Here are more photos from Prince William, Prince Harry and Duchess Kate’s appearance in London on Monday, where they launched Heads Together, the umbrella organization for various charities and mental health campaigns in the UK. Heads Together is setting a fundraising goals, but it’s unknown if Harry and the Cambridges will actually do some heavy lifting with organizing fundraisers and shaking the dirty peasant hands of the nouveau riche potential donors. Which brings me to this fascinating story by Tom Sykes at the Daily Beast – Sykes spoke to some charity and fundraising professionals who are not all that pleased at the idea of Will, Harry and Kate teaming up for one big umbrella organization. Some highlights:

Kate is the one pushing for a focus on mental health: Sources say that it is Kate, however, who has led the way in encouraging the royal focus on mental health, and she has made a point of championing this unfashionable cause throughout her royal career. Kate has taken on very few patronages, but several of those—Place2be, Action on Addiction and, now, Heads Together—are focused on this area.

The money: Heads Together, an umbrella organization bringing together eight of the country’s leading mental health charities, is now set to reap enormous rewards from its association with the young Royals. The coming together of Harry, Kate and William as a kind of triple-threat, fundraising A-bomb for just one, big cause is a huge departure from the way the Royals have traditionally done their philanthropic business.

But there are concerns: The Heads Together event will have sent shivers down the spine of seasoned professionals in the fundraising world who will be wondering how they will be able to attract royal attention to their smaller causes, which don’t make the cut for the newest Royal Foundation. There is little doubt that, as a unit, the young royals can bring tremendous attention to their favored causes, but the united front is actually a significant worry for countless small British charities that have long been highly dependent on the Royals for public profile in the UK. The general idea was that you got one royal per charity, not three.

The slimmed down monarchy: The core of the problem is to be found in Prince Charles’s decision that a ‘slimmed down’ monarchy—him and his kids, basically—is the best way to maintain support for the institution. It seems reasonable to conclude that Edward, Andrew, Eugenie et al won’t be spending their lives cutting ribbons after they have been cut out of the perks of royal life. Charles’s pared-down monarchy means a smaller group of working royals and, inevitably, a smaller number of organizations supported.

Kate is never going to be Prince Philip: Kate may not be as lazy as is sometimes portrayed by the British media, but equally she has no intention of emulating another royal spouse, Prince Philip, who has already shed many of his most time-consuming patronages but is still patron of more than half of the 1,300 organizations of which he and the Queen are the figureheads. It is an astonishing number, but when the monarch and her husband die, there will be no repeat of the scene following the death of the Queen Mother when the Royal Family was reported to have laid out index cards with each patronage written on it, and divvied them up.

Royal leverage: Officially, royals talk about using Harry, Kate and Will as a unit to create more “leverage”, but that’s not the way everyone sees it. “It’s actually almost impossible to raise any significant sum of money in England without a royal being involved, even a minor one,” one experienced fundraiser tells the Daily Beast. “The fact is that there are effectively not going to be any minor royals in the future. William, Harry and Kate all coming together to promote this one ‘foundation’ may be great for efficiencies, but there is a major concern about where it leaves the rest of us.”

[From The Daily Beast]

What always bugs me about William and Kate (and to a lesser degree, Harry) is that it’s like they don’t realize how easy it would be for them to simply take up the “Fundraising Royal” mantle. They wouldn’t have to pretend to be “keen” about this issue or that issue. Just be a prince or a princess, wear some great jewelry and put on nice clothes, and just go to fundraisers three nights a week. Shake hands with people, make a short speech, and BAM, you’ve raised awareness for an important cause, plus people gave money to an important cause just because a royal was in attendance. Why don’t they get that? Why all of this wringing of hands about “privacy” and such? Just go out and use your title to raise money, for the love of God.

Beyond that, I feel strongly that the real reason why the Cambridges and Harry are uniting for Heads Together is because Will and Kate NEED Harry. Harry is the best-reviewed royal these days and Will and Kate are the worst-reviewed. Here’s their speech:

Photos courtesy of WENN, Fame/Flynet.