With thanks and appreciation to: Jo Casebourne, Jane Ashton, Karl Wilding, Cathy Pharoah, Helen Goulden, Philip Colligan, Natasha Amaral, Theo Keane, Nick Webb, Nicole Wilkinson and Tara Kennedy and her team.

And special thanks to all the people and organisations who have been supported through the Innovation in Giving Fund.

About Nesta

Nesta is the UK's innovation foundation.

An independent charity, we help people and organisations bring great ideas to life. We do this by providing investments and grants and mobilising research, networks and skills.

Executive Summary

Even in a modern world made rich by markets and systems, simple acts of giving make a critical contribution to the health of society. Giving is generative: a gift is simultaneously a transfer of resources, a statement of goodwill, an example to others and a way to create a lasting bond between people.

While Britain is a generous country and the giving sector has become more professionalised and innovative in the past few years, there is no room for complacency. Giving in the UK depends on a dangerously small, ageing, educated and affluent civic core of people. The voluntary and charitable sector has been running to standstill: a mass of innovation in fundraising techniques has kept the amount donated stable, only because a small group of people donate more. Without further, even more far reaching innovation, there is a risk that as the civic core ages it may also dwindle. Giving could suffer the kind of decline it went through in the 1980s, when the number of households giving dropped by a third. This could be doubly damaging because a prolonged period of low economic growth, modest rises in incomes and restrained public spending will create the need for more philanthropic, voluntary solutions to big social challenges. Britain will need more social innovation, of a more fundamental kind in the next decade to meet these challenges. The voluntary sector will be a vital source for that innovation. The Innovation in Giving Fund was established by the Cabinet Office in partnership with Nesta to help address these challenges.

Through supporting some of the most innovative ideas to increase giving, the Fund seeks to create a deeper, shared culture of giving, across a wide swathe of the population. It seeks to expand the civic core to include more of those who are willing to give but find it hard to do so and those that have resources to give but do not feel motivated to do so.

The cumulative impact and conclusions of the Innovation in Giving Fund will not emerge for perhaps another year or more. However, our interim conclusion is that successful giving strategies will follow what we call the Four Ms of effective giving. They will:

• Create the most appealing mix of what people can give, why they give and how. They will appeal to but not rely on purely altruistic motivations, nor confine people to giving in one way and will make it easy for people to give money, time, skills, underused equipment, spare resources and unwanted assets in whatever quantities are convenient.
• Appeal to the right combination of motives for people to give more, including well thought out forms of reciprocity which recognise the contributions givers make; peer-to-peer support so people draw one another into giving; making giving intrinsically interesting and enjoyable; reinforcement of the higher moral motives for giving.
• Make it easier for people to give time, services and objects in kind, especially by using new means such as digital technologies to weave giving into the everyday life of younger generations.
• Turn giving into a more meaningful experience, making people feel uplifted by becoming part of something bigger and making the most of an intimate connection that makes giving personally worthwhile.

Preface

Funded by the Cabinet Office, the Innovation in Giving Fund is supporting innovations that aim to get many more people involved in giving time, money, skills and resources to the causes they care about.

Nesta set out to find and support the most exciting innovators; to help them bring their ideas to life; and to help the most promising ideas and organisations grow their impact and reach many more people. We also wanted to encourage established charities and public services to embrace these new ways of giving.

We have deliberately adopted a wide definition of giving; ensuring that we support innovations that explore reciprocity and include the giving of physical assets and resources as well as time and money. This is key to bringing many more people into the habit of everyday giving.

Through two open calls we have conducted a nationwide search for the best and most radical ideas for new ways to support and encourage giving, reviewing over 1,000 ideas, interviewing well over 100 teams of innovators and ultimately awarding grants and non-financial support to nearly 80 innovations, backing a small proportion of the most promising ideas with more significant funding. In addition to this, the Fund has supported and worked with a range of major charities and volunteer centres to build skills and strategies for exploiting some of the most promising new ideas.

This report seeks to set that work in the context of the broader giving landscape and draws directly on the experiences and insights of people and organisations who are being backed through the Innovation in Giving Fund.

1. Giving Matters

The National Blood Transfusion Service was established in 1946, in the wake of the Second World War, when hospitals had needed unprecedented amounts of blood. That year the service collected 250,000 units of blood, from volunteer donors. The modern service collects more than 2.25 million units, still entirely from volunteer donors. This massive expansion in the amount of blood we give to one another has been achieved through constant innovation to make it easy, attractive and meaningful for people to donate. When the service started, most blood was given by people working in large factories and offices going to a mobile clinic which arrived on site. Now a donor can register through a state of the art website; find the nearest clinic using a digital map; book an appointment online; register for email updates and ‘like' the service on Facebook. Despite the technology, the experience of giving blood for the sake of unknown strangers or perhaps because a close relative has just had an operation themselves, remains emotionally and morally charged. The modern NHS, high-tech and highly systematised depends on a core of generosity that cannot be taken for granted. Only 4 per cent of the population give blood. Their giving has been sustained through innovations that have made it easy and relevant for people to give blood even as Britain has been swept by the decline of large manufacturing industries, the contraction of trade union membership, the rise of individualism, the spread of home ownership and the advent of the web and social media. The blood transfusion service is a model for what the Innovation in Giving Fund is attempting to achieve: to create new ways for people to want and be able to give.

