How to fix charitable giving (in time for Christmas?)

Hello and welcome to Working It.

With the water temperature at 5C (41F), this is the best time of year for outdoor swimming. The cold puts us into a euphoric state 😍.

Why am I boring you with this? (Q: “How can you tell if someone is an outdoor swimmer? A: Because they’ll be sure to tell you.”) It’s because swimmers are living inside the seasons — we immerse ourselves in the changes. I often think about the concept of “wintering”, accepting that cyclical seasonal differences affect us, as humans. In darker months we hunker down* and can perhaps enter a slower phase at work. At least until the Christmas parties start🤶🏽.

*Rivals has certainly livened up my rainy evenings 😳.

Read on for a follow-up on the crisis in corporate charitable giving that we reported here a few weeks ago. And Dear Jonathan advises a graduate who doesn’t know how to get a mentor.

Email about anything work-related, or your freezing swims: [email protected].

Corporate giving: some good news for once

Earlier this month I wrote about the decline of corporate giving to charity in the UK. The tl;dr is that the Charities Aid Foundation found that donations from FTSE 100 companies are down 34 per cent over the past decade, and three in four companies outside the FTSE didn’t give at all in 2023. (If there were a seasonal Scrooge emoji, I would use it here.)

I’m following up because there was a big reader response to the newsletter. I think the only topic that gets Working It readers more engaged is managing Gen Z staff (oh, that old chestnut 🌰).

Part of the problem may lie in the mismatch of expectations between corporates and charities. As a senior leader in the charity sector wrote: “I have noticed not just a reduction in giving but a growing preference for giving pro bono rather than in cash.” Sometimes, they say, this involvement brings in helpful skills, but it can also lead to “staff in charities feeling patronised because so often private sector employees talk down to them as though they are just ‘lovely people’. A new term ‘biz-splaining’ has become rather popular in the sector 👀.”

While nobody has an immediate solution to the funding/expectation problems, it clearly makes a difference when business leaders have a personal interest in corporate giving, and make it a priority — as well as building long-term relationships with charities.

At OakNorth, a digital lender, Rishi Khosla, co-founder and chief executive, says: “The motivation stems from the fact that Joel [Perlman, co-founder] and I have always wanted to support communities — we did this in our previous business, and wanted to continue at OakNorth, which, as a bank focused on empowering entrepreneurs, is driven by a strong social purpose. So, from a very early stage when we hit cash flow break-even (within a year of launching), we started giving. We then formalised it in 2018, and then added the 1 per cent of team time in 2023.”

Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, runs the Analyst Impact Fund, an annual global competition for younger analysts, who form teams to go through rounds of pitching to win cash (top prize $250,000💰) for their selected non-profit. It’s a big deal internally: more than 700 analysts start the process each year, and four teams reach the live final, where they pitch to CEO David Solomon and the firm’s leadership, plus 2,500 staff watching on live stream. (No pressure, then 😰.)

This year’s winners pitched onebillion, a non-profit that develops software that works offline to teach numeracy and literacy skills to students across Africa, the US and the UK.

I used to be unsure about the merit — or ethics? — of competitive pitch events for charity, but changed my mind after attending The Funding Network events in London. These are live crowdfunding evenings: chosen charities have six minutes to pitch, the audience has six minutes for questions, then there’s a live pledge session led by an expert. While some charities raise more than others on the night, they all get on to givers’ radars for the future — and the atmosphere is supportive and celebratory.

I don’t know what the future is for corporate giving, but ideas such as Goldman’s pitching competition 🏆 and TFN’s model make it exciting and compelling — as well as developing staff teamwork and presentation skills.

In a sentence: The key to boosting charitable giving might be a combination of greater commitment to true long-term partnerships with charities — and creating programmes that energise and interest business staff. (More ideas welcome.)

Want more? The “venture philanthropy” model at Impetus, a charity foundation backing organisations that work with young people, is an interesting innovation in the way pro bono partnerships work.

This week on the Working It podcast

Are you lucky at work? My colleague Emma Jacobs wrote a hit column on the topic, pointing out that many of us are reluctant to accept (for example) the role of privilege in our career success. There are, however, plenty of things we can do to maximise our chances of getting that lucky break, and on this week’s episode of the podcast I talk about it with Emma, and with Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, chief innovation officer at Manpower group and a professor of business psychology at UCL and Columbia University. (Neither of my guests was impressed with my habit of seeking luck in the stars via the Co-Star app 🔮.)

