Last week saw the third annual ‘raising funds from the rich’ conference, hosted by the Charities Aid Foundation and Action Planning. With an impressive line-up of speakers including Alec Reed, founder of Reed Recruitment, Martha Lane Fox, founder of Last-Minute.com and hedge-fund executive Stanley Fink, the 1,800 delegates present at the event should have been presented with ample food for thought over the course of the day. However the question and answer session which followed the key note speech by Sir Richard Branson was far from inspiring, as delegate after delegate queued to ask the man himself for a donation. Here Beth Breeze from the Centre for Charitable Giving and one of the speaker’s at the event, gives her very apt review of the conference: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/philanthropy/2009/10/17/when-is-it-a-bad-idea-to-ask-a-billionaire-for-a-donation/