New forms of giving are emerging all the time. Freecycle the world's largest online re-gifting community, in which people make available for free items they no longer need, has eight million members. About 70 per cent of the population has donated to good causes by playing the National Lottery. Annual ticket sales of about £4 billion generate £1.5 billion to be donated to good causes. Cancer UK's Race for Life, the country's largest all female fund raising event, has engaged more than six million women and raised almost half a billion pounds. Our calendars now include a roster of giving festivals such as Red Nose Day and Movember. We are more aware of humanitarian crises around the world and more inclined to give to them than ever before.

Opportunities to give are all around us, from tossing some spare change into a charity fundraiser's bucket, to signing up for a bike ride to raise money for a good cause, volunteering at the school fete, donating blood, or simply giving up your seat to an elderly person on the Underground. Everyday acts of giving are like red cells in the bloodstream of society. They carry the oxygen of generosity, kindness and care into the deepest recesses of society. Despite our growing reliance on systems and markets to provide for the basics of life, simple acts of generosity among friends, family and strangers are still vital to a healthy society that can come together to help those in need.

At its simplest giving entails doing something to benefit someone else without any strings attached. Time and money can be given but so too can organs, blood, information, assets and services in kind, in large and small amounts, from the bequest made by a rich philanthropist to free acts of kindness. The top 500 UK charities received in-kind gifts worth $256 million in 2008-2009 for example.[^1] Each year people donate 1.1 million hours as volunteers, the equivalent of £23 billion worth of labour at median wage rates.[^2] Charity shops collect about 36,000 tonnes of textiles and 20,000 tonnes of books to be reused and recycled each year.[^3] We give to a very wide range of people, from close family to complete strangers on the other side of the world. Sometimes we give to a particular person, other times to a cause we believe in. We use a wide variety of vehicles to convey our gifts, from a standing order to donate to a charity to the informal to-and-fro of reciprocal giving in close relationships where no one is keeping count.

Our tendency to give is deeply rooted. A growing body of scientific research shows that humans cooperate in special ways. We cooperate with strangers, not just our own kin. We form intimate bonds of friendship with people we are not genetically related to and make sacrifices on their behalf. We cooperate with people in one off encounters, even when there is no prospect of an act of kindness being reciprocated. Many animals engage in direct, tit-for-tat forms of giving. Humans stand out because we engage in more indirect and extended forms of reciprocity: we give to strangers, even when there is little or no prospect of a direct return. Giving does not go against the grain of our nature; it is written into who we are through evolution. A society that extinguished opportunities for giving would cut us off from that part of ourselves.

Gifts forge relationships in a way that market transactions do not. The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss said gifts among strangers were “an assertion of good grace which does away with mutual uncertainty.” When someone is prepared to give up something for your sake that creates a sense of connection, obligation and gratitude, which is lacking when someone is paid to do the same thing. Indeed some goods are better when they are freely given rather than paid for. Blood is the most famous example. In The Gift Relationship published in 1970, Richard M Titmuss showed that blood donated by volunteers in the UK was of higher quality and collected at lower cost than the blood provided by paid donors in the US. Titmuss argued that by offering people a financial incentive giving was tarnished: people who were willing to give just because they believed were almost offended by the idea they might do it for money. Instead Titmuss found the US system of paid-for donation often attracted people who had few other ways to earn their living and who often had health conditions they did not disclose, which meant their blood was unusable. In the case of blood, a voluntary system delivers higher quality products at lower cost. Much of what we most value – love, dignity, good conduct, pride, trust, friendship, care – cannot be bought. If we were to try to use money to buy any of these things most people would think we were mad. Many aspects of our lives we value precisely because they are beyond price: they cannot be produced in a market without distorting them out of all recognition.

Public services cannot afford to ignore the power of giving. Mass public services can sometimes struggle to respond to people with distinctive needs. For many years people with learning disabilities, for example, found public services unresponsive to their demands for independent living. That is why most of the new services designed to support people with learning disabilities came from voluntary sector bodies, charities and mutual self-help. Public services will increasingly rely on informal giving as a complement to more professional services. As health services grapple with the needs of an ageing population beset by interrelated, complex, long-term conditions, such as diabetes, arthritis and dementia, so they will increasingly need to mobilise peer-to-peer support, knowledge and influence, alongside professional, medical health services. People helping one another to tackle long-term conditions will become as important as people being helped by professionals.

For all these reasons, giving is important. Giving makes people happy, especially when it helps them to form relationships. Communities benefit from the social bonds that giving creates. Groups whose needs are often overlooked by larger systems can find solutions through mutual help and philanthropy. Giving is a way for us to express our better natures, to rise above calculations of self-interest. As a result, giving can provide our lives with a sense of meaning and purpose. By making a sacrifice, with others, often in response to a call for aid, we feel part of something larger than ourselves. Sustaining our capacity for giving will help to make society stronger.

2. Grounds for Concern

Britain faces a looming giving challenge. We are heavily reliant on a small proportion of the population, an ageing, affluent civic core, who provide a disproportionately large share of the time and money donated in the UK. Without innovation to encourage more people to give more, there is a risk that giving could face a sharp decline of the kind suffered between 1978 and 1999, when the proportion of households giving to charity fell by a third. Such a decline would leave giving dangerously dependent upon the contributions of a small minority of the relatively rich and wealthy. Rather than acting as a force to bind society together giving would become a reflection of growing inequality. The aim of the Innovation in Giving Fund is to avoid that outcome by finding ways to regenerate Britain's capacity to give.

