Managing reputation for ‘good works’ while undertaking commercial activities: Communication best practice guidelines for charities

Charities and not-for-profit organisations have traditionally eschewed commercial operations in favour of direct fund-raising from supporters. Competitive pressures, however, are driving charities to take on ‘dual citizenship’ through activity in both profit (commercial) and nonprofit (voluntary) sectors. There has been little scholarly attention or professional focus on the impact that commercial trading by charities has on relations with key stakeholders, such as supporters, and upon the reputation of the community-focused organisations. This paper reports a case study of a UK charity and explores supporters’ perceptions of the impact of commercial trading upon the organisation’s reputation as well as their relationship and level of engagement with the organisation. It found that donors are in support of commercial activities, as long as these are aligned with the charity’s values. The study, however, also found that commercial activities should not deflect the charity from its perceived and announced mission

Communicating 'dual citizenship' - how do charities manage their reputation for 'good works' while undertaking commercial activities

Charities and not-for-profit organisations have traditionally eschewed commercial operations in favour of direct fund-raising from supporters. Building on Goodall’s (2000) exploration of sectoral values, it can be said that competitive pressures are driving charities to take on ‘dual citizenship’ through activity in both profit (commercial) and nonprofit (voluntary) sectors. In the United Kingdom, there are some 170,000 charitable organisations in England and Wales which generate £46 billion in annual revenue (UK Charity Commission 2008). There has, however, been little scholarly attention or professional focus on the impact that commercial trading by charities has on relations with key stakeholders, such as supporters, and upon the reputation of the community-focused organisations. This paper reports a case study of a UK charity and explores, using document analysis and phone interviews with supporter-stakeholders, their perceptions of the impact of commercial trading upon the organisation’s reputation as well as their relationship and level of engagement with the organisation. It found that donors are overwhelmingly in support of commercial activities, as long as these are aligned with the charity’s values. The study, however, also found that commercial activities should not deflect the charity from its perceived and announced mission. There were also lessons arising from the study on frequency and style of communication, and the relevance of models of communication, c.f. Grunig’s four descriptors, and measurements of relationships (Hon and Grunig 1999). The paper concludes with proposals for further research

Managing reputation for ‘good works’ while undertaking commercial activities - communications best practice guidelines for charities

Charities and not-for-profit organisations have traditionally eschewed commercial operations in favour of direct fund-raising from supporters. Competitive pressures, however, are driving charities to take on ‘dual citizenship’ (Goodall 2000) through activity in both profit (commercial) and nonprofit (voluntary) sectors. There has been little scholarly attention or professional focus on the impact that commercial trading by charities has on relations with key stakeholders, such as supporters, and upon the reputation of the community-focused organisations. This paper reports a case study of a UK charity and explores supporters’ perceptions of the impact of commercial trading upon the organisation’s reputation as well as their relationship and level of engagement with the organisation. It found that donors are overwhelmingly in support of commercial activities, as long as these are aligned with the charity’s values. The study, however, also found that commercial activities should not deflect the charity from its perceived and announced mission

Nothing to See Here? The Extension of Parent Company Liability in James Hardie Industries plc v White

In James Hardie Industries plc v White, the New Zealand Court of Appeal considered circumstances where a parent company could be directly liable for defective products produced by its subsidiary while upholding the principles behind separate corporate personality. The Court passed off the case as an unexceptional development in the law, based on an application of ordinary tort law principles and supported by decisions from overseas jurisdictions. However, the Court neglected to consider the underlying policies of the cases it cited, ignored important distinctions between them and the present case and did not inquire into whether they were in fact relevantly applicable. In fact, the Court extended parent company liability for the acts and omissions of its subsidiary far beyond what courts in overseas jurisdictions have held. In doing so, the Court implicitly lifted the corporate veil and failed to acknowledge the impact such a finding of liability would have on the corporate form

