Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) play an increasingly important role in the world and receive a growing amount of outsourced development work. Funding enables them to do the work necessary to provide aid. NGO work is influenced by the dependence on their donors and many NGOs increasingly take donations from private donors as a way to try to mitigate donor dependence and maintain neutrality in their work. However there is little research analysing this shift and the potential positive and negative effects. This study looks at dependence and efficiency in an NGO - private donor relationship. The objective is to contribute to the discussion about NGO dependency on donors by evaluating the positive and negative impacts of primarily private donorship on NGOs’ work efficiency. Little research has been done on the private donor relationship and this study is contributing to filling that gap. The study is a qualitative case study, with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) due to their private donor base’s recent increase. The data were obtained through interviews with MSF Sweden staff, other MSF primary source documents and secondary sources written by scholars on the topic of NGO dependency on their donors. The results of this study concluded that MSF works more efficiently with a primarily private donor base, due primarily to their increase in independence and control of their own operations. Since the shift from EU-funding, MSF can spend fewer resources on reporting and more on allocating the money to the field. A primarily private donor base has a positive impact on MSF and it is safe to say that other NGOs will likely follow suit. Further research should look into other NGOs to see whether a primarily private donor base benefits them too or if MSF is a one case exception.

Between 1847 and 1903, spanning the first three episcopates of the newly-created Diocese of Manchester, 228 churches were built, or significantly extended, in the largest by far of its five deaneries, the Deanery of Manchester. Exploration of diocesan, Mancunian, and parochial archival and other sources revealed that sixty-one of those 228 building-projects – over a quarter – had each been funded by a single donor or single family. The fifty 'singular' donors (eight financing more than one project) represented a wide swathe of the middle and upper echelons of society, comprising six MPs; thirty-one industrialists, including twenty-two (predominantly textile-) mill-owners, three engineers, and two colliery- and canal-owners; and thirteen non-industrialists, including five bankers, two landed gentry and three clerics. The scale of this aspect of industrial city philanthropy, and its lack of study are striking. Singular funding by donors of specific buildings provides a fresh angle from which to approach the reasons for philanthropy at an individual level. In each case, what role did self-interest play; what role such impulses as Established-Church-allegiance, evangelism, paternalism, territorialism, and dynasticism? Could a master driving-force, composed of a combination of some or all of those and other possible impulses, have been a donor's desire for worth: self-worth; worth in the eyes of contemporary society; and worth for remembrance in posterity? Were donors essentially creating churches in their own image? The Introduction covers identification of the churches and the ecclesiastical, industrial and historical context of their building and of nineteenth-century Mancunian philanthropy. Chapter One, exploring the donors' biographies, includes, as potential drivers in church-creation, timing of public preferment – providing scant support for its previously identified role in other charitable giving – and alternative donor-self-image-related impulses. Chapter Two considers, as a measure of donor-church-identity, possible linkage of donor to church through dedication, proximity, iconography, memorials, armorials, dedicated space, and burial arrangements. Chapter Three uses choice of architect, their north-western oeuvre, and the balance of architects' and donors' roles, to further assess reflection of donor-self-image in the church. Finally, Chapter Four scrutinises each donor-church-architect nexus for signs of churchmanship; a quality – where present in strength and definable as donor-led – considered strongly indicative of donor-self-image. Donor, church, architect, and churchmanship – key components of the donated church and to assessing in each their interconnections – disclose great diversity. Donor-self-image was indeed present, in its various aspects, in most if not all the churches. Its presence ranged from almost negligible or inconclusive to what amounts to its passionate expression. Archive Note: Research for this project resulted in far more material of relevance to its substance than could be included in the text. The University of Manchester has kindly consented to hold this material, comprising textual and photographic data, as an archive freely accessible on request.