With small amounts of money, if you’re very strategic, you can achieve quite a lot

David Graham is the kind of man charity folk love – rich, generous and motivated.

The small-scale philanthropist may be no Tom Hunter but he has spent the last 16 years travelling the world helping out charities and trying to work out how to make a big impact with small activities and grants.

At last year’s Edinburgh festival, he saw the National Theatre of Scotland’s play Adam, about a young transgender man who moved from Egypt to Scotland, and his latest inspiration was born.

David is the man behind the brand-new Social Impact Theatre (SIT-UP) Award at this year’s Edinburgh Festival. Through it, he hopes to inspire theatre production companies – a quarter of whom are tackling social issues at this year’s Fringe – to take action beyond their production and create real change in society.

“It all started in 2002 when my son broke his neck and became paralysed,” he says over what turned out to be an ambitious attempt at a quiet coffee on the Royal Mile just before the start of the festival.

“I thought life’s too short to sit in the office. So, out of the blue I found myself doing an MA in photo journalism.”

The following six years saw David working around the world taking stunning photos of the work of charities like the Vine Trust, Bhopal Medical Appeal, Children on the Edge and International Development Enterprises (IDE).

It was an exciting time, but eventually in 2012, David had to stop when the travelling took its toll on his own health, but he also admits to becoming a little jaded.

He’d set up the charity Changing Ideas to support photography for social impact but had found it wasn’t enough just to create good photographs if organisations he was working with didn’t know what to do with them.

“IDE had someone in its London office who was excellent at knowing how to use good imagery,” he explains. “So, when it was World Hunger Day, they used the photos. They did loads of presentations for the EU and other funders and used them really successfully there too. I felt with them the photos were used well and definitely helped with their work.

“Other organisations didn’t use the photography very well, and that was disheartening.”

It is this same frustration with the production of art for art’s sake only that is now fueling the SIT-UP award.

Last year, David was very moved by the play Adam, which told the real life story of how Adam became a refugee from his own country after deciding to live as a different gender to the one he was born as. The play pushed David’s perceptions of transgender people, enabling him to empathise with Adam in a way he hadn’t thought possible before.

The problem was that although the play was powerful, David felt its momentum ended abruptly when the curtain went down.

“Last year, I went to Adam and I thought – why is that you go to these plays about social issues and they don’t say to the audience do you want to have a discussion, do you want to give money? Why don’t they engage with a leaflet of things you can do.”

While lamenting this fact with a friend from the Edinburgh Fringe, David came up with the idea of the SIT-UP Award. So, he is donating a £5,000 prize to a play in this year’s festival, which, like Adam, takes a social issue and really challenges its audience to think differently about it.

The prize money will be used to ensure the impact of the production grows either by funding further performances or perhaps creating educational materials to spread the word.

“As we developed the SIT-UP Award this year, I realised that you’ve got the audience in the middle and you’ve got the production companies and you’ve got the venues and the charities and they’re not all linking up very effectively,” he explains.

But while the National Theatre of Scotland may not be one of them, David’s research of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe productions also uncovered a few trailblazers, who are already taking their art a step further.

“Our big dream is that any production company putting on a play about an issue puts the issue at the centre,” explains David. “They think right from the start about what can they do – some of the things are very small such as fundraising or a social action pledge.”

So, David decided to also give £1,000 as a social engagement award for just such a company. He’s got a shortlist of about 15, including companies that worked with charities or people with lived experience to devise their story, and those encouraging audiences to make a social action pledge or talk about their own personal experiences of the issue.

All of this chimes in with David’s desire to ensure his philanthropy makes a real difference. Earlier this year he completed a course with The Philanthropy Workshop, an international body that supports potential donors to work out how to make the most of what they do.

“I finished that in May. The whole purpose for me was to start to try and think about how I can give the little bit of money I’m going to give more effectively,” he explains.

“I realize that with small amounts of money, if you’re very strategic, you can actually achieve quite a lot.”

However, just as social issues present an opportunity for theatre production companies to tell a powerful story, David ends by highlighting how the theatre also presents an opportunity for charities.

He believes charities could take advantage of the Edinburgh Festival more.

Remembering his own experience of Adam, he says: “You’ve got an audience for an hour and a half who are quite influenceable – they’re not half watching while fiddling with their phones. That audience can have their opinions changed.”