Blog
DECEMBER 2022
The holiday ride
Long time readers of this missive may recall it is my tradition to close out the year by featuring a holiday video that I feel captures the spirit of the season. In the past it's been the much anticipated production from the British retailer, John Lewis. And, although I thought this year’s version was quite good, John Lewis Christmas Video 2022, a number of retailers have recently stepped up their game.
Fortunately, my seventeen-year old daughter, Kiera, absolutely loves Christmas commercials and spent countless hours filtering through dozens of candidates to find our “holiday commercial of the year”. For this December, perhaps surprisingly, we both agreed that, although from 2021, Chevrolet’s The Holiday Ride, directed by Academy Award winning director, Tom Hooper, was an example of truly wonderful story telling. I challenge you to not shed a tear while you watch it! 😊
As this third, and hopefully last, year of pandemic winds down, I sincerely hope you have the opportunity to spend more time with family and friends. And as mentioned in the above quotation, I also hope your Christmas is an opportunity to reflect on your own values, desires, affections, and traditions.
Happy Holidays!
"There is no ideal Christmas; only the one Christmas you decide to make as a reflection of your values, desires, affections, traditions."
OCTOBER 2022
The top 7 myths about leaving a charitable gift in your will
Laurie Fox, from the Canadian Association of Gift Planners (CAGP), and I recently co-hosted a webinar entitled, The Top 7 Myths About Leaving a Charitable Gift in Your Will. In their biggest campaign in history the CAGP is attempting to inspire the 95% of Canadians who have not yet included a charity in their Will to do so. If, by 2030, the CAGP is successful in this initiative and can move the percentage of Canadians leaving a charitable gift in their estate from 5% to 8.5%, this will result in an additional $40 billion dollars finding its way into the nonprofit sector. One can only imagine how much social good could be done with this extra $40 billion!
Laurie and I had a lot of fun recording this presentation. Hopefully you too will find the “process” to transform average Canadians into extraordinary philanthropists both interesting and entertaining.
Click here to access the webinar.
"What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others in the world remains and is immortal.”
JULY 2022
Doing good better
As an avid long-format podcast listener, I was delighted when my favourite podcast host, Sam Harris, interviewed William MacAskill, one of the founders of the effective altruism movement and author of the excellent book, Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Help Others, Do Work that Matters, and Make Smarter Choices about Giving Back.
It was truly one of the most intelligent conversations I have had the pleasure of listening to on how to do the most good in the world. Highlights include:
- Why you have already won the “ovarian lottery”! (Hint … if you make over $78,000 a year you are already in the top 1% of income earners.)
- Anonymous vs. public giving. Is one better than the other?
- Why we are programmed to give locally.
- Terrible ideas around giving.
- What exactly is effective altruism and how do we build it into our lives?
- The myth of the self-made person and how it relates to giving.
- Is it more effective to be charitable with your time or your money? (Check out the link 80,000 hours).
- Why bad charities never die!
- How to maximize your “philanthropic serotonin“ while harnessing “virtuous greed”.
If you are sincerely interested in doing the most good with your time and money, I encourage you to listen to the podcast in its entirety.
Sam Harris - Making Sense Podcast #228 - Doing Good with William MacAskill
"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.”
MARCH 2022
Leading with unrestricted gifts
Paul Graham is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and co-founder of Y Combinator and, in my opinion, a true polymath.
In a blog he authored last year Graham writes about one of my charitable giving pet peeves … restricted gifts. Unfortunately, over the last few decades restricted donations have become one of the biggest trends in the nonprofit sector. As Malcolm Burrows, head of philanthropic advisory services at Scotia Wealth Management writes, “As a general rule, the more restrictions the greater the likelihood an estate donation will fail”.
I encourage you to take a moment and read Paul Graham’s insightful thoughts on, as he puts it, “The secret curse of the nonprofit world …”
by Paul Graham, March 2021
The secret curse of the nonprofit world is restricted donations. If you haven't been involved with nonprofits, you may never have heard this phrase before. But if you have been, it probably made you wince.
Restricted donations mean donations where the donor limits what can be done with the money. This is common with big donations, perhaps the default. And yet it's usually a bad idea. Usually the way the donor wants the money spent is not the way the nonprofit would have chosen. Otherwise there would have been no need to restrict the donation. But who has a better understanding of where money needs to be spent, the nonprofit or the donor?
If a nonprofit doesn't understand better than its donors where money needs to be spent, then it's incompetent and you shouldn't be donating to it at all.
Which means a restricted donation is inherently suboptimal. It's either a donation to a bad nonprofit, or a donation for the wrong things.
There are a couple exceptions to this principle. One is when the nonprofit is an umbrella organization. It's reasonable to make a restricted donation to a university, for example, because a university is only nominally a single nonprofit. Another exception is when the donor actually does know as much as the nonprofit about where money needs to be spent. The Gates Foundation, for example, has specific goals and often makes restricted donations to individual nonprofits to accomplish them. But unless you're a domain expert yourself or donating to an umbrella organization, your donation would do more good if it were unrestricted.
If restricted donations do less good than unrestricted ones, why do donors so often make them? Partly because doing good isn't donors' only motive. They often have other motives as well — to make a mark, or to generate good publicity [1], or to comply with regulations or corporate policies. Many donors may simply never have considered the distinction between restricted and unrestricted donations. They may believe that donating money for some specific purpose is just how donation works. And to be fair, nonprofits don't try very hard to discourage such illusions. They can't afford to. People running nonprofits are almost always anxious about money. They can't afford to talk back to big donors.
You can't expect candor in a relationship so asymmetric. So I'll tell you what nonprofits wish they could tell you. If you want to donate to a nonprofit, donate unrestricted. If you trust them to spend your money, trust them to decide how.
Note [1] Unfortunately restricted donations tend to generate more publicity than unrestricted ones. "X donates money to build a school in Africa" is not only more interesting than "X donates money to Y nonprofit to spend as Y chooses," but also focuses more attention on X
Keith here - Closing off this month’s blog I would again like to quote Malcolm Burrows, “Charities know the need and should be trusted to do their work without handcuffs or second-guessing”.
"If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about."
JANUARY 2022
Hope
Is it possible to hold the view that the state of the world is perpetually getting worse but, in actual fact, things are really getting better? I would answer with a resounding “yes”! Echoing Professor Deidre McCloskey’s comment, “For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear the world is going to hell”, I feel my perspective is very much in the minority.
For those of us who work in the nonprofit sector, or as a donor contributing to it, whether we believe the world is going to hell or not, in the end what we can probably all agree on is that each one of us is trying to make our planet a better place.
As we look forward to a much improved 2022, I thought you might appreciate “99 Good News Stories From 2021 You Probably Didn’t Hear About”. As the author suggests, the reason you didn’t hear about them is, quite simply, good news does not sell advertisements or generate clicks. I believe this is all the more reason to highlight them. From big wins for conservation and global health, to peace, safety and human rights, these are 99 good news stories from last year that are the very embodiment of the word … “hope”!
Thank you, and all the best for 2022!
“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.“