About Us
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Who we areWE ARE AN INDEPENDENT donor advisory website and part of New Philanthropy Capital (NPC), a charity think tank and consultancy. |
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Staff
InternsWe depend on volunteer interns to keep the company going. They are responsible for writing many of our charity profiles, and help out in all manner of vital ways - from doing research to writing blog entries. They are all very clever and deserve real, probably highly paid, jobs. |
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The Board of TrusteesOur work is directed and overseen by NPC's Board of Trustees. The Trustees are unpaid, and include charity workers, businesspeople and major donors. You can find out more about the Board of Trustees on NPC's website. |
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Our FoundersIntelligent Giving was founded in 2006 by two journalists, Peter Heywood and Dave Pitchford. We owe them a great debt for coming up with the idea of Intelligent Giving, developing this website and getting the project off the ground.Peter Heywood (Founder and major benefactor)  Peter worked as a civil engineer for 10 years before discovering his true calling as a journalist while editing an underground newspaper for expatriates in Algeria. In a wild moment, he jettisoned his career and entered the world of trade publishing, eventually covering the technologies underpinning the Internet. In a wild moment 20+ years later (1999), he abandoned his steady job and together with a colleague founded a website, LightReading.com. It proved highly successful (albeit utterly incomprehensible to most people) and the duo ended up selling it for a considerable sum in August 2005. Peter hit on the idea of evaluating charities when writing his will in 2001. He wanted to give a proportion of his estate to good causes and discovered there was no easy way of identifying which charities most deserved his cash. He resolved to set up a website to undertake this task when he retired, in the hope that it would encourage everybody to give more. After the sale of Light Reading, Peter started researching this project and found David Pitchford already working on an identical idea. Peter had the cash but no time (he was still working flat out on Light Reading). David had the time and skills to develop Intelligent Giving, but needed cash. Both had journalist backgrounds and a desire to bring analysis to bear in the charity sector. It was an incredible fit. In a wild moment, Peter committed to funding the project. Peter is now enjoying his retirement. Dave Pitchford (Founder)  Dave founded the Keswick Friends of the Earth group before getting his first job in outdoors journalism, and
was editor of the highly successful Camping Magazine for some
time. You'll find WH Smith is often sold out. When he'd had enough of
tents, boots and caravans - especially caravans - he sold his sub-editing
skills to an unlikely range of publications including the Middle
Eastern Economics Digest, Probe (for dental professionals)
and the News of the World. Defeated by endless caption-writing about Princess Diana, he ran off to PricewaterhouseCoopers to help run its European websites for a few years, then became a Content Strategist for an ebusiness consultancy. He was touring Bangladesh with Oxfam in 1999 when he heard criticism of some charities from the people those charities were allegedly helping. A light bulb went on in his head and he decided to try to build a website that would help people choose between charities. Four years later he ditched his consultancy job and started Intelligent Giving. After three years of graft getting this website up and running, he retired to the private sector, and now works as a digital-media consultant at The Storm Creative. |
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Tris leads the development and review of NPC’s strategy and of strategic partnerships to help create the infrastructure, tools, support and networks that will be needed to achieve NPC’s goals in the long-term. At Intelligent Giving, he oversees the development of the website and is leading the current strategy and funding review.
