StephenTall.org

The Universities of London, Oxford and Cambridge are (perhaps unsurprisingly) the UK universities which have produced most graduate millionaires, according to a survey by the financial investment firm Skandia UK: The University of London is ranked first, with almost one in 10 millionaires gaining a degree or higher from one of its colleges. Oxford is ranked second, significantly ahead of  [ Read More ]

The media may be focusing on the Boris v Ken show for London mayor, but Brian Paddick’s Lib Dem campaign is making some noise. His hard-hitting campaign posters focusing on crime — an issue the former police commander in the Metropolitan police knows first-hand how to tackle — abound in London. And one of the [...]

A terrific piece of good news popped into my email inbox today from the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford — and it’s good news whether you’re an Oxford graduate, or simply wish higher education more generally well: It is with great pleasure that I am writing to inform you that the Oxford Thinking Campaign has now passed its minimum  [ Read More ]

There are many ways to live it large on a Friday night. Here’s what I did to get the weekend party started… grazed on the Electoral Commission’s website, looking at the data available of all declared donations by the Lib Dems, Labour and the Conservatives between 2001 and 2011. Here are the results of my labours… First, this blog-post from  [ Read More ]

The Electoral Commission website is a data-mine of information for those interested in all aspects of party political funding. For those who’d rather not get their hands dirty doing the mining themselves, below you’ll find 10 interesting (in my opinion) facts I discovered there. But for those of you interested in excavating further, I’ve uploaded [...]

The Electoral Commission has this past week published the latest donation and borrowing figures for the political parties, showing that the Lib Dems raised £1,076,469 between October and December this year. (At the foot of this post is the full breakdown of donations (excluding public funds) received by quarter since 2005, and annually between 2001 [...]

Last Friday’s Guardian-hosted #HElivechat on the role of the philanthropy in universities, on which I was one of the virtual panellists, covered a range of issues. The single biggest issue for new development offices eager to start delivering a return on investment to their university is… “How do we start to build our number of donors?” Here’s one of the  [ Read More ]

Last Friday’s Guardian-hosted #HElivechat on the role of the philanthropy in universities, on which I was one of the virtual panellists, covered a range of issues. One perennial issue that emerged was ‘What makes for a really good piece of direct-mail asking for money?’ I revisited the three principles of a good ‘ask letter’ that I blogged about here in  [ Read More ]

Last Friday’s Guardian-hosted #HElivechat on the role of the philanthropy in universities, on which I was one of the virtual panellists, covered a range of issues. Inevitably at one stage the question turned to the difference in cultural attitudes between fundraising the UK and US. In general, I’m quite sceptical of the focus on this area: too often it’s used  [ Read More ]

As I flagged here, my Friday lunchtime was occupied as one of the panel members on The Guardian’s #HElivechat on ‘The future of philanthropy in higher education’. You can catch up on the discussion — all 137 comments — here. It was fun and furious (the latter evidenced by my increasingly egregious typos), and hopefully of both interest and use  [ Read More ]