Climate, Power, and Possible Futures, from the Banks of the Humber Estuary

Nayan Kulkarni’s Blade, Lucy and Jorge Orta’s Raft of the Medusa, and Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen’s Quicksand were exhibited in Hull during its year as the 2017 UK City of Culture. These artworks provide the impetus for an article that moves between the local, national, and global, in order to connect visual culture, climate politics, and questions of citizenship and borders in a warming world. In the first section, I discuss how Blade—a wind turbine rotor blade repurposed as a public art installation—provides the opportunity to examine the role of large-scale renewable energy transition in addressing the deep regional economic inequalities in the UK. In the second section, I consider how artworks displayed as part of the ‘Somewhere Becoming Sea’ exhibition linked Hull’s recent history to a global context of displacement and precarity, in the wake of the ongoing ‘refugee crisis’ within Europe and at its borders. In the final section, I seek to bring together a number of threads from the preceding discussion, in order to outline some alternative political horizons. I turn initially to Sean McAllister’s documentary A Northern Soul (2018) and its powerful examination of how personal debt, the toxic fuel of neoliberalism, forecloses the future. In opposition to a future of deepening inequality and climate breakdown, I trace a renewed politics of public ownership and expanded social welfare in the UK, and its place in a prospective global renewable energy transition. This is a hopeful vision, given the current political climate, I argue, but it is also an eminently feasible one

Climate change communications: Understanding people’s perceptions and evaluating the effectiveness of interventions.

A government-funded scheme, the UK Climate Change Communications Initiative (UKCCCI), provided money for organisations to deliver projects that attempted to impact positively on people’s attitudes towards climate change and to increase knowledge and awareness of the issue. This devolution of communications is a relatively novel approach after previous centralised campaigns. This thesis adopts a mixed-method approach; a qualitative and a quantitative study have been conducted based on three case studies of individual projects funded under the UKCCCI. The quantitative study analyses pre- and post-project surveys to assess whether the communications produced the desired changes in attitude, knowledge and awareness; results are generally mixed in relation to all three case studies as some statistics are more positive after communications, whereas some are less positive. Data from a regional UKCCCI project are compared with a nationally representative dataset; this analysis shows that attitudes, knowledge and awareness differ at regional and national scales, supporting the policy of devolving communications. Regional data are also analysed to see if there are differences between socio-demographic groups within a single target audience for communications; this analysis suggests that interventions must strike a balance between personalisation of information and the higher cost of targeting smaller groups with more specific material. The quantitative study uses conceptual content cognitive mapping (3CM) to discover the climate change-related knowledge of twenty subjects who received communications from two of the case study projects. Results suggest that people have knowledge of a wide range of issues related to climate change, but they do not possess a detailed scientific understanding. However, there is a high knowledge of how to mitigate climate change and this is expressed largely through individual actions and lifestyle choices. A template analysis was also conducted to discover what interviewees thought specifically about the communications and a range of practical recommendations are made for future projects. Implications are discussed in relation to future practical climate change communications projects, wider policy and academic research.EPSRC Gran

A Working History of Digital Zoom, Medieval to Modern

[Article draft from 2020: very of its mid-lockdown moment, but unlikely to be revisiting this, so here it is!] This article examines one of the most familiar elements of digital interfaces: the zoom tool. By tracing the conceptual, technical, and material histories of zooming from the late Middle Ages to the present day, it demonstrates how historians of the medieval book might turn their attention to the digital tools on which we increasingly depend not just in our academic work, but in all areas of life. It also considers some of the broader ramifications of looking beneath the screens of our smart devices: the complex and often discontinuous histories of information technologies, the hollowness of powerful corporations’ claims of “innovation” and “disruption,” the various forms of extractivism on which the digital realm depends, and the modern regimes of worker “flexibility” and “knowledge work.

Shared Visual Abstractions

This paper presents abstract art created by neural networks and broadly recognizable across various computer vision systems. The existence of abstract forms that trigger specific labels independent of neural architecture or training set suggests convolutional neural networks build shared visual representations for the categories they understand. Computer vision classifiers encountering these drawings often respond with strong responses for specific labels - in extreme cases stronger than all examples from the validation set. By surveying human subjects we confirm that these abstract artworks are also broadly recognizable by people, suggesting visual representations triggered by these drawings are shared across human and computer vision systems