It’s an easy assumption that the creator of a charity must be motivated by the desire to improve the lot of the disadvantaged. But it would be wrong in the case of Claire Mackintosh, the founder of London-based charity ShareGift.
Claire Mackintosh – aka Lady Mackintosh (she’s a viscountess) – is delighted the charity she created in 1996 has passed on well over £3 mn ($4.8 mn) to worthy causes. But that was not her primary goal in launching it: ‘I certainly didn’t think, I want to make an amazing contribution to society and raise lots of money for charity; how will I do it?’ Rather, what motivated her was a desire to help companies by coming up with a cheap and easy mechanism to solve the problem created by odd-lot shareholders – investors with tiny amounts of stock which they often have no real desire to keep.
Like all good ideas, this one now seems too obvious for anyone to have needed to invent it. Indeed, Mackintosh herself, a former investment manager and broker, says there was no eureka moment; rather it arose after years of considering the problem.
It’s a simple concept: people who own so few shares that the selling costs would exceed their value can instead send their certificates to ShareGift which accumulates them, sells them, and passes the proceeds to charity. Donors can add their own suggestions to ShareGift’s list of charities.
To begin with, ShareGift concentrated on the shareholders themselves. ‘But from the word go,’ Mackintosh says, ‘I was thinking about it from the company’s point of view.’ She was aware of their costly obligations to send annual reports and so on to every single shareholder, whether those shareholders wanted to receive them or not.
Indeed, the problems were easy to see; the hard part was solving them. ‘The charity thought came into my mind as a logical squaring of the circle,’ says Mackintosh. ‘I thought it would be great if you could get rid of the unwanted assets and the nuisance they caused. And it was immediately obvious to me that the way to do it was via a charity. How else could you do it?’
A few other things were obvious to her, too. First, ShareGift would have to involve lots of charities; and it would have to accept all shares, regardless of their value. ‘The concept was for it to be overarching and universal. I knew I couldn’t say we’d only take assets worth over £20; or that we’d choose which charities to give money to.’
Second, Mackintosh was clear ShareGift would have to cope with any and all problems: ‘I knew we would have to take on whatever work was required to deal with the problems – to be a universal problem solver.’
The first publicity for ShareGift – a story in London’s Daily Telegraph in 1996 – prompted a huge response. ‘The wave of certificates arriving was so enormous I had to lie low on publicity for a year. Only by seeing what people sent in could I find out what had to be done. I spent days calling registrars’ help lines, checking holdings, checking what to do with grants of probate, and so on.’ As a result, she boasts, ‘There’s now pretty well nothing in any country – in terms of share transfers and settlement – that we can’t deal with.’
The third thing Mackintosh saw from the start was that she’d have to build ShareGift into an established operation before approaching companies; she’d have to start with the shareholder side of the equation. But dealing with those individuals was always a means to an end.
‘The company angle was going to be the ultimate key to ShareGift realizing millions of pounds for charities. We wouldn’t be able to do that with the odd share here and there from individuals.’ Equally, companies would only feel confident about working with her – from the due diligence angle – once ShareGift was well-established and respected.
That is certainly the case now and, as a result, ShareGift works with numerous UK companies wanting to establish programs offering their shareholders the option of giving their unwanted shares to ShareGift. Typically this happens when a company is doing an odd-lot clean-up, a merger or similar corporate action.
Take the example of Marks & Spencer, which in 2002 was making a ‘return of value’ issue to shareholders. Working with ShareGift, M&S gave its shareholders a choice: would you like to buy more shares, sell them or pass them to ShareGift? The clean-up raised £45,000, which M&S topped up to £75,000 from its own community affairs funds.
Such programs are now commonplace, and the roll call of companies working with ShareGift just keeps on growing: BT, Scottish & Southern Energy, Barclays, Aviva and National Grid Transco, to name a few. BT’s program – coinciding with its mm02 issue – yielded £700,000 of shareholder donations for ShareGift all on its own.
Not that Mackintosh is satisfied. ‘I don’t want every company to be running a full-scale program; I wouldn’t want them doing it unless it made sense. But I do want them – if they’re doing any kind of corporate action – to be aware of ShareGift and at least consider using it. If they do, tens of millions will be given to charities annually, which is what I want to see. And it’s an absolute winner in terms of companies’ relationships with shareholders. All the feedback is that shareholders like being offered choices – to sell, buy or give away.’
And the catch? Well, there really isn’t one. ‘It helps companies’ CSR profiles and improves their reputation with shareholders. It is something that costs companies nothing, saves them money, makes them look good, benefits charities, improves companies’ reputation with shareholders, solves a problem for shareholders and makes those shareholders happy. Everybody’s happy.’
And how much money does it raise? ‘I’m not fundamentally so interested in how much money comes into ShareGift,’ answers Mackintosh. ‘The questions I’m fundamentally interested in are: was the company happy overall that it did the program? Was it happy with the response? And would it include ShareGift again? If for some reason more people went for the sell or the buy options, that’s fine. I don’t judge its success by the take-up or the amount passed to charity. But on the other hand, it’s not a bad result that ShareGift has become a multi-million pound charitable donor in only seven years. I’m happy with that.’
