On clever campaigns and choosing hard things 

I've always been a giver, even as a young person. I remember learning about Greenpeace spraying seal pups with a harmless coloured dye to make their pelt worthless. I was about 12 years old and I remember thinking it was such a clever approach. By painting the seals with a small Greenpeace logo, they were making it worthless. But they were also telling a story, do we really think these beautiful animals should be sacrificed for women to wear fur coats? Clearly, I was meant to be a campaign strategist! But I started to donate to Greenpeace at that time. It was probably only 50 cents, but that giving was really important and it was a key learning experience for me. At the time, I was watching which organisations were doing this kind of thing and that one really struck a chord.

Well, I ended up working for Greenpeace for more than a decade and became the Head of Global Communications so that particular campaign was a very formative experience for me. I’ve worked on the charity side and the advocacy side, not only at Greenpeace, but also on boards and as a consultant on campaigns. I can honestly say that after 40 years in the charity sector I can give in lots of different ways, especially in experience.

I think many women, who've worked in interesting careers, will bring that kind of skill set to organisations, particularly if they can provide board experience and governance advice. Almost every charity will need help on that front at some point. Of course, not everybody has time to do that. But if you do, it’s worth finding an organisation that you love, and doing a bit more with them. It's really satisfying on all sides.

I give selectively and often out of my issue area. I tend to pick unusual things and I like to pick the hardest stuff. I know some people give to ‘look good’ and they do that by giving to the easy stuff. I have no interest in looking good while giving.

Over the years, I’ve supported organisations that work with domestic violence offenders to offer rehabilitation through training and counselling. These are hard issues, but I can't think of too many situations where you can have more of an impact; where you can successfully intervene and change a behaviour. Something like 80% of men who go through this training in prison do not re-offend. That's an amazing success rate.

I'm very impressed by Grace Forrest who has driven the Minderoo Foundation to do incredible work combating sex trafficking and human trafficking. Again, it's hard stuff but also incredibly important. I'm interested in these areas because I know how hard it is for organisations that work on these issues to raise money in mainstream philanthropy.

We’re an investment advisory practice that makes it easy for people to give. We mainly fund environmental and climate work. We advocate on several things and support women's issues like Fair Agenda, equal pay and domestic violence. We also give to social issues. One of my favourite organisations is Thread Together which takes brand new, unwanted clothes, that would be otherwise dumped in landfill, and distributes them to people in need.

Ethinvest has its own foundation, the Ethinvest Foundation, and we put about 30% of the company's profits into that foundation each year and give to about 36 different charities – 80% who work on climate and environment and 20% who work on social issues. For our clients, we have set up a public ancillary fund, the Community Impact Foundation, that makes it really easy for our clients to give. For that we have about 75 giving sub funds and we manage the corpus investment and administration. They make their own decisions about who they give to but if they would like advice, I work with them to ensure they can find good organisations working on the issues they care about.

Once we find potential organisations, I encourage our clients to call the CEOs and have a chat because if a CEO won’t take that call, it’s not a good sign. You need to establish trust and that comes from understanding what the organisation is doing and how they’re doing it.

It’s about trusting the organisation or person that you're giving to and the relationship you build around that over time. It's not a numbers game. It’s not a case of you gave X amount and they delivered Y. Instead, it’s saying, ‘Ok, we gave you that money to do this project, how'd that go?’ Sometimes people will tell you that they failed on a project but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a success. If you've learned through a failure and you're taking that to your next attempt, that can be worthwhile.

I know that a lot of people fear this approach because it's hard to judge whether it's effective or not. But with some experience, you start to get an instinct for what's effective. This is what philanthropy is to me.

The first lesson is that fundraising is not about getting somebody to cut a cheque and then disappearing. When you have a relationship with donors who actively support an organisation because they like the work it does, it becomes a two-way street. This is where the magic happens.

The other side of this is that philanthropists need to understand how hard it is to run these organisations day-to-day. The heart and the soul of a charity is the dedication of the people to the issues they're working on. A lot of philanthropists don’t have that same depth of experience, and I advise them to take a step back and ask a lot of questions before jumping to conclusions that they know more than the people in there slogging it out.

That's a great question. I think there are too many organisations doing too much of the same thing. We need to find better ways of streamlining things and support more collaboration between organisations because they can be so much more strategic by working together. Right now, we're not collaborating particularly well. I think we could do better, on both sides, including philanthropy.

One thing I'm noticing is that when a problem comes up, like a disinformation campaign, it affects the entirety of all the issues that we support. This became obvious to me after The Voice. And these kinds of tactics are going to be used against our efforts across the board - from First Nations to environment, social issues, and especially to those causes impacting women.

I'm really interested in how we deal with these problems because in the past, philanthropists would pick their charity and give to it. But we need more people trying to create solutions by bringing different organisations together to counter disinformation. It’s going to be a whole new challenge.

I see more collaboration starting to happen and there are some great networks of givers that get together and think strategically about who they're going to fund and where the fit is for them within that group. In the future, we need much more of this in Australia.