Britain starts from a strong position: it is a generous country. The UK ranks fifth in terms of giving money and time to help others. According to the CAF World Giving Index, the UK is the second most generous country in the world measured by the proportion of the population giving money. In 2006 UK citizens' monetary donations were equivalent to 1.1 per cent of GDP, half the proportion of the US but higher than many European countries. The UK does less well in terms of giving time, lying 32nd in the world, behind a range of developed and developing countries. Giving is fairly widespread in the UK: more than half the population give time and money to charitable causes. Many more give informally. Only 15 per cent give virtually nothing at all.[^4]

Figure 1.0: Summary of participation in giving in the UK

Giving money

Giving time

Yet despite the UK's strong track record there is no room for complacency. One study suggests that a civic core that accounts for at most 36 per cent of the population provides 87 per cent of volunteering, 82 per cent of donations of money and 77 per cent of civic participation.[^5] The really active part of this core may be even smaller. Less than 10 per cent of the population contributes between a quarter (24 per cent) and a half (51 per cent) of total civic engagement in the UK. In 2008-2009 just 7 per cent of donors were responsible for 49 per cent of donations to charity and two-thirds of all the time volunteered. Not only does the civic core account for a large amount of time, money and resources, their highly altruistic behaviour sets the tone for others to follow.

People are more likely to give, even if only a little, if other people are visibly giving, leading the way. If the civic core becomes too small its decline could have a dangerous multiplier effect.

Figure 1.1: The Civic Core

The amount given in the UK has kept pace with average household spending and GDP only because a smaller core gives more. Very large donations account for a significant proportion of this. A survey by Coutts, the bank, recorded 201 donations of more than $1 million in 2008-2009 which raised £1.5 billion.[^6] In the last 20 years there has been huge innovation in how charities and voluntary sector organisations raise money, from the National Lottery to Gift Aid; the rise of high-street 'chugging' to the creation of online giving platforms; the spread of mass live giving events such as Comic Relief and Sport Relief to direct mail campaigns; organised charity bike rides and swimathons to sponsored runs and climbs. The giving sector is already running hard to stand still.

The conditions giving faces will become more challenging. The UK economy is likely to grow only slowly in the next few years. Middle and low-income households in the UK are likely to face a prolonged period of stagnant incomes which will leave with less discretionary spending. As the civic core ages it may not be renewed. The culture of giving is strongest among educated, affluent, middle-aged people who were born in the wake of the Second World War at a time when a collective ethos of finding shared solutions to social challenges was much stronger. People over the age of 60 give more than six times as much as those under the age of 30, a trend that has been widening over the past three decades.[^7] Younger generations are more individualistic and more inclined to believe people should look after themselves. Traditional charities may find themselves even more detached from younger generations that are growing up with social media and the web.

As the capacity to give becomes more constrained so the needs that giving addresses are likely to become more pressing. A prolonged period of fiscal austerity will leave more communities needing volunteers to support services that the state has withdrawn from. Families finding it hard to make ends meet even with both parents working will be increasingly dependent on support from family and friends. There is no prospect that humanitarian crises will become less common and compelling. We will need to give more not less in future.

Britain is a generous country. Yet the amount we give has been maintained only because a smaller group are giving more, in part thanks to a string of innovations in how charities solicit donations. It is not hard to imagine a future in which fewer people are willing and able to give and yet the need for giving is ever greater. The Innovation in Giving Fund is helping to address this challenge by stimulating new approaches that will sustain a broadly spread culture of giving across British society.

The fund is primarily focussed on giving among strangers although several projects seek to support informal care networks. While rich philanthropists give a disproportionate share of all donations, the Innovation in Giving Fund is focussed on increasing giving across a much wider range of people, to create the infrastructure, tools, norms and habits of giving. Giving does not just generate resources for those in need; it also creates strong social bonds. To make the most of that social multiplier the Fund set out to find ways to engage much larger numbers of people in giving, to expand what is given and in what quantities. Innovation in Giving funded organisations work with donations of money, time, assets, household resources, complementary currencies and services in kind.

The civic core is both willing and able to give. To renew and refresh the civic core we should focus on two groups. The first are those who are able – they have the time and resources to give – but they are unwilling to do so. Innovation in Giving is funding organisations that are exploring how to make giving attractive, compelling and appealing. The second group are willing to give but feel unable to do so because they lack the resources. Many Innovation in Giving funded organisations make it easier for people to give by expanding the range of resources people can give and by allowing them to donate as much or as little as they feel able to. The organisations that are being funded address these challenges of ability and willingness through tackling four related issues, which we call the Four Ms of giving. The experience of the Fund is that these Four Ms hold the key to effective approaches to increase giving to:

• Create the most appealing mix of what people give, why and how.
• Motivate more people to give more.
• Provide new means for people to give.
• Make giving a more meaningful experience which will bring about a lasting change in habits and behaviour.

We look at each of these issues in further depth in turn.

3. Mix

To increase giving people need to be able to create the right mix of what they can give, how they give and why.

The archetypal act of giving is when someone gives something, some money or food perhaps, to someone clearly in need, without asking or expecting anything in return. This is a pure, altruistic, neatly bounded act of giving, in which resources are transferred from a donor to someone in need for them to use. Quite a lot of giving conforms to this model. But much of it does not: it involves more of a mixture of motives and items. Exploring these more mixed, hybrid forms of giving will be vital to expand giving as a whole.

