200 issues and still counting....

Civil Society News is republishing this article from December 2013 in tribute to Daniel Phelan.

The December 2013 edition of Charity Finance magazine is the 200th issue. To celebrate this momentous occasion, the team at publishing house Civil Society Media hosted a party on the 31st Floor of Centre Point, central London, on Monday 25 November. Editor-in-chief and founder of the magazine, Daniel Phelan, shared some anecdotes from the journey so far in his speech to the assembled guests. This is the full text of that speech.

A major milestone like publishing our 200th issue gives cause to reflect on the past 25 years. In some ways everything has changed. In some ways nothing has changed.

The issues charities face tend not to change which is why charities can endure for centuries but the fiscal, legal, economic and political climates that charities operate in are constantly evolving. This means there will always be a need for what we do at Charity Finance and why we can take our own place in the long history of charities.

The enterprise started out from scratch in 1990. I rented my first office from a charity founded in 1843 – Shaftesbury Young People (Shaftesbury Homes & Arethusa as was then). The director was Neil Baird-Murray, a wonderful man sadly no longer with us. Neil set a ‘very reasonable’ rent for the spare room which I then unerringly failed to pay. Nothing was said until year end, which arrived along with the gentlest of nudges from the finance director asking whether our modest contribution might be expected any time soon.

Of course the rent was always paid – eventually – and as an under-capitalised start up, that degree of tolerance was very helpful. It may not have been textbook credit control but it was textbook charity.

I can see a trustee of Shaftesbury Young People here tonight – James Minett. Thank you, James, for your charity’s forbearance towards a then younger man trying to get something off the ground. Of course, like most start-ups, it was a bumpy ride.

It was 1990, the economy had just fallen off a cliff, interest rates were on a rising path to 15 per cent, the banks had shut up shop and we were deep in a recession that still had several years to run.

I had no money and the printers insisted I show them a bank statement with £3,000 on it before they would print the first issue. I cobbled this together somehow and satisfied the printers. Of course, I didn’t actually use that money to pay the printers. Instead I spent most of it on installing a phone system. The very night that was installed someone broke in and ripped it off the wall. So the print money went on a phone system which was immediately stolen. Not a great start.

Nevertheless, there was little choice but to carry on and Issue 1 came along and contained this ever so slightly pompous statement of editorial intent.

The magazine “will provide a diet of informed and expert editorial on technical subjects as well as providing a forum for the airing of policy-shaping ideas. Circulation will include finance directors, trustees and policy makers in non-governmental organisations in the not-for-profit sector together with the professionals who advise them.”

That remains true today.

Looking at those early issues is a trip down memory lane for me but the content of those first few issues is also surprisingly fresh. The very first issue contains articles on subjects that we’d recognise today:

liberalising charity investment rules
using property assets effectively
solving the charity VAT problem
there’s a piece inviting charities to use Business Expansion Schemes to fund social housing developments, and
there is even an article on management training which explains that “charities involved in an era of scarcity and survival need managers who can find ways of procuring resources through business ventures and other enterprising means”.

So today’s big topics of social investment and social enterprise were both there in the first issue in 1990.

The topics may be familiar but it was a very different world. Compared to now, publishing technology was primitive.

Forget email, even the fax hadn’t been invented. Everything was typeset and run out on long sheets of white bromide. This was then cut up with a scalpel and pasted onto a make-up board – the original cut-and-paste. Editing to fit was a process of literally cutting out words, phrases or sentences and moving the following pieces up the board until it all fitted. The boards were then photographed and run out to film which was physically transported to the printers.

For example, in Issue 5 we reproduced the entire Charity Bill 1992. In those days, HMSO would print a few copies of a bill, put them on the shelves at their shops in various cities where they would mostly gather dust because no one knew they were there. There was no internet. There was no such thing as a pdf. I badgered HMSO until they gave me permission to reproduce what is Crown copyright. Getting that permission was not easy. Working all day and through the night, we produced an enormous issue. I then took the large box of film to Paddington and got on the 6am train to Merthyr Tydfil, then the home of the cheapest possible print in the UK. Once I arrived in the Welsh valleys they straight away set to making up the printing plates while I borrowed their phone and rang around the chief executives of the umbrella bodies offering cheap run-on copies for them to circulate to their members. Within the hour many thousands were added to the print order and as a result a very much larger number of charity professionals were directly engaged with an important piece of legislation for charities.

Issue 6 contained our first job ads. Job ad number one was for a new Chief Charity Commissioner – with a salary up to £59,000. The current CEO’s job is being advertised at £125,000. According to one online inflation calculator, £59,000 in 1992 is the equivalent of £107,000 today so the pay for the job has risen by 0.5 per cent above inflation on average for each of the 22 intervening years. Is that unreasonable?

