The Hidden Cost of Stolen Ideas: Why Intellectual Property Matters in the Charity Sector
Most of us have been there; a colleague, a boss, a tutor... someone takes credit for an idea we had. It's so common that the anecdotal evidence of people in junior and mid-level positions saying they feel grateful to a boss for publicly giving them credit for their own ideas is far too high.
If it's happened to you too often, you've probably started being a bit careful about how and when you share your ideas. You hold back in brainstorming meetings, you keep an idea to yourself until you've formed it properly, you consider more carefully how and when you share. This self-protective instinct is entirely understandable, but it comes at a cost. When talented people hold back their best thinking, everyone loses. Innovation slows, collaboration suffers, and the culture of creativity that organisations desperately need begins to wither.
When Organisations Lose Their Ideas
But what about when it happens to a company, an organisation, or a charity? The corporate world cottoned on to the importance of intellectual property a long time ago. We hardly even notice the tiny TM next to brand names anymore. Corporate espionage is a huge game and privacy is taken seriously. Patents are fiercely protected. Non-disclosure agreements are standard practice before anyone even enters a preliminary meeting. Legal teams are on standby. The business world understands that ideas have value, and that value needs protection.
Not so much in the third sector.
Small charities and arts organisations often rely on trusts and foundations to fund their ideas and projects. The time it takes to get an idea off the ground can be long and arduous. You might spend months researching community need, developing relationships with beneficiaries, consulting with experts, and crafting an innovative approach to a persistent problem. This work represents genuine intellectual labour, creativity, and often personal investment that goes far beyond contracted hours.
In that time, you might be expected to develop partnerships. If you're a small charity, a partnership may seem the best way of making sure things happen. You'll get better reach, better funding, better publicity. So you meet with people, with companies, with organisations. You share your ideas, your vision, your outcomes. You write down your pitch. And in the spirit of collaboration that defines the charity sector, you do this openly, generously, and often without any formal protection in place, trusting that everyone in the room knows the project is yours.
The Funding Application: A Blueprint for Your Project
Then you write your funding bid. You have to describe your project in detail. You discuss methodology, you pin down how you will evaluate, you show how you've worked out your costs by providing two quotes for every pound you've included in your budget. You show what success looks like, you prove the research you've done that shows the need for your project. You explain your Theory of Change, outline your stakeholder engagement strategy, and demonstrate your understanding of the policy landscape.
In short, you provide a handbook for your project. Everything someone would need to replicate it: clear links to partners, tested methods, innovative ideas, measurable outcomes, tangible outputs. And you hand it over without a second thought about the ownership of that idea. Because you're focused on securing funding to help the people you serve. Because the application process demands transparency. Because trust and openness are supposed to be the currency of the charitable sector.
Until your funding bid is turned down and six months, a year, two years later, something very and disconcertingly similar is being run or created. It's your vision. It's your planned outcome. It might even be your location, your target beneficiaries, your innovative methodology. The only thing that's different is who's getting the credit and the funding to deliver it.
The Sector-Wide Silence on Intellectual Property
How many funding bodies think about intellectual property? How many of them reference it in their submission guidelines? How many are explicit about it with their employees who read hundreds of applications containing innovative ideas? How many charities or arts organisations discuss it with the numerous partners and potential partners they're meeting with? You don't usually have an agreement in place with someone you're having an opening meeting with. How many freelancers and consultants write intellectual property clauses into their contracts?
These are basic things we could be doing in the sector. Because intellectual property is a little more important than simple etiquette. It's about fairness, sustainability, and the very future of innovation in charitable work.
The Real Cost to Charities
The impact this neglect has can be huge. In extreme cases, it could shut down a smaller organisation, because the funding streams or possibility of sustainable income disappear along with the project. When a small charity loses a signature programme to a larger organisation with more resources and better connections, they don't just lose one funding opportunity; they lose a unique selling point.
Even without such an extreme outcome, the credit for good ideas is given elsewhere, the impact on staff morale is tangible, and the reputational hit you take is not insignificant. Those who knew about your project think you weren't big enough, robust enough, or strong enough to deliver on it yourself. Those who didn't know it was your idea will never credit you with having it. Future funders may wonder why they should back you when a more established organisation is already delivering similar work. The opportunity cost is high.
For charities operating on tight margins, the loss of a major project idea can mean redundancies, service cuts, or even closure. It can mean that vulnerable people who would have been served by your innovative approach are instead served by a watered-down version delivered by an organisation that didn't truly understand the community need. The ultimate losers aren't just the charities; they're the beneficiaries who miss out on programmes designed specifically with their needs in mind.
The Personal Toll: Confidence and Career Progression
Perhaps even more insidious is the impact on individuals working in the sector. When your ideas are repeatedly taken without credit, something inside you begins to change. The enthusiasm that once made you stay late perfecting a project proposal starts to dim. The creativity that made you see connections others missed becomes guarded, careful, self-protective.
Junior and mid-level charity professionals often enter the sector burning with passion and brimming with ideas. They're committed to making a difference, willing to work for lower salaries than the private sector offers, and eager to contribute innovative thinking to persistent social problems. When their ideas are appropriated by senior colleagues or stolen by partner organisations, that passion becomes complicated by cynicism.
The confidence that comes from having your ideas recognised and your contributions valued is fundamental to professional development. I worked for an organisation in my early career that managed to build an entire role for me out of my ideas. I felt supported, and unstoppable. The impact of that role on me and on the people my projects supported in that time is wide-reaching. When that recognition is withheld or misdirected, career progression stalls. You don't get invited to present at conferences about "your" project because everyone thinks it belonged to someone else. You struggle to talk about your innovation at job interviews for more senior positions because there's no evidence trail showing that the successful initiative came from your thinking. Your CV remains stubbornly bare of the achievements that should be there.