Giving can involve a mixture of motives, including altruism, self-interest and community building. Giving involves people in making sacrifices for the sake of others. But the sacrifice might not be all or nothing, once and for all. People might choose to give up only a part of something and for a period of time, before reclaiming it and they might expect something in return, if only an acknowledgement of their generosity. Some acts of giving are purely altruistic: the only concern is the other person's wellbeing. Many involve more complex motives and rewards: giving might make us feel good about ourselves and even burnish our reputation. We may give something because we hope that may trigger others to give in their turn and eventually we will get a reward, if only indirectly. Gift giving can often play a strategic role in relationships, as any dating couple knows. Giving plays a critical role in business marketing: mobile phone companies give discounts on handsets to sign up customers to long-term contracts. Many of the organisations backed by Innovation in Giving are exploring when a degree of reciprocity – in which the giver gets something back in return - increases people's propensity to give. Take a simple example of how this changes how and when we give.

When we pay well over the odds for a cake at a school fete, made by pupils raising money for charity, we are buying and giving at the same time. The pupils have made something that attracts a fair but high price. The exchange of money for cake makes it more attractive and dignified for both sides: they are not pleading for charity, by rattling a can. The money paid is simultaneously part the price of a purchase and partly a gift. The giver may have wanted to give to the cause anyway but as a mark of recognition, to say thank you, they get a tasty cake. Many social entrepreneurs are pursuing business models which have this mixture of paid and freely given services. One of the most famous is Aarvind Eye Hospital in India, which charges richer patients more so the hospital can give poorer patients treatment for free. The mixture of gift and commercial exchange can go the other way. Vast and very valuable reservoirs of open source software, like Linux, have been created by programmers giving one another code for free. However, these shared programmes are then applied by companies to make money, selling services using them. We can give while we are also earning, lending, leasing, selling and not just when we are giving to a charity out of pure altruism.

Moreover, people can give a mixture of different things. People who may lack money to give might be able to give time or services in kind. Someone who is willing to give may not realise that the unused garden equipment in their garage might be useful for someone else living nearby: Streetbank has been created precisely to create those kinds of connections. Services like FutureGov's Casserole Club, which helps people share extra portions of home cooked food with others in their area who are not always able to cook for themselves, is another example of increasing the ways in which people can give. Complementary currencies, such as Timebanking, also enable people to give and exchange without that involving money. However, to do so people might have to be persuaded that they have valuable skills to offer, according to Becky Booth of the timebanking service Spice. Giving might be made easier by finding ways for people to give only small amounts, for example, through micro volunteering. The aggregation of many small acts of generosity would create a long tail of giving.

Giving is sometimes a discrete, altruistic, act of charity. But to expand giving, to involve more people we will have to explore its hybrid, mixed character: the mixture of motives that lead people to give; the mix of settings in which they give, including as a by-product of everyday transactions; the mix of resources they give, including time, money, services in kind, idle assets.

As we innovate so we can also learn from ancient approaches to giving. The Trobriand Islanders are known as the Argonauts of the Western Pacific thanks to a book about them by the ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski, which was published in 1922. The islanders are skilled sailors, potters and pearl fishers and their tribal society depends on a complex system of gift giving, the kula, which Malinowski describes in detail. The kula is an aristocratic form of gift exchange, conducted between people of the same social rank, mainly the chiefs of tribes and clans. The kula is different from gimwali the exchange of useful goods which can take place between anyone and is accompanied by ferocious bargaining on both sides. The kula is noble and modest; to bargain would be unworthy. In the gimwali it would be unthinkable not to bargain. On the face of it the kula and the gimwali are completely distinct and separate. But as Malinowski explains it is not quite that simple.

When tribes gather for a kula it is also an opportunity for lots of gimwali. Moreover in the kula gifts are not simple transfers from one person to another. When someone receives a gift in the kula it is on the understanding that they will pass it on. The gift carries an obligation to keep it in circulation, to create a sense of binding ritual. The sociologist Marcel Mauss in The Gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic society describes the kula as “neither purely free and gratuitous gift giving nor of purely interested and utilitarian production and exchange; it is a kind of hybrid." These gifts are not spontaneous but strategic: they are given with the aim of cementing relationships and alliances. Nor are they entirely disinterested and altruistic. Hybrid giving is often a mutual activity, in which people's willingness to give is conditional on other people giving in return or just as important passing on the gift to another person. They give not because they expect to get something back themselves but because they want a spirit of goodwill to circulate and grow. These ancient forms of giving are hybrids. The most enduring and effective forms of giving may well involve a mix of motives, settings, means and resources.

The Trobriand islanders point to another way in which giving has to be mixed: it has to be systematic and spontaneous at the same time. The kula organises a rolling cycle of giving. In our modern, system-driven society we need ways to organise giving like the kula, to embed it in social systems, to make it both symbolic, binding and habitual and yet also moving and spontaneous.

If we see giving as only lilywhite altruistic activity then we will restrict who will give and to what. As Malinowski and Mauss found among the Pacific islanders giving is a complicated undertaking; it is rarely purely altruistic; it is often combined with other economic transactions; it frequently serves strategic goals; it can also be highly communitarian; gifts can take many forms from money, time, services, assets to objects with symbolic value. The more we see giving as a mixed and hybrid activity then more we will open up avenues for its development.

4. Motivation

To increase giving more people need to be motivated to give more.

