Motion draws on her 50-year career in Advancement, reinforced by 30 years of More Partnership’s experience, to provide perspective on what matters.

How much more perfect can a storm get?

Universities are under siege and undermined from all directions. Cultural organisations lament a wholesale collapse in corporate sponsorship. Humanitarian agencies scramble to cope with the swerve in US government policies. High street charities, as they lay off staff and explore mergers, point to a “cost of giving” crisis. It’s messy out there. In this convoluted story, what sort of voice does philanthropy have?

Everywhere the distraction factor is huge. And treacherous. Surveying their options, organisational leaders and their advancement teams have first to distinguish between climate – the wider context that individuals can do little to influence – and weather – short-term atmospheric conditions which we can plan for and work around. “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing”, wrote Alfred Wainwright, the indomitable fell-walker. So, what’s suitable clothing for these times? For starters, here are four all-weather garments to dig out of the wardrobe: conviction, ambition, optimism and purpose.

Conviction
Glance back. We’ve already travelled a fair way. In 1986, as the University of Melbourne’s shiny new Executive Officer of the just launched Alumni Association, I met a group of engineering graduates in Bendigo, the former gold rush boom town. To explain why I was there I wrote the word ALUMNI on a blackboard. A hand went up. “I can see UM is the University of Melbourne, but what do the other letters stand for?” The speaker had just encountered the alumni word for the first time – and with it the concept of a continuing mutually helpful relationship between an institution and its ex-students. Fast forward forty years, Melbourne University, with the aptly-named, billion dollar BELIEVE campaign under its belt, has just won a CASE gold award for initiatives in attracting and retaining advancement talent. Change is up ahead for all of us but a lot, really a lot, has already changed, creating momentum and expertise to wrangle the future.

Ambition
Concepts, tools and professionalism have matured, together with the alchemy that all those make possible – the scale of ambition. These days, the University of Oxford is a philanthropic powerhouse. I remind myself, however, that it’s not so long since its fundraisers found it hard to lift their sights higher than a gift of £10m. Yet this year marks the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Weston Library, a cultural and intellectual landmark, catalysed by the gift of £25m from Garfield Weston – the Foundation’s largest ever at the time. Even as I write, Oxford’s humanities disciplines move into their spiffing new home in the Schwarzman Centre, enabled by a gift six times that size – £150m from the Blackstone CEO. With subsequent further gifts, Steve Schwarzman’s vigorous championship of the humanities has risen to £185m. They could carve William Blake’s lines, “what is now proved was once only imagined”, over the front door. Demonstrating that gifts of that size are not blips in the graph, The National Gallery has announced a matching pair to supercharge its visionary Project Domani. Crankstart and the Julia Rausing Trust are giving a spine-stiffening £150m each. This could become habit-forming!

Optimism
Pearls grow from grit. We’ve lived through a sobering rollcall of shocks to the system. Institutional character has been exhaustively stress-tested by the global financial crisis of 2008, then Brexit, then Covid-19, on top of assorted local calamities. Looking back, however, it’s now possible to pick out innovation, resilience, good practice and generosity that were sparked in the gloom – and sometimes by the gloom. Further back still, the 1981 cuts to UK university funding, differentially applied across the sector ranging from York’s 6% cut to Salford’s seismic 44%, were certainly a factor in prompting the 1960s universities such as Kent and UEA to focus for the first time on engagement with their alumni. Today, graduation no longer means goodbye, and alumni are regarded as valued stakeholders by any university worthy of the name.

The notorious Gaddafi gift caused a firestorm for LSE in 2011. But the legacy of the Woolf Report that followed – gripping reading for every development office in the country – has mostly been a force for good, strengthening institutional policies and procedures right across the charitable sector. And just look at the recent acceleration in LSE’s advancement trajectory and its dashing Shaping the World campaign. Energy and fresh ideas are hovering out there; some equivalent shining pearls will surely emerge from current stony circumstances.

Tough times are powerful myth-busters too. The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated that people instinctively want to give to agencies that provide solutions for important social problems – hospitals among them. Hospital charities have learnt a great deal about effective fundraising since then; now they are upping the revs. There are calls for a Matched Funding scheme to encourage giving, along the lines of the Blair government’s boost for higher education 2008-2011. Some unbelievers will still pronounce that beyond the USA there is no tradition of philanthropy or, doggedly, “it’s the government’s business” – but these days those conversations are fewer and further between. The compelling urge for most of us is to get the important stuff done now, not least on the children’s ward and in the research lab.

Purpose
The lodestar, the guiding principle to steer by, is an organisation’s core purpose. As we stressed in Accelerating Ambitions, the CASE-More Report on Philanthropy 2023, the starting point of an effective advancement programme is the Delphic maxim, know thyself. One size seriously doesn’t fit all. (See our Playbooks presenting plans for differing stages of evolution.) Philanthropy at its most powerful occurs when it turbocharges a task close to heart and mission. No doubt dejection descended on the V&A when the government broke the news that the museum’s storage facility at Blythe House in Kensington was to be sold for luxury flats. Yet the V&A East Storehouse, which opened this summer, is a revelation. Not just a solution to a problem but a grand leap forward in the museum’s interaction with a wider public. Storage has become the story. A crisis transformed into a defining triumph – boosted, of course, by philanthropy. So, what’s your true north? Who will want to help you reach it? What difference will it make when you get there?

