Z/Yen Takes Nothing For Granted

Z/Yen, together with Cass Business School Centre for Charity Effectiveness, has just completed a research study to trial PropheZy as an anomalous grant detector. The study used grants from The New Opportunities Fund (now part of the Big Lottery Fund) and City Parochial Foundation. Over 1800 grants were included in the study.

Three post-hoc evaluation questions were used; all questions that can reasonably be asked of any funded project and organisation:

• Did the funded work mostly achieve its objectives?
• With the benefit of hindsight, was it the right decision to have funded that work?
• Did you fund that organisation again or would you recommend funding it again?

The study proved that PropheZy demonstrated statistically significant predictive capability on The New Opportunities Fund data but not on the City Parochial Foundation data, indicating that these predictive techniques are mostly applicable to relatively large, structured grant-makers such as Government bodies and large philanthropic foundations.

The research has just been published in Strategic Change [15: (2006)]: “Predicting the Effectiveness of Grant-Making”, by Ian Harris, Michael Mainelli, Peter Grant, and Jenny Harrow. For more information on this groundbreaking study, please contact Ian Harris.

Financial Myopia versus Farsighted Investment

People constantly complain that the financial community (“the City”) is too short term, busy analysing day-to-day investment decisions with little thought to the future. Au contraire! To counter the over-emphasis on the short term, a group of investment managers formed the Enhanced Analytics Initiative to promote long-term, extra-financial research. The 16 members manage over $1trillion (sic) and are a powerful force for change. The largest UK member, the Universities Superannuation Scheme, and Z/Yen’s own Michael Mainelli, in his role as Mercers’ School Memorial Professor of Commerce at Gresham College, have launched the Farsight Award, a “Man Booker Prize” for the best single investment research report that looks to long-term issues such as climate change, human capital, corporate governance or intellectual capital. Sir Paul Judge will present The Farsight Award on 21 September at 18:00 in Cabot Hall in the Docklands, London E14, preceding a lecture by Professor Werner Seifert, ex CEO of Deutsche Börse on globalization. More information and tickets (free) are available here (once you’ve clicked through, see bottom of page to book).

Don’t Be Vague

As in 2005, the 2006 Z/Yen award for Operational Performance was presented to Credit Suisse on June 21st at this year’s Thomson Extel Survey Awards, by the Rt Hon William Hague MP on June 21st. Having been prepped by Jeremy Smith and James Pitcher, William Hague excelled himself by himself by pronouncing Z/Yen correctly. The 2006 round of Operational Performance Surveys are now underway and three new banks have already signed up to take part this year. The Z/Yen survey team has now increased to 10 with new associates, Martyn Howell in London and Peter Cardosa in Asia.

Z/Yen Is The News

Devoted readers will know that Z/Yen loves making news, but being the news? Well, now Z/Yen can be an RSS feed for your favourite newsreader - up-to-date Z/Yen news in convenient, straight-to-your-desktop RSS format! By dragging and dropping the RSS logo on the left hand side of the Z/Yen website into your favourite RSS news reader (so far we know it works on Awasu, NewsCrawler, FeedDemon, Thunderbird, RSS-News, EffNews and others), you will receive updated news from Z/Yen, just as you already do from lesser sources such as the Daily Mail, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal or even the editor’s favourite, “The Snail Painting Annual” (gotcha!).

If all this means nothing to you, another minor feeder service, the BBC, explains all. We look forward to readers’ stories of how their cornflakes were enhanced by up-to-the-minute Z/Yinfo.

Running Out Of Steam

The Z/Yen running team was again in action on two of the hottest days in June. Jeremy Smith and Francesca Birch ran the British 10K and Jeremy (again), Giles Wright and Ellie Rochford ran the JP Morgan Corporate Challenge in 32 degrees. Next stop is the Great North Run for Jeremy and Francesca.

Steaming Out Of Runs

The annual Z/Yen and The Children’s Society cricket match took place on 21 June. We came a good second this year, responding to the 112 runs set with a noble 97. John Davies was our star player this year, with James Pitcher pitching in with a surprising number of runs and good fielding plays. Ian Harris managed an early top edge that went so high a reception committee of three met the ice-covered ball when it returned and (this really is true) two of the three caught the ball! George Wright once again provided copious amounts of beer (courtesy of Youngs) and another fun evening was had by all concerned.