Altruism is at the peak of a hierarchy of motives for giving. Richard Titmuss's study is an account of institutionalised altruism, which he argued was the "life giving impulse" at the heart of all welfare. Yet people give for a wide range of reasons. Apps for Good, for example, as part of its model of creative education provides mentors for teams of school children designing apps for mobile phones. The mentors get a sense of satisfaction from using their skills for social good. YoungScot an organisation that works with 400,000 young people found that some people volunteer because it is just a chance to do something different; altruism is not their prime motive but variety.

Several of the organisations funded by Innovation in Giving are exploring ways to motivate people to give through offering a form of reciprocity so the donor gets something back in return. Cool2Care recruits and trains personal assistants to work with disabled children and young people. Innovation in Giving funding helped Cool2Care to experiment with the development a Family Reciprocity Programme in which families can 'bank' time they donate which can be redeemed against their own support needs. The programme wanted to demonstrate a way to circulate donated time amongst the families on the programme, thereby reducing their need to call on paid staff.

Horsesmouth aims to create a more diffuse, communitarian form of reciprocity: volunteers give their time because they feel part of a community that is benefitting from their contribution. As the community also includes them, they will in time benefit themselves.

Hackney Shares is using an online platform to create a local timebanking network, in which people barter skills. Early evidence suggests a more reciprocal approach – put something in and get something out - is reaching people who would not normally engage in giving.

Striking the right balance between extrinsic and intrinsic, short term and long-term motivations to give will be critical. Some of the organisations involved in Innovation in Giving have found that offering rewards makes little difference. Carebank, for example, provides its volunteers with credits that can be exchanged for services within the community but early indications are that rewards are not important to volunteers. Yet other organisations have found that rewards pitched in the right way do have an impact. Timto a tool which allows people to turn their own, small-scale celebrations and gift giving, like a birthday or wedding, into an opportunity for giving to a cause has found this helps attract people to give who would not normally do so. The Amazings, which recruits retired people to share their experience with others in their community, has found that paying mentors a modest sum helps to make the whole programme feel more professional.

The new wave of crowdfunding platforms such as CrowdFunder and Buzzbnk mobilise large networks of people to donate to specific projects, often in return for rewards for donations. These rewards are small but enable the donor to be personally recognised and thanked for their contribution and integrally bind the donor to the project. A community bakery in Leeds for example, raised £8,000 by exchanging bread for money. If someone donated £10 they got a free loaf. When extrinsic rewards are taken too far, as Titmuss found with blood, they can undermine giving. Yet these rewards are proving effective because they are more like tokens of recognition: not a material reward so much as a way to say thank you.

Giving is not just sustained by altruism. People like to feel good about themselves: giving is one way to achieve that. Another theme of Innovation in Giving has been to enhance the pull of intrinsic motivations to give by making giving even more pleasurable.

A tried and tested route is to make giving part of playing. Someone who enters a charity raffle is giving while playing a game of chance. People who undertake charity cycle rides through Vietnam are gaining pleasure while raising money from charity. The most successful modern exercise in harnessing playing and giving is the National Lottery launched in 1994. Twenty-eight pence from each £1 ticket bought in the lottery is given to a good cause. There is conflicting evidence as to whether lottery players give less to charity as a result or whether it has been a way to get more people to contribute to charity who would not ordinarily have seen themselves as givers. However, the Lottery has raised enormous sums that have been invested in charities and the voluntary sector.

Innovation in Giving is testing other ways in which giving could be combined with playing, especially to appeal to younger generations. Giving is increasingly dependent upon the old: people over the age of 60 contribute more than 52 per cent of money given to charity, compared to 35 per cent in the 1970s. One way to reach younger people is through the pervasive culture of digital gaming, not least through experiences modelled on large multi-player games such as World of Warcraft. Can giving be increased by making participation fun rather than worthy? Playmob, for example, offer a technology which connects computer games with charities, so that players can fundraise for charity by purchasing virtual items within a game. As part of the Fund's Open Innovation Programme Marie Curie have worked with a wide range of open innovation delivery partners in an agile mode, together they created 'Tickety Boo', a loyalty based data-driven online gaming platform where supporters can play a wide choice of free and paid-for games (including bingo, raffles, lottery and instant win games).

Appealing to play and tapping into the skills and interests people have is an area still worth exploring. A prime example is Zooniverse a portal for citizen science owned and operated by the Citizen Science Alliance. Zooniverse hosts more than a dozen projects which allow volunteers to participate in scientific research. The volunteers join because they like doing science and get a sense of achievement; the projects get a voluntary labour force. As of 30 January 2013, the Zooniverse community consisted of more than 785,000 volunteers, known as Zooites, and was gaining on average 500-1,000 daily registrations.

People give for a mix of reasons: helping someone they know; giving to a cause they believe in; doing something interesting and challenging; meeting new people; having fun; feeling good by doing good. Ivo Gormley, the founder of GoodGym put it this way: “It might be the credibility of being involved with something cool, or having their name in the credits of a film, or is it that its their mum they want to impress? There are a lot of different reasons and you need to understand what they might be so you can really nail it. The idea that giving is completely non-reciprocal doesn't exist – there is always something to be got out of it."

