UCL Recommendation Letter Example: Charity fundraiser to philanthropy policy (Score 92)

To the Admissions Committee MSc Technology and Public Policy University College London I supervised the applicant's undergraduate capstone project over approximately nine months, from initial scoping through final submission and oral defence. That sustained contact gave me a reasonably clear picture of how they think, how they respond to criticism, and where they are still developing. I am writing to support their application to UCL's MSc in Technology and Public Policy with that direct evidence in mind. The capstone focused on the policy dimensions of philanthropic giving — specifically, whether voluntary fundraising campaigns can be designed to shift donor behaviour toward causes with weaker public visibility. The applicant came to the project with genuine sector experience, having worked in charity fundraising before returning to study. My initial concern was that this background might lead them to treat practitioner intuition as a substitute for analytical rigour. That concern did not persist beyond the first month. The first moment that shifted my assessment came during a methods review session in the autumn. The applicant had drafted a comparative analysis of two fundraising campaign models, drawing on publicly available charity commission data and a small set of semi-structured interviews. I pushed back on the causal language they were using — the draft implied that campaign design drove donor retention in a way the data could not actually support. Rather than defending the framing, they paused, asked a clarifying question about the distinction between association and mechanism, and came back the following week with a revised section that was more careful and, frankly, more interesting. The revision did not just soften the claims; it reframed the question around observable behavioural proxies, which opened up a more tractable line of argument. That kind of methodological self-correction is not common at undergraduate level. The second moment worth noting came later, during the policy memo stage of the project. The applicant was asked to translate their analytical findings into a short memo addressed to a hypothetical foundation board — an exercise designed to test whether they could move between registers without losing precision. The first draft was competent but read like a condensed version of the academic chapter: dense, hedged, and not well-suited to a decision-making audience. I gave direct feedback on this. The revised memo was noticeably better — it led with a clear recommendation, used the evidence selectively rather than exhaustively, and acknowledged implementation constraints that the original had ignored. The improvement was not cosmetic. It reflected a genuine shift in how they were thinking about the purpose of policy writing, which is a skill I find harder to teach than methods. I should be honest about one area where the applicant's preparation is still uneven. Their quantitative methods work across the degree has been solid but not especially deep. The capstone relied primarily on qualitative and documentary analysis, and while they engaged competently with the quantitative material they encountered, they have not yet had sustained exposure to the kind of data infrastructure or computational policy analysis that increasingly features in technology-adjacent policy programmes. This is not a disqualifying gap — it is a normal one for a student coming from a nonprofit management background — but it is worth naming. I would expect them to need to invest effort in that dimension of the MSc curriculum. What I can say with confidence is that the applicant has the intellectual habits that make graduate study productive: they revise in response to argument rather than just to instruction, they are willing to narrow a question when the evidence demands it, and they bring genuine domain knowledge that they have learned to hold critically rather than defensively. The connection between philanthropic funding mechanisms and public policy is not a peripheral concern — it sits at the intersection of civil society, government, and increasingly, platform-mediated giving. A programme focused on technology and public policy is a logical and well-reasoned next step for someone who has already begun to think analytically about that space. I recommend the applicant for admission and am happy to discuss any aspect of their academic work directly. Yours sincerely,