Dear Jonathan 📩

The problem: “I hear and read a lot about the importance of finding a mentor 👩🏻‍🏫 but I don’t really know why that would be helpful or how to do it? I’m not very comfortable contacting strangers out of the blue and anyway, why they would want to mentor me?” Graduate, 20s

Jonathan Black’s advice: A mentor is a critical friend who can guide, suggest, and challenge you, as and when you seek input — usually for career decisions.

Usually, a mentor is outside the organisation, or at least outside your department. It can be helpful if they have insight 🔍 into your industry or organisation, so any advice they give is informed and useful. The best mentor: mentee relationships will be based on trust and respect; a mentor will usually have a few more years’ experience in the workplace so they may well have seen the issue the mentee is facing before. You may seek (or gradually acquire) several mentors over your career, perhaps who bring different skills and insights.

As for finding a mentor, these relationships can develop organically, without ever being organised or specifically requested. You may chat to someone at a conference, in another department, or outside work, and ask them about one issue. Later, you might follow up and ask if you could chat about other issues. Some interchanges like this run their course and stop, while others continue over the years 🗓️.

Some organisations, including universities, run formal mentoring programmes, introducing people to mentors who they have recruited (perhaps senior people in the organisation, or alumni). Enrolling in such a programme can help answer your question on how to get started, as the organisers will try to match you.

It’s important that both mentor and mentee understand the limits on the help: mentors do not usually arrange to find mentees a job, though they might point out roles or people to contact.

As to why someone else would want to help, it’s in the same way that you would help others seeking your advice. Fundamentally, it’s flattering to be asked for advice. And when you become a mentor, you’ll have learned what makes for a useful relationship.

Jonathan Black is director of the careers service at Oxford university. Email your career dilemmas to [email protected]. Next week: Office Therapy.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Citigroup slashes promotions as it seeks to overhaul bank: There’s disappointment for thousands of bank staff who were expecting to stay in their current roles but get more money and a better job title. Citigroup has put some of these “in seat” promotions on hold, the FT’s Stephen Gandel reports.

2. Climate COPs and the art of the deal: Pilita Clark was at the COP29 climate conference and has some tips on the kinds of negotiating tactics used at these big events. It’s very different from sales tactics, she writes.

3. The age of the partial outsider: It can be an advantage to stand a bit outside the mainstream, writes Janan Ganesh, citing Donald Trump as “New York but not Manhattan, urban but not urbane, rich but from the construction game rather than from genteel finance”.

4. Mass X-odus: professionals desert Elon Musk’s network: Emma Jacobs talks to people who have enjoyed using X for work, but who have now jumped to Bluesky — or are staying to tough it out. (Includes a bonus quote from Count Binface, a familiar face on stage at UK elections.)

5. What the US can learn from ‘Wicked’: One of my favourite FT writers, Patti Waldmeir, sees lessons for fractured US politics and society in the unlikely friendship of Glinda and Elphaba in the hit film. I will always hold space for that.

One more thing

The author Nick Hornby (Fever Pitch, About a Boy etc) has a Substack newsletter, A Fan’s Notes, covering “music, books, movies, work, football, TV and so on”. It’s a treasure trove if, like me, you love to get informed reading recommendations and playlists. Nick recently wrote about a 1991 non-hit album, 24 Years of Hunger, by Eg and Alice. He describes it as a “minor classic” — it can’t be a major one, he says, as “nobody has heard of it”. Oddly, I bought it in 1991, played it on repeat for years, and then totally forgot about it. The album is a delight to (re) discover — I hope you agree.

Get in the festive career spirit . . . 🎄

It’s almost time for the Career Collective live podcast event in London on Monday December 2, where I’ll be discussing work trends for 2025, AI angst, how to get a pay rise and much more, alongside Bruce Daisley of Eat Sleep Work Repeat, Jimmy McLoughlin of Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future and Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper of Squiggly Careers.

FT Working It newsletter subscribers get a “family and friends” 50 per cent discount (taking the cost to £22) when you book through Eventbrite. Proceeds go to Beam, a charity getting homeless people and refugees into work, and UpReach, which supports students from low-income backgrounds into top graduate careers.