The most successful giving platforms will be able to appeal to a mix of motives. Ian Tennant of the skills sharing site Greeniversity explained the success in very utilitarian terms: “It works well because you get something back, however you engage with it.” Yet Streetbank, found that meeting new people was more important as a motivator for participants than sourcing useful skills or things for free, the organisation's ostensible purpose. The reality is that both matter: Streetbank is both a way for people to exchange useful stuff for free and to meet people in your locality.

Clear rewards might attract people to giving who would not usually see themselves as volunteers. However self-interested motivations can quickly run out of steam. The best long-run motivation for giving is that it makes people feel good about themselves. Social and communitarian motivations also count. People are rewarded by a diffuse sense of reciprocity, from feeling part of a community, which benefits from mutual giving. Reciprocity has a further, often overlooked benefit: it can make it easier for people to receive a gift. Many people are resistant to receiving charity which makes them feel needy and dependent. If a recipient is able to contribute something back that may in turn make it easier for them to be able to receive a gift that is much larger. Selling someone an over-priced homemade cupcake may is a less embarrassing way to raise money for charity than shaking a bucket. Forms of giving which allow the recipients to make a contribution will be more effective than those that treat people as dependent and incapable. Reciprocity may increase the supply of recipients not just of donors.

5. Means

To increase giving people need new, more convenient ways to give.

People may be willing to give but think they are unable to do so, either because they lack the resources to give or because the barriers to giving seem too daunting. Innovation in Giving is funding a range of ideas to make giving easier. People who may lack money to give might be able to give time or services in kind. Complementary currencies, such as time-banking, may enable people to give without that involving money. Time-banking allows a person to 'bank' an hour of volunteer labour and in exchange draw out an hour of labour from someone else later. An hour's babysitting might earn an hour's decorating. People who have little money can thus trade with one another directly by giving and receiving time. There is an estimated 275 timebanking schemes in the UK with more than 20,000 regular time-bankers. One of the main issues with a complementary currency is whether it can be traded only locally and whether it can be exchanged with normal, monetary currencies. These issues have bedevilled complementary currencies which despite their promise have largely failed to scale.

Innovation in Giving is working with several complementary currency schemes to see whether these obstacles can be overcome. Spice is a time credit system linking community development organisations, housing associations, homeless hostels and prisons. People who contribute time to their community gain credits printed on paper notes which they can use to access training, events and leisure activities. The Brixton Pound is one example of a localised currency, designed to create local loyalty to smaller shops who might be under threat from larger chains.

The main opportunity to make giving easier and more attractive is to use digital technologies. Social media and the web are remaking how people expect to get information; make their voice heard; connect to others; to receive services and combine to take action. People brought up with these technologies are bound to carry those expectations into the way they interact with charities and the way they expect to give. The potential for the web to provide a new platform for giving is illustrated by the dramatic rise in online retailing. In 2000 less than $1 billion was spent online; by 2011 the figure had reached £60 billion.[^8] Giving might be made easier by finding ways for people to give only small amounts, for example, through micro volunteering. The aggregation of many such small acts of generosity could generate a huge impact. In theory social media is creating the conditions for the emergence of a civic long tail, a mass of loosely connected, small-scale conversations, campaigns and interest groups, which can sometimes coalesce to create a mass movement.

Organisations involved with giving, just as much as governments and business, will have to work with this civil long tail or risk being left behind by it. The heavy reliance on an older civic core, which uses these technologies rarely, may disguise how vulnerable giving organisations are losing touch with younger donors.

People and organisations are already responding. Online donations almost doubled between 2009 and 2010. After Claire Squires tragically died while running the 2012 London Marathon the public outpouring of condolences led to £1 million being donated to the Samaritans through her fundraising page on the JustGiving site. In early 2012 Martha Payne's blog about school lunches became an international sensation after it was censured by her local council. The blog got more than five million hits and her JustGiving page for the charity Mary's Meals received donations of more than $100,000.

Despite these high profile successes, digital giving remains a relatively niche activity: less than 4 per cent of giving by value takes place online. Only 7 per cent of people have donated online and less than 1 per cent have donated by text. Traditional charities and voluntary organisations risk being left behind as young people increasingly orchestrate their lives through technology platforms that many in the giving sector find unfamiliar. Although many charities and voluntary organisations are engaging seriously with digital technologies, many lack the resources and confidence to engage creatively with technology.

Organisations funded by Innovation in Giving are exploring how technology can make it easier for people to give while also creating deeper relationships between givers, the causes to which they contribute and the eventual recipients.

Technology should make it easier to match those with spare resources to those in need of them. Do-It Connect for example argues that it is easier to find people willing to volunteer than it is to match them to relevant opportunities. In the same way that post code and direct marketing systems enabled new forms of fundraising, so in the era of 'big-data' it should be possible for charities to tap into a wealth of behavioural information about people's interests, habits and activities to enable causes to make much more targeted and successful ‘asks' of people.

Digital technologies should make it easier to make giving more personalised, timely and convenient. Apps for Good has used its online platform and Skype to make it easy for its volunteer mentors to help teams of school children. The teams and their mentors are matched automatically through an online calendar. The consultations take place over Skype which allows the mentors to give their time without leaving their office.

Re:act is exploring how to link giving to the daily cycle of real time news and reaction conveyed by social media platforms such as Twitter. Re:act's behavioural targeting app helps someone to find opportunities to give just based on their daily browsing habits, just as another app might find a good place to have coffee. The aim is to make giving a part of daily digital life. The Pennies Foundation makes it easier for people to give to charity by rounding up their pennies to the nearest pound when entering their PIN or in online retail stores.