Imposter syndrome, aconcept that already plagues many in the helping professions, is compounded tenfold when you can't legitimately claim ownership of your own ideas. You begin to question whether your thinking was really that original after all. Maybe that senior colleague did think of it independently. Maybe that larger charity had been planning something similar anyway. It’s incredibly easy to gaslight yourself into insignificance.
For women, people of colour, and others from underrepresented groups in charity leadership, this dynamic is often even more pronounced. Research shows that women's ideas are more likely to be attributed to men in meetings, and that contributions from minority staff members are more frequently overlooked. When this happens repeatedly, talented people leave the sector entirely, taking their innovative thinking to fields where their intellectual contributions will be recognised and rewarded.
When Innovation Goes Underground
There's another, more subtle cost: the innovation that never happens because people have learned to keep their best ideas to themselves. When you've been burned once or twice, you become strategic about what you share and with whom. That brilliant idea you had for addressing food poverty in a new way? You'll sit on it until you're absolutely certain you can execute it without interference. That innovative partnership model? You'll keep it vague in meetings until the contracts are signed.
This protective instinct creates a poverty of ideas at exactly the moment when the charity sector needs innovation most. With funding increasingly competitive and social problems growing more complex, we desperately need the free flow of creative thinking. We need people to build on each other's ideas, to spark new connections in collaborative spaces, to take risks with untested approaches. But that can't happen in an environment where sharing your thinking means risking having it stolen.
What Funding Bodies Can and Should Do
Funding bodies hold enormous power to change this dynamic, and they have both an ethical obligation and a practical interest in doing so. After all, they benefit most when charities are innovating effectively and when the best ideas are coming from organisations that truly understand community needs.
Implement Clear Intellectual Property Policies
Funding bodies should develop and publicise explicit policies about intellectual property in applications. These policies should clearly state that ideas submitted in applications remain the property of the applicant, whether or not funding is awarded. They should outline what happens to application materials after decisions are made—how long they're retained, who has access to them, and how they're ultimately disposed of.
Train Staff and Panel Members
Grant assessors, trustees, and panel members should receive training on intellectual property ethics. They should understand that reading an application creates an obligation not to share its contents or use its ideas elsewhere. This training should cover unconscious bias and how ideas from smaller organisations or less established applicants might be unconsciously shared with or attributed to larger, more visible organisations in their networks.
Create Information Barriers
Some funding bodies could consider creating ethical walls between different programs or teams, particularly when there might be conflicts of interest. For instance, if a funding body also delivers its own programmes, there should be strict separation between the team reading applications and the team designing services.
Offer Feedback with Care
When applications are unsuccessful, feedback should focus on the organisation's capacity, the fit with funding priorities, or the strength of the proposal, not provide a roadmap for how to improve the idea for someone else to implement. Phrases like "this would work better with a larger partner" can inadvertently encourage idea appropriation.
Include IP Clauses in Partnership Requirements
When funding bodies require partnerships as a condition of funding, they should provide template agreements that include intellectual property protections. This removes the awkwardness of smaller charities having to raise IP concerns with potential partners and normalises the conversation.
Consider Blind Review Processes
For initial application stages, some funding bodies might consider anonymising applications where possible, so that decisions are based on the quality of ideas rather than organisational reputation. This could help protect smaller organisations and ensure their innovations are evaluated fairly.
What Charities and Individuals Can Do
While systemic change is essential, there are steps that organisations and individuals can take to protect themselves now.
Document Everything
Keep dated records of when ideas were developed, who was involved, what you pitched to whom and when, and what stages the thinking went through. Email yourself notes. Keep meeting minutes. Save draft proposals with timestamps. This creates an evidence trail if you ever need to demonstrate that an idea originated with you.
Consider Using Formal Agreements
Use non-disclosure agreements when appropriate. Yes, it might feel awkward in the collaborative atmosphere of the charity sector, but a simple NDA before detailed discussions with potential partners protects everyone. It shows professionalism, not suspicion.
Be Strategic About what You Share and When
You can discuss the problem you're trying to solve and the need you've identified without providing a complete methodology until there's a formal agreement in place.
Discuss IP as a Governing Body
Include intellectual property clauses in all consultant and staff contracts. As an organisation the trustees should discuss IP and the organisation’s approach to it. Do the ideas generated by staff belong to the organisation or to the individual? How will you attribute credit? What about with freelancers? If you hire someone to help you solve a problem, does the idea belong to you or to them? What about ideas generated in a brainstorm that aren’t used immediately? These are not questions that should be left until a staff member or freelancer asks about it, but should already be something you have a policy on, and make sure you communicate it to new hires.
Build Your Public Profile
Write blog posts, speak at events, publish think pieces. Be public with your ideas and what you want to be known for, even when your ideas are not always fully formed. This creates a public record of your thinking that's harder to claim as someone else's.
Changing the Culture
Ultimately, addressing intellectual property in the charity sector requires a cultural shift. We need to move from a naive assumption that everyone in the sector is acting in good faith to a more mature recognition that even well-meaning people can unconsciously appropriate ideas, and that systemic protections benefit everyone.
This doesn't mean becoming as litigious as the corporate world or abandoning the collaborative spirit that makes the charity sector special. It means treating ideas with the respect they deserve. It means recognising that innovation has value, and that the people and organisations who create that value deserve credit, compensation, and career advancement.
It means building a sector where talented people don't learn to hide their best thinking, where small organisations can compete fairly with larger ones, and where the best ideas reach the people who need them most, delivered by the people who understood the need first.
The charity sector exists to create positive change in the world. We can't do that effectively if we're not willing to protect and nurture the innovations that make change possible. Intellectual property protection isn't a barrier to collaboration; it's the foundation that makes genuine, equitable collaboration possible.