The Future Fund is currently highligted on the home page of Impact030, the hub for social entrepreneurs in Utrecht, where the Future Fund is based! See here for the full article, published on 10 december 2020.
On 25 september 2020, the first Future Fund newsletter was sent out! You can download it here, and this was what the intro said:
Dear potential donors, dear employees of charities, and dear colleagues who work at the Future Fund, The first Future Fund newsletter! (you can also access this newsletter online) Thank you for your interest in the Future Fund so far: thanks to your inputs, time and ideas we have made a solid start with building the foundations for the Future Fund. Below you can read about the recent developments at the Future Fund: 1. The first Future Fund survey 2. Ideas: conversations with charities 3. New website 4. New data on the website by Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller 5. Students of the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht start projects 6. Donate via the Future Fund and create double impact!
In establishing the Future Fund, we regularly ask 2 groups of people for their ideas, input and feedback:
The past few weeks, we held our first meetings with charities. The result: a lot of positive feedback! The charities see the Future Fund as an innovative way to attract new donors.
The meetings also resulted in good ideas for future collaboration between the Future Fund and charities. For example:
The first Future Fund survey! It has only 1 question and takes 10 seconds to complete. The question is: how often do you want to receive this newsletter with updates about the Future Fund? Click here to fill in the survey! (Edit 28 dec 2020: survey is now closed).
One of the volunteers at the Future Fund proposed a few weeks ago to focus more on the ‘double impact’ that people create when they donate via the Future Fund:
We found this such a good idea that we started working on it straight away. Previously, the Future Fund offered two options for how your donation could be invested:
The Future Fund once started with the idea of investing donations in the stock market. We then received feedback that some donors would appreciate it if it was also possible to opt for ‘saving’ of the donation. After that, we created the two options above.
With a view to the ‘double impact’ of the Future Fund, we have now developed two additional options:
Thus, if you donate via the Future Fund, you now create a double impact: the interest on the investment goes to charity and the investments themselves also contribute to a better world!
You can find more information about these four options on the Future Fund website.
In September, 4 groups of students from the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht have started projects for the Future Fund. A warm welcome to everyone: we are happy with your help!
The students study at two departments at the University of Applied Sciences: the Department of Communication and Multimedia Design (CMD) and the Department of Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
The students from the department of CMD are going to help the Future Fund answer questions that are typical for a new charity, such as: Who are the main target groups of the Future Fund? And how can we best reach them?
Students from the department of ICT are going to help the Future Fund set up an ICT infrastructure that gives donors transparent insight into how their donation has been invested and how much money has been transferred to charity. The students will also assist the fund in strengthening its business plans and in making a grant application.
In the past few weeks, we strengthened the ‘evidence base’, the scientific basis, of the Future Fund. To do this, we used a set of investment data by Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller. Based on his research, we now show on the Future Fund website that if you invest a donation for a charity, and give the interest on the investment each year to that charity, that this generates a stable source of income for the charity.
Even more so, the income becomes bigger and bigger with time. The graph below shows this. For this graph, we have calculated how much support a charity would have received in the past century if someone had invested $10 for that charity in 1920 via the Future Fund. Instead of the original $10, the charity would have received $418 in financial support! And that is in ‘real’ value, already corrected for inflation.
You can download all these calculations and Robert Shiller’s data on the Future Fund website.
The Future Fund website has been given a makeover, with a new design and more content. Have look at https://future-fund.org.