Another avenue is to build on how online platforms allow people to collaborate and cooperate around a common cause. Tyze Personal Networks does this at a micro-level by creating a private online community around an individual who needs care, such as a young adult with learning disabilities. Tyze creates a shared diary, documents, plans, stories and narrative, so that as people join the care team they can be easily integrated and coordinated. Tyze makes it easy for a family to coordinate the formal, paid care they might be getting with the informal care provided by friends and family. Crowdfunding platforms such as Solar Schools are exploring collaboration on a larger scale.

Online giving could also make it easier for donors to get trustworthy information about projects, for example through user feedback and ratings, and for people to gain recognition for their contributions. The Pennies Foundation is aiming to become a trusted brand for organising online giving by providing donors with better information about how much of their money is going to charity and the impact their donation has. Streetbank is a different example of how online giving can build trust. New users of Streetbank enter their postcode and one item or skill they can easily offer to their community. All members can then see what is available and required within a mile of where they live. So far, not a single item lent out has not been returned.

Nevertheless there are also risks in relying too heavily on digital technologies. Although technology can provide charities with a low cost, real time way to identify and connect to potential givers, an avalanche of ill-considered emails can swiftly turn people off. Charities recognise the need to become skilled at using technology rather than hoping it will be a magic bullet. Online activity should help support rather than diminish face-to-face connections.

Technology will play a growing role in engaging people in giving, by making it easy, personalised, effective and immediate. All charities will need a digital strategy to engage with new generations of participants and donors. New forms of giving will emerge, designed for and evolved on social media platforms. Many of the most interesting applications will involve collaborative peer-to-peer solutions.

However, using technology is no easy solution. The creation of an app or a Twitter account will not lead to a sudden flood of new donations. Technology can connect people and sustain contact but lasting and powerful relationships are usually established face-to-face. The misuse of technology, bombarding people will ill-judged requests, can also antagonise potential donors.

6. Meaning

Giving will grow if it is regarded as meaningful and to be meaningful it has to be more than a transaction. One clue to what is needed lies in the tribal cultures that Marcel Mauss studied among the Pacific islanders.

The elaborate systems of tribal gift giving such as the kula, were communal rituals, a mixture of the festive and stately. Mauss called them "total phenomenon” which were simultaneously economic, moral, religious, aesthetic and mythological. We seem to be in the midst of inventing modern versions of the kula, a calendar of large scale, public displays of volunteering and giving, from Red Nose Day to Sport Relief, the London Marathon to Children in Need. These modern rituals of giving are responding to those in need but also to the desire of those giving to be part of something bigger, not only socially, by doing something alongside other people but also morally, adding a sense of purpose to their lives. This search for something more to add to people's lives is widely felt, according to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor :

“The individual pursuit of happiness as defined by consumer culture still absorbs much of our time and energy, or else the threat of being shut out of this pursuit through poverty, unemployment, incapacity galvanizes our efforts...and yet the sense that there is something more presses in. Great numbers of people feel it: in moments of reflection about their life; in moments of relaxation in nature; in moments of bereavement and loss; and quite wildly and unpredictably.”

Giving meets this need for “something more” because according to Marcel Mauss giving should be spiritual as well as a material. The physical objects exchanged as gifts by the Maori, for example, known as taugo, carry with them a spirit – the hau – which bring them to life. The hau is what moves people. These spiritual aspects of gift giving are evident even in modern society. Take the London Olympics as an example. The animating spirit of the London 2012 Olympics was largely created by the 70,000 volunteer ‘Gamesmakers' who collectively gave more than eight million hours of the time to the event. The Gamesmakers' friendly, upbeat good-natured, helpful provided much of the inspirational hau of the Olympic games.

When giving is powerful and meaningful it is always more than a donation of money, time or resources. There is an emotional, psychological and moral component to a gift of money, the donation of blood, the setting aside of time, which might be hard to measure but may be the most moving and compelling aspect of the experience.

Innovation in Giving funded organisations are pursuing two different approaches to make giving morally and emotionally meaningful: to make people feel part of something bigger and to make giving feel highly personal.

The appeal of being 'part of something bigger' is a key motivation for participation in large scale, collective action and giving. Two-thirds of the organisations involved in Innovation in Giving said that encouraging opportunities for collective action would persuade more people to give more.

Humanitarian crises are one focus for this kind of collective action. Surveys commissioned by the Charities Aid Foundation show that just under half (48 per cent) of the population gave to the Haiti Appeal in 2010, and 81 per cent of the population gave to the Tsunami Appeal in 2004. (There are also worries that repeated calls for crisis-related donations can lead to giving fatigue.)

The need to interact with others in common cause is very evident in the responses to humanitarian appeals; catastrophes such as the Japanese tsunami of 2012 and community celebrations such as the London Olympic and Paralympic Games. #wewillgather was formed in response to London's riots of 2011, using Twitter as a means of bringing community members together to clear the mess left by rioters and looters.

According to Ivo Gormley of The Good Gym, one driver is the sense of acknowledgement people get by doing something with others through which they form a sense of identity:

“By collective action you are automatically building in some sort of recognition. You can't join without a t-shirt. It's like a uniform. (Our members) have to wear the red t-shirt if they're working with a vulnerable adult, but 60-70 per cent of people wear them when they do group stuff and don't have to wear them.”

