When Giving Money Away Became the Harder Business

In November 2014, Nick Jenkins described an education experiment in India that had produced an uncomfortable result. Ark, the children's charity on whose board he served, had been testing ways to help disadvantaged pupils. Some approaches had not worked as expected, he said, for cultural reasons. The response was to share what had been learned so others might avoid the same mistake. He supplied no success percentage or detailed evaluation. He treated the unexpected result as something other charities should be able to examine.^[1]

Moonpig gave Jenkins frequent commercial feedback about what customers wanted. A customer either bought a personalised greeting card on Moonpig or did not. The company measured orders, repeat purchases, costs and profit. After the sale, he allocated money to charitable projects, where spending was certain but the benefit remained debatable. A school could open without improving an education; a treatment could reach a patient while displacing care elsewhere.

Jenkins was explicit about that difference. Speaking to Alliance, he argued that donors ought to look for the net effect of their choices, including what resources might have accomplished without their intervention. His comparison exposed a problem in grant-making: spending is observable, but incremental impact is harder to establish. He was moving from measurable transactions to consequences that could be delayed or difficult to attribute.^[1]

A price for the company, not a price for the founder

Jenkins founded Moonpig around the turn of the millennium after working as a commodities trader. Its proposition was prosaic and effective: customers could personalise cards online, then let Moonpig print and post them. Selling individual cards was not the same as making a card retail operation profitable. The company had to acquire customers, build a production system and secure repeat use. By July 2011, when Photobox announced the acquisition, Moonpig had dispatched 12 million cards to almost three million customers over the preceding twelve months. The buyer disclosed approximately £38 million of revenue for Moonpig's 2010–11 financial year and said both businesses had been profitable in 2010.^[2]

The announced purchase price was £120 million. Photobox brought an existing European digital-photo printing business and a broad customer base; Moonpig brought a dominant position in personalised greetings. The acquirer's announcement identified a £75 million capital-raising exercise supporting the combination, involving existing Photobox investors, Moonpig shareholders and new investment firms. Contemporaneous reporting described consideration made up of cash and shares, rather than a simple cash sale. Some Moonpig owners exchanged part of their holdings for shares in the enlarged group. The new capital, the headline purchase price and the shares rolled over were related parts of the deal, not interchangeable descriptions of money paid to one person.^[2][3]

Jenkins reportedly held about 35% of Moonpig before the transaction. Early press accounts said that he sold some of his stake, reinvested in the combined business and would advise its board. A £120 million headline price multiplied by 35% gives £42 million, but that is an arithmetic illustration, not a verified bank transfer. It omits the cash-versus-share allocation, any adjustment to the price, liabilities and taxes. No accessible founder-level settlement statement establishes precisely how much Jenkins received in cash or how many shares he retained. Any rolled equity would have left Jenkins exposed to the combined company's subsequent performance.^[3][4]

Photobox gained ownership of Moonpig. Jenkins had been identified as its founder and chairman, while the company also had its own management. After the deal, his reported board-adviser position did not amount to an independently documented right to run the company or veto decisions. The reviewed reports do not disclose an adviser agreement, reserved matters or the duration of any commitments. The precise contractual boundary of his influence is not public.^[4]

The experiment that would not behave like a product

It would be inaccurate to say Jenkins discovered philanthropy only after the acquisition. The Charity Commission records the registration of the Nick Jenkins Foundation on 16 April 2010, more than a year before the sale. The foundation is described in the regulator's register as a grant-making charity funded by Jenkins himself. In his 2014 Alliance interview, he said that he endowed it when Moonpig was sold in 2011 and spent the following three years developing its strategy. Registration, endowment and subsequent grant-making were distinct events.^[5][1]

He also accepted an executive position at Ark. City A.M. reported on 29 September 2011 that Jenkins had been appointed the charity's chief executive, with a remit that included working with philanthropists to fund programmes in several countries. That position should not be projected across his entire philanthropic career. Ark's own announcement of 24 October 2012 named Lucy Heller as chief executive and said Jenkins was joining its board as a trustee. By the time of the Alliance interview, he discussed the Indian experiment as a trustee, not as Ark's chief executive.^[6][7]

At the foundation, Jenkins had to evaluate outcomes without the customer signals he had used at Moonpig. Managing a company involves deciding which service to offer and watching customers reveal whether they value it. A foundation must decide whose needs count, what alternative uses of the money exist and which outcomes can plausibly be attributed to its intervention. Jenkins described a potential freedom in having one's own foundation: the ability to fund uncertain experiments without the institutional pressure on a large charity to demonstrate a reliable stream of apparent successes. He also saw the danger. A donor who does not answer to shareholders needs another form of discipline to keep preference from masquerading as evidence.^[1]

The India pilot was his example of the difficulty of interpreting an unsuccessful intervention. He did not identify a particular school, supply outcome data or say that the entire programme had failed. He said some ideas had not behaved as expected and that local cultural factors mattered. The practical response was to disclose the negative result. A conventional retailer might discontinue an unpopular product; in education, the equivalent decision requires asking whether a disappointing result reflects the programme, its delivery, local institutions or a mistaken assumption made far away. Without the evaluation itself, the reader cannot independently judge the intervention's effect.^[1]

When the beneficiary cannot send a sales report

Jenkins offered a useful thought experiment about medical philanthropy. Paying for a specialist to perform a procedure might sound unambiguously good. But if the same surgeon would otherwise have delivered a different necessary treatment, the relevant result was the additional health gained, not simply a count of patients seen. He made a related point about education: buildings were of limited value if the scarce resource was suitably trained teachers. These were examples used to test reasoning about resources, not documented descriptions of grants his foundation had made.^[1]

The measurement problem is sharper in philanthropy than in retail. An online retailer can mistake a marketing campaign for profitable demand, but it has receipts and costs with which to test the claim. A philanthropic pilot has an expenditure figure, a list of activities and often an account from the people delivering them. To establish impact, evaluators need an estimate of the outcome that would have occurred without the intervention. Evaluators have to estimate that counterfactual. The act of giving money produces no equivalent of a customer's willingness to pay.

He did not regard an unsuccessful trial as grounds to abandon evaluation. He described examining an intervention's effect across the wider system and treating failed hypotheses as reasons to learn. His foundation's status as a personally funded grant-maker gave him latitude to choose projects, but it did not automatically make the choices correct. Accountability to a board of trustees and the Charity Commission provided a legal framework; it could not, by itself, establish whether a child learned more because of a particular intervention.^[1][5]

The reviewed record cannot establish that Jenkins's donations produced a specified educational improvement or that disclosing the Indian pilot changed sector practice. His published description gives a narrower result: an experiment did not work as hoped, and its proponents said so. In 2011 he could point to 12 million cards shipped and a buyer announcing a £120 million price. In 2014 he was asking how to value a result that might take years to observe and depend on what would have happened anyway. That required impact evaluation rather than a transaction statement.