The CFO Playbook: What Corporate CFOs Can Learn from Amnesty International

And for our listeners who maybe work primarily in the private sector, and I suspect that that's many of them, what can you tell us about what that picture of income looks like at Amnesty? Where does the money come from and where does it go to? You mentioned 400 million globally there, 100 or so million for the international secretariat.

What's the input and what's the output for that?

Where that money comes from is by vast majority is from individual donors making gifts of 20, 30 pounds a month or in euros.

And then we also get some one-off donations for particular appeals.

And we also get legacies as a significant proportion of our income.

What is a very small proportion is money from governments.

We take money from governments for human rights education because we see education as a government responsibility.

But other than that, we don't take money from governments just to preserve our independence.

So it is largely from tens of thousands of donors.

So it has meant that with the cuts in development budgets globally and the cuts in USAID budgets, then we've fortunately been immune from those cuts.

And so we've preserved and managed to grow our income last year.

When there is a news story, an injustice with individuals or groups of individuals, there's very often an Amnesty International spokesperson presence in some way.

But in terms of where the money, how you use the resource that you have at your disposal there, what does that typically look like for you? Or is typical a difficult thing to talk about given the number of countries and the number of different ways in

which you do work? The fundamentals of Amnesty International are doing research into human rights.

So we've got researchers that cover the globe and particularly priority countries where there's conflicts and the gravest human rights abuses, such as Sudan, DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, and so on.

Then we have researchers, sometimes based in those countries doing work.

And then we also have legal and policy experts who are experts in international humanitarian law and human rights law, who can analyze situations so that we can comment on situations.

And that's why sometimes it takes us a bit longer than some other organizations to comment on particular situations because we like to get our facts correct and we like to be evidence-based.

And I guess what this brings me to now is then your role as CFO.

Something that I think here on CFO Playbook and elsewhere we've observed is the shrinking distance between the kind of front end and back end.

So more and more I hear that CFOs are increasing in private sector, increasingly connected to customers, increasingly involved in fundraising.

And so given your role in Amnesty International, spoken about, the income model.

And then given the nature of the work that Amnesty does that you've just described, how easy is it for you to be close to that? How do you describe how much you are able to be involved in both that input and that output side?

Amnesty International compared to other fundraising charities of workforce such as British Red Cross or WWF, Worldwide Fund for Nature, then less involved because the International Secretariat receives about more than 80% of its income from sections.