Indeed some people join these events without even giving. The annual Poppy Day employs a similar mechanism: the wearing of a poppy makes it evident who has given to charity. By wearing a poppy you feel connected to others and part of something bigger. Something similar lies behind the success of the Movember movement which began in 2003 when a few friends in Melbourne decided not to shave for the month of November to raise funds for cancer charities. In 2011 almost one million people took part in Movember all over the world. Giving becomes compelling when it creates a sense of shared experience from doing it together; identity, to show you are a giver and moral purpose.

Connecting people to movements and events larger than themselves is one way to make giving meaningful. The other is to go in the opposite direction, to make giving intimate, personal and transformative.

Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, grew up on a poor farm, with neither toys nor entertainment; he would play in the bare yard behind his family's shack. One day to his surprise, next to a small hole in the fence he found a tiny toy sheep, lying in the dust. The sheep was dirty and dog-eared but it was Neruda's first toy. Looking through the hole he saw the tiny hand of the person who had deposited it there for him. Neruda rushed into his shack to bring back his most prized possession, a pine cone, which he pushed through the hole. When he next looked the cone had be whisked away. The generosity of an unnamed stranger, Neruda said, left a deep deposit in his life, which he believed animated his poetry:

“I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvellous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and weaknesses – that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.”

Innovation in Giving is funding several organisations that are supporting highly personal forms of giving.

Tyze strengthens networks of care around a single person, making the shared commitments people have more evident to one another. Timto turns family celebrations into opportunities to give to larger causes. Race for Life is an outstanding example of how these two approaches – macro and micro - can be combined. The race's campaign strategy emphasises the personal link between the runners raising money and relatives and friends they know suffering from cancer. Women often run with the names of those whom they are running for pinned to their backs. Race for Life has engaged more than six million women in an event that is simultaneously collective and yet deeply personal. Society needs giving at both the macro and micro scale, from mass appeals in moments of crisis and festivals of giving like the Olympics, to the long tail of small acts of kindness organised by engines of giving such as Tyze and Timto.

7. The Future of Giving

Giving is vital to any healthy society, not just because of the resources it mobilises but because of the deeper social and emotional bonds that it creates. Giving is something much more than a transfer of money, time or assets. Giving connects us to a deeply rooted part of ourselves, our propensity to be generous, which in turn helps us to connect to one another. To paraphrase Dr Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London: our lives grow fuller and we find our true selves the more we give and so the more love should find its centre beyond ourselves. Giving is a vital antidote to a culture of self-absorption and self-interest.

Yet our culture of giving cannot be taken for granted. In a modern professionalised and system-driven society, opportunities for giving are in danger of becoming curtailed. The giving sector is running to stand still as the civic core upon which it relies ages.

We do not just need to increase the amount of money, time and assets that are donated to good causes, we need to find better, different ways to give to one another, ways that sustain its vital emotional and moral charge. The Blood Transfusion Service has increased the amount of blood people give, through innovation, often with new technology, while maintaining the moral significance of blood donation. We need innovation on a similar scale in other areas to make giving easier, more attractive, compelling and meaningful. In our efforts to increase the amount that is given we must not rob it of its spirit but instead find new ways to express it.

The Innovation in Giving fund is supporting ideas whose full impact may not be felt this year, or the next. However, at this stage we offer four main conclusions about characteristics of successful giving strategies. They are the Four Ms of effective giving:

• Create the most appealing mix of what people give, why they give and how. They will not rely on a single set of mainly altruistic motivations and not confine people to giving in one way.
• Appeal to the right combination of motives for people to give more, including well thought out forms of reciprocity which recognise the contributions givers make; peer-to-peer support so people draw one another in; reinforcement of the moral motives for giving.
• Make it easier for people to give time, services and objects in kind, especially by using new means such as digital technologies to weave giving into the everyday life of younger generations.
• Turn giving into a more meaningful experience by making people feel they are part of something bigger and by making the most of a personal connection that matters.

Endnotes

1. Beaumont, C. (2011) ‘From Fundraising to Resource Raising: How an Organisation Can Use Donated Resources as Part of an Income-generation Strategy.' Available at: http://www.cloresocialleadership.org.uk/userfiles/documents/resources/fellows/Caroline_Beaumont/From_fundraising_to_resource_raising_July_2011_FINAL.pdf.
2. 'What would it cost the sector to replace volunteers with paid staff?' See: http://data.ncvo-vol.org.uk/almanac/voluntary-sector/work/what-would-it-cost-the-sector-to-replace-volunteers-with-paid-staff/ (Accessed 18 September 2012.)
3. 'Charity shops, reuse, and recycling.' See: http://www.charityretail.org.uk/reuse.html
4. Charities Aid Foundation (2006) 'International Comparisons of Charitable Giving.' West Malling: Charities Aid Foundation.
5. Mohan, J. and Bulloch, S. (2012) 'The idea of a 'civic core': what are the overlaps between charitable giving, volunteering, and civic participation in England and Wales? '(TSRC Working Paper 73.)
6. Breeze, B. (2010) 'The Coutts Million Pound Donors Report 2010.' University of Kent: The Centre for Philanthropy, Humanitarianism and Social Justice.
7. Charities Aid Foundation (2012) ‘Mind the Gap: the growing generational divide in charitable giving.' West Malling: Charities Aid Foundation.
8. http://internetretailing.net/2011/05/uks-online-retail-market-passes-300m-milestone/

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© Nesta. November 2013

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