Sorry that this blog has been a bit quiet for the last few weeks. I’ve been busy moving house and starting my new job as a marketing and digital communications consultant. I’ve got some great projects in the pipeline and am working with some fabulous people. It is lovely to be back out there in the sector after maternity leave, doing the work I love and being inspired all over again by fantastic charities.
I’ve been having some very interesting conversations with charities about transparency recently, and am a big supporter of the campaign recently launched by US nonprofits on ‘The Overhead Myth.’ Essentially the campaign wants donors and supporters to measure charities according to impact and performance, not on how little they spend on overheads. It follows Dan Pallotta’s now legendary TED talk on the same theme, which I wrote about recently for The Guardian Voluntary Sector Network.
So I was delighted to see UK based charity Afrikids, who work to alleviate children’s suffering and poverty in northern Ghana, blogging about this issue. I love the fact that they are bringing other international development charities together, encouraging the sector to be more transparent.
I hope this is just the start of UK charities supporting the Overhead Myth campaign and would like to see our own homegrown version. As Civil Society recently reported, UK donors often focus on how much a charity spends on administration costs, rather than their impact. Isn’t it time that charities defined how our success is measured?