Anne Marie Huby – Keynote Speaker

Anne-Marie is Managing Director of Justgiving, an internet based tool which enables individuals to raise funds for the causes they care about.

Bringing technology within reach of even the smallest charities, the site has helped raise over £400m for good causes. The idea has even started to change the way the sector operates, with far less reliance on old methods like direct mail.

Anne-Marie was previously Executive Director of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) UK. MSF UK was financially successful and independent within 5 years. To this day it enjoys a loyal following of dedicated supporters, many of them from the medical community, who see donating to MSF as a substitute for direct humanitarian work. In 1999, Medecins Sans Frontieres received the Nobel Peace prize.

This is when she met Zarine Kharas, who came to MSF to present her fledgling idea for Justgiving. Immediately bowled over by the power of the idea, Anne-Marie decided to leave MSF, and partner with Zarine to build and develop Justgiving. Though a for-profit company, Justgiving has an unusual culture. It has a flat structure, no fixed rules, and frontline teams take all operational decisions. Both employees and investors (individuals rather than institutions) are driven by the belief that a company does not exist to make money, but rather to serve all its stakeholders (individual users, member charities, staff and investors) in a balanced way.