The Philanthropy Gene & Memes
Tuesday, June 18, 2013 at 09:52AM 
In an earlier post I mused on Kevin Dutton’s ‘Wisdom of Psychopaths’ – test yourself here - but recent efforts by VPF to engage with people in the venture capital and private equity world have made me wonder about the flipside, about Empathy and how that might manifest in philanthropic actions.
Over the last three months, VPF has written to just over 500 people working in the VC and PE industries in London. We deliberately targeted people who were below the traditional target of board or partner level to see whether it was possible to find new VPF members to work on some of the tough challenges faced by our ventures.
Over 50 expressed an interest in finding out how they can use the skills that earned them their jobs to help. 10%...either our letter was superb or there was latent interest (hopefully both). Did VPF inadvertently tap into a wider social meme?
Memes, particularly culturally spread ideas, attitudes or patterns of behavior appear to have a habit of springing from nowhere. In fact there has usually been a period of gestation – there will often have been significant seeding work going on in the background (by advertisers more often than you’d like to think).
However this level of response suggests there is untapped potential amongst the respondents which should be of interest to all who work in the charity sector. Is there is an underlying meme, perhaps generated by the hyper-connected nature of this generation?
I don’t think the financial sector has suddenly become a fluffy altruistic hotbed of philanthropy (although there have always been notable benefactors from this area). But maybe, just maybe, simply asking for money is a turn-off, particularly amongst those who don’t have it…but may well do in the not too distant future.
It might be that the sector as a whole is missing a trick by not actively trying to engage with this highly intelligent, motivated and self-selecting group who might well become the future of philanthropy in this country.
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