For Heritage Memory and Survival, Though Pandemic Times! Philanthropy of Leading Trust and Foundation in Italy and UK

Cultural not-for-profit organizations can be split into operating and grant-making foundations. Both of them support restoration, recovery, and resilience of culture and creativity. For this goal, they can mix the operating and the grant-making roles. Big organizations like National Trust (NT) in UK and FAI (Fondo Ambiente Italiano) in Italy collect memory of tangible and intangible heritages, which are restored, renovated, and given back to communities after disruptive events, from death of the founder to pandemic emergency. Their fundraising gets on into grant-making to heritages, whose management is fully operating thanks to NT and FAI managers. Their philanthropy, their leading roles, and their reputation are founded on virtuous underlying vision, strategy, or set of principles, grassroots approach, dedication, and professionalism. This is empowered by the communication, traditional, and online, where the former contributes to the capillary dissemination and gathering of information. The aim of this paper is to compare performances of NT and FAI. These performances concern the range of revenues and costs of these big and leading organizations, together with the growth of visitors and members. The methodology includes regression analysis of 2014–2019 NT and FAI data, together with a qualitative analysis of strategies during pandemic times. The magnitude of the philanthropy of these foundations will be highlighted with a multiple regression for total revenues being function of operating and fundraising costs.