Seven years slow

nfpSynergy has published an interesting report on what it calls the "21st Donor" (you have to register to download the free report) which examines how attitudes towards giving are changing.

One of its ten recommendations for engaging donors in the new millenium is to:

Make donors stakeholders, with a real say in how they give and how their money gets spent. While this does not mean that donors have the final say in how the money gets spent...it does mean that their views are really important. Therefore dialogue between donors and service deliverers becomes more important.

It goes on to explain:

Those charity sector interviewees who dealt with wealthier donors highlighted a trend towards greater interest in two overlapping areas: firstly how charities measure and demonstrate impact, and secondly a desire to specify how their donations are spent. These two trends are linked because a desire to specify how donations are spent is, at least in part, an indication that the donor does not entirely trust the claims of impact...Individual donors’ increased interest in impact and directing the spending of their money is really just a catch-up with the rest of the funding world. Indeed, all the major funders of the sector: central government, local government, lottery bodies and charitable trusts attach great importance both to prescribing their areas of interest and to measuring the impact of their funds. One of the ironies of this trend is that many service-delivery people are appalled at the idea of being donor-led in their response to individual donors, but are already heavily funder-led when the funders are central or local government.