Giving beneath the radar

If you move in philanthropic circles you won’t have failed to notice the flurry of philanthropy reports recently issued. The TL:DR version of these reports is that due to a number of factors (not least privacy concerns but also fragmented data sources) we don’t have as clear a picture of philanthropic giving in the UK as we should; also that we should have a national policy to encourage this (as is the case now in Ireland). In line with the truism ‘what gets measured gets managed’, there are many third sector bodies seeking to advance these arguments.

It is true that much charitable giving does go on beneath the radar here in the UK, the private individuals that donate shares through ShareGift, for example. These modest, unsung heroes of common-or-garden philanthropy have helped ShareGift to generate more than ￡48m in charitable funding since we were set up in 1996.?

2023 in numbers

The 2023 calendar year saw ShareGift receive more than 800 individual charity suggestions from its donors, and there are many more donations received which for a variety of reasons don’t come with charity suggestions. ShareGift made 480 grants of unrestricted funding to 384 different charities. Some of these charities received more than one grant in the year.

ShareGift’s grants in 2023 totalled ￡3,265,000. Our largest grants were ￡70k, our smallest ￡1k. The average value grant made was ￡6,663.

Those are some decent numbers by anyone’s reckoning, and there is an interesting story to be told on how ShareGift takes its distinctive approach to grant-making.

Different by design

ShareGift is rather different to most grant-making foundations.

Firstly, we specialise in accepting donations of shares – no donation is too small (or too large), we can accept listed and unlisted securities, and it doesn’t matter whether the shares are worth very much or very little. We also accept cash, of course, whether that’s in the form of dividends, share sale proceeds etc. We aggregate donated shares, sell them whenever we can, and along with cash donations, this creates a pool of funds for our grant-making.

Cause-neutrality

Another point of difference is that ShareGift is cause neutral. This means that we can give to any UK charity, provided our in-house due diligence identifies no issues. This neutrality enables us to take our donors’ charity suggestions into account in our grant-making, along with charities identified from our own independent research and those suggested to us by the firms we work with.

Unrestricted funding

Unrestricted funding is another specialism of ours, indeed, we give virtually nothing else. Why? Well, as a cause-neutral, generalist funder, we think that charities themselves are the best judge of where to spend our grant funding. This kind of funding seems currently to be repackaged as ‘trust-based’ giving, and whilst that’s not a bad description, we’ve been giving unrestricted funding since we were set up in 1996. New to some, certainly not to us.

No applications

We don’t have an application process nor do we solicit grant applications in any form. A very recent statistic estimated the cost of applying for funding at ￡900m for the UK charity sector. ￡900m!

The best way for charities to access funding from share donation is to encourage their supporters to donate shares, and to educate them on the benefits and efficiencies of doing so. The largest part of our pro bono work is supporting charities on how to do this. There is also a key role for philanthropy advisors to play when working with their HNWI clients.

To find out more about ShareGift and its grant-making philosophy: ?www.sharegift.org