Planning that journey to better and sharper-edged times, what role exactly can philanthropy play? There’s the muscle power of serious money, of course. “Massive donation bankrolling veterinary education overhaul” – a recent THE headline announcing a A$100m gift to Murdoch University in Western Australia from businessman Ted Powell – encapsulates the transformational impact of megagifts. There can and will be more like that, especially if urgent attention gets paid to the unprecedented inter-generational transfer of wealth happening right now as baby boomers such as the magnificently generous Mr Powell settle their affairs. (“It’s a weight off my mind”, said the longtime supporter of the university.)

We should all be rolling our respective pitches in ways that make such high scoring not only more probable but more predictable. Accelerating Ambitions charts the doubling in philanthropic funds raised for UK universities over the previous decade. In the 10 highest performing UK Higher Ed institutions, new funds committed philanthropically rose to a record 10.4% of overall turnover in 2022 – and the figure has edged up since. For some institutions, that benchmark raises sights; for others, it can seem an off-puttingly high bar. Which opens up the question of what impact philanthropy makes alongside its financial contribution.

Interestingly, in a recent blog post lifting the lid on university finances, Sir Anthony Finkelstein, President of the newly merged City St George’s, University of London, wrote: “Much of what universities spend a great deal of time discussing – such as global strategy, impact and innovation, development and philanthropy, even research which is mostly 'money-in, money-out' – has for the largest part very little effect on the bottom line.”

So, what are we seeing philanthropy enable for organisations great and small beyond the pound and dollar and euro signs? A brief checklist.

• Philanthropy provides discipline. In the chapter “When Development Drives Distinctiveness” for the CASE handbook, The Challenge of Being Distinctive, my colleague Marc Whitmore and I explored how fundraising can serve not just as income generation, but as a strategic act – aligning resources with values and ambition. Fundraising can sharpen institutional identity, unlock new forms of engagement, and catalyse change.

• Philanthropy refreshes the parts other funding streams don’t reach. It can be agile and risk-taking. Donors can hazard their own funds when it might be irresponsible to use taxpayers’ money or cumbersome to activate institutional resources. Thanks to philanthropy, Magic Breakfast was able to demonstrate proof of the concept that well-fed children make more attentive students, since rolled out as a UK government project.

• Philanthropy widens the circle of people who say “we” and “us” about an institution. They may be alumni or local residents, supporters of particular expertise that the institution champions, retired staff, concert-goers or grateful patients. As we captured in the Pearce Report, the review of philanthropy to UK higher education commissioned from More by HEFCE back in 2012, “at its best, philanthropic support not only adds financial resources to an institution but also brings the intellectual and emotional engagement of the donor.” Now is a good time to be cultivating committed friends and keeping them well-informed.

• Philanthropy enables us to tell a more compelling story and a more human one. Universities often struggle to explain what it is that they do and why it matters to society. It can all seem too big, too impermeable, too cerebral. But the thoughtful, patient care that universities like Leeds and Bristol and Imperial take year after year with their regular donors and legacy-pledgers, showing how education vitalises individual lives, makes the cause personal, comprehensible and moving. It’s good for morale, both inside and outside the institution, and a high proportion of this income is unrestricted or only broadly restricted. This matters. Universities and other charities after all depend on a kind of social licence and understanding if they are to flourish rather than merely survive.

If we recognise that philanthropy is about more than the money, and its latent soft power is available to us, are we deploying it enough in practice? I suspect not. I’m struck by how many university-related keynote speeches and even strategic plans scarcely mention the words philanthropy or alumni, for instance. What’s going on there? A love that dare not speak its name? A lack of confidence or a sort of self-censorship?

To discuss!

To end with a weather warning: the dreariest phrase in More Partnership’s lexicon is “serial startup”. We used it in the Pearce Report and had to cite it again in Accelerating Ambitions. It is heart-breaking and wasteful of scarce resources to see an organisation invest in advancement operations, skilling up, raising the expectations of its donors, and then, when key players move on or hard times set in, allow the tide to wash away all traces of activity from their beach – sometimes including policies, records, cases for support and above all, relationships with donors. Rinse and repeat? When financial pressures necessitate cutbacks and freezes, finding ways to make the best of the worst will serve the organisation well in the longer term. Identifying and protecting the core components of a successful advancement function enables reconstruction to start from clean foundations. In the meantime, the task of building a culture of philanthropy, embedding good practice, mitigating against fragility, falls to all of us. More’s “philanthropic organisation” matrix is a valuable tool for testing your defences and planning for the next leap forward when the storm abates. Do talk to one of us if you’d like to know more about that.

Wrap up warm. Keep on trekking.

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