Bouncing back again to February 1996 – 17 years ago – we ran a cover story called ‘Charity Fat Cats – fact or fiction’. This showed that senior positions at charities paid considerably less than equivalent positions in commerce.

Issue 7 - Only another 193 to go!

Issue 7 contains one of my favourite articles. Allan Hargreaves, then charity tax partner at KPMG, wrote a priceless review of Anthony Trollope’s novel The Warden from a charity law and tax perspective. The central figure in the novel is the warden of Hiram’s Hospital, an ancient endowment set up in 1434 to favour the retired beadsmen of the town. As can happen with ancient endowments vested in fields and meadows, the value outgrows the founder’s vision and a considerable amount of surplus cash ends up being produced each year.

Allan points out in his piece that even in 1992, practitioners were used to seeing old wills precisely in the form of John Hiram’s in The Warden and they probably still are today. He also proposed that Trollope’s novel, published in 1855, resulted in the Charitable Purposes Act 1860 which for the first time gave the Charity Commissioners the power to establish a scheme for the administration of a charity.

Which all shows the power of the printed word and the immutable truth that there is always another piece of legislation coming down the tracks.

Also in 1992, David Harker came up with the idea of comparing the performance of charity shops and compiled the first charity shops survey, a task we have repeated annually ever since. Charity shops were heavily featured on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning and have been in the news all day.

You may be interested to hear that British Heart Foundation has multiplied its shops turnover 63 times in 21 years to £164m and its profit by a factor of 232 to £35m.

That’s quite an achievement and one Charity Finance can tell you about because we have 21 years of data to look at.

Thank you David Harker for starting that.

1993 saw the launch of our audit fees survey – someone once said to me that this survey was the “single biggest downwards pressure on audit fees and has saved charities millions over the years”.

There have been many other milestones:

The Charity 100 Index was launched in 1996 to track the main income trends in large charities
The Charity Awards were launched in 2000. We see The Charity Awards as one of the most important development derived from Charity Finance. It is an outstanding way of showcasing the very best of charity innovation. 2014 is our 15th year and we’d like you all to help us make it the best year yet.
2000 also saw our first governance survey – a precursor to Governance magazine which was launched a few years later in 2005.

Nowadays we produce Charity Finance, its sister titles Governance and Fundraising, an enormous web resource at civilsociety.co.uk and a wide range of conference and training programmes.

All this could not have been achieved without a lot of people’s commitment, dedication and help.

That includes our first accommodating landlord in 1990 and our first advertisers in Issue 1 – CCLA and CAF among them. And ever since, our contributors, columnists, researchers, database workers, reporters, advertisers, sponsors and subscribers.

I’d like to particularly thank prior distinguished editors who are here this evening. Heather Lamont held the reins with great style and skill for five years until November 2003. Thank you Heather for your superb contribution.

Ian Allsop also held the editor’s role with distinction for five years until early 2009. Many of you know Ian’s reputation for dry wit and his epigrammatic and elliptical writing style. We are very fortunate to have retained Ian’s services in the form of his column, ‘Closing Time’, which wraps up every issue of the magazine to this day. Thank you Ian.

I’d also like to thank John Tate as our longest contributing columnist. John Tate has been a columnist since Sep 1999 – never missed an issue – IT is endlessly fascinating (I know this because John tells me!)

The magazine’s reputation is also based on high design and production values for which we have to thank Rachel Fletcher and the team at RF Design who have worked with us for well over 15 years.

We could not have done it without all of you. Thank you all very much.

And Charity Finance has an outstanding team today. They are all here tonight.

We believe that information-based journals and journalism are now even more valuable than ever. Communication channels have multiplied since the 1990s and the speed at which information is disseminated has increased dramatically.

Back in 1990 people simply didn’t have access to the information they needed – Charity Finance came along and did something about that.

Nowadays, it’s the opposite problem – we are all inundated with information. No one could possibly read it all let alone make sense of it. That makes Charity Finance even more crucial than ever it was. As a trusted editorial filter and consolidator, we serve back to you a considered, expert and hopefully well-judged diet of essential insights and knowledge. It’s like having your own team of expert advisers on tap – all for about 40p a day. Now that really makes good Charity Finance sense!

And it is more than that too. Someone must have the independence to challenge party lines. Someone must hold government to account. Someone must speak truth to power.

Civil Society Media has always been a values-driven organisation. With integrity and a commitment to truth being so important to the ethos of Charity Finance, we couldn’t have found a better person to fulfil the editor’s role than Andrew Hind. Andrew’s thoughtful style and meticulous attention to detail always delivers nuanced and balanced insight on the many issues that charity leaders face.

And finally, before I hand back to Andrew, I want to thank our readers who have trusted us to deliver something worthwhile in return for their annual subscription and for whom we have worked so hard to deliver great value.