Once you’ve decided where to focus your giving, you need to choose which charities to support. You also need to work out the best ways of supporting them and make sure you get the right feedback to measure the results.
NPC can help you to find and assess
charities that fit with your areas
of interest. We can teach you how to analyse charities using our Charity Analysis Framework (to be updated in early 2010), and we can analyse charities you are interested
in to assess their health and
effectiveness.
NPC can teach you the practicalities
of grant-making, so you can give away money professionally and efficiently. We can help you to decide what type
of funding and support will be
most helpful to charities, and we can talk you through what
information you need to monitor
charities and how to collect it.
Case study: Analysing an international development charity
A trustee of an international development charity, who also supported the charity financially, commissioned NPC to analyse the organisation and advise him on future funding decisions. We analysed the charity’s overall organisational capacity and a specific proposal for funding to scale up activities. We reviewed the charity’s strategy documents and plans, and interviewed core staff, funders and experts in the field.
We found that the charity had a strong model and addressed an important need. However, due to rapid growth, it was facing some organisational challenges and needed to strengthen its central functions before expanding further.
We presented the results of this analysis in a report to the trustee, who adjusted his funding decision as a result. He considered the findings so useful that he shared them with the charity, whose staff deemed NPC’s work 'an excellent learning process.’
Learning by doing
‘NPC ran a workshop to teach us how to analyse charities and helped us put this into practice on some of our funding applications. They are taking us on a charity visit so we can see the work first hand. This time next year, we hope to have the knowledge and resources to make and implement effective funding decisions ourselves.’
Daughter, Family Trust
Giving strategically
‘I wanted to start making strategic grants very quickly without having to get up the learning curve fast myself or to hire my own staff to do it. Using NPC enabled the foundation to double the size of its giving in the UK.'
NPC client, quoted in Intelligent Life, the lifestyle magazine from The Economist