Most weeks, at least one message lands with a name I don't yet recognise — an organisation somebody has seen doing good, unglamorous work and thought we ought to know about. I'm the person who reads every one of them, and I think it's only fair to explain, plainly, how that process actually works: what tends to make a recommendation land well, what happens to it once it reaches my desk, and why — given how selective we deliberately are — not every good cause we hear about ends up as a New Capital Link Foundation partnership.
What makes a recommendation stand out
The recommendations that catch our attention fastest are rarely the ones written in general terms. "There's a lot of need out there" is true, but it doesn't give us anywhere to start. What helps is a name: a specific charity or project, operating in one of our three focus areas — homelessness, education and access, or community development — that we can actually go and look into properly.
From there, what we're really looking for is evidence of focused work. Not a mission statement, but a sense of what the organisation actually does day to day, and some indication that it can show the difference that work makes. A small charity running one well-run outreach shelter, or a local project with a clear track record of helping young people into education, tends to stand out far more than a large, diffuse appeal covering dozens of activities at once.
Ideally, someone who has seen it first-hand
The strongest recommendations, in my experience, tend to come from people with direct knowledge of the work in question — a volunteer who has given up their weekends, a local resident who has watched a project change their street, someone who has used a service themselves. That doesn't rule out a recommendation from someone who has simply read about a charity and been impressed. But first-hand knowledge tends to come with detail: names, specifics, a sense of how the organisation actually behaves when nobody is watching. That detail is exactly what makes our own research quicker and more useful.
- A specific, named organisation we can research — not a general cause or category of need.
- Focused, evidence-based work that sits clearly within homelessness, education & access, or community development.
- Ideally, a recommendation from someone with direct, first-hand experience of that work.
"The best recommendations read like they were written by someone who has actually stood in the building — not someone forwarding on a leaflet."
— Georgina Rigby, Foundation Lead
What happens once you've submitted one
Every recommendation that comes through the Suggestions page reaches me directly, and I read all of them — there's no filtering step before that. The first thing I do is check it against our three focus areas. If it sits outside homelessness, education and access, or community development, I'll say so honestly rather than let it sit in limbo.
If it fits, it goes into a proper review against our selection criteria: we look at the organisation's leadership, how it's run day to day, and whether it can demonstrate real outcomes rather than good intentions. That's the same process we apply to any candidate charity, whether it arrived through a recommendation or through our own research. We don't rush this stage. Understanding an organisation properly, before committing to it, is the whole point of working the way we do.
Because we only take on a small number of causes at any one time, recommendations are considered periodically rather than acted on the moment they arrive. When we do decide to bring on a new partner, the recommendations we've gathered are often exactly where that search starts — which is why every single one genuinely does get read with care, even when the timing doesn't work out straight away.
Being honest about the odds
I'd rather be straightforward about this than let anyone submit a recommendation under a false impression. We support a small number of causes, deeply and for the long term, rather than a large number briefly. That means most recommendations, however good the underlying organisation is, won't turn into a partnership — not because the cause wasn't worthwhile, but because we simply can't take on everything that deserves support.
What I can promise is that nothing is discarded unread, and that the recommendations we don't act on immediately often shape where our attention goes when a new partnership does open up. If a cause you know is doing real work in our three areas, it's worth telling us about it even if the timing feels uncertain.
Ready to tell us about a cause?
If you know an organisation quietly doing excellent work in homelessness, education and access, or community development, I'd genuinely like to hear about it. Head to our Suggestions page, tell us who they are, what they do, and how you know about their work — that's all we need to start looking properly.