Careers in our field

Photo: Damir Kopezhanov on Unsplash

This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

Table of contents

1. London and, er… everywhere else

A very high proportion of all trust fundraisers work in London. In other areas, you may need a car and patience, or luck, to make the best career in our field.

It will be very interesting to see how things change now it will be clear in many charities that trust fundraisers can work effectively from home, rather than in the office. It’s probably too early to know, just yet.

2. Career paths in the sector

a. How you start out

I’m assuming you’re not at this level, or you shouldn’t be reading this site! However, it’s useful to cover starting points, for context.

It’s not unusual to start out either in an entry level job in a trusts team or to start as a generalist trust fundraiser:

Entry level jobs, for example doing applications up to £10k, are a more gentle way in. At a charity with several services and a more sophisticated operation, they can be a steep learning curve for more than six months. They can, however, get quite repetitive and not all charities are clever or flexible enough to keep trying to move people forwards.
Generalist trust fundraising jobs are a big challenge as a first fundraising job. There’s so much to know and get right. If this is how you started, you might be feeling a little battered! If you would like some confidence-building support, a couple of ideas: (1) The Chartered Institute of Fundraising can provide mentors in some regions (as of early 2021, London and the South West). (2) Bill Bruty’s Fundraising Training programme provides an excellent grounding. It’s more expensive, so you’ll need to pitch it internally as an investment in the function.

b. Routes on from a first job

There are quite a few very different options hidden behind those generic job titles on CharityJob and sent to you by agencies:

i. Sticking with smaller trusts-type jobs

This might be for grants up to £5k or (a bit more challengingly) grants up to £10k. Some people will enjoy the level of predictability and control these types of roles involve. If you miss your target, you’re usually not going to do so by much. There are tons of different numerical analyses you can do, to ensure you’re following exactly the right strategy. Sometimes people move sideways rather than up after a first similar job, to develop their confidence.

Unless you see yourself as an administrator, though, some people will find these become a grind at some point. The things to pick up can seem a little bewildering at first, but there’s often limited change once you’re up to speed and these jobs don’t let people develop particularly diverse skill sets.

The most important skills for this role (assuming you have the wherewithal for trust fundraising) are probably: thoroughness; emotional self-control to handle the repetition; efficiency; ability to take pride in moving people. I’d want to go to a charity where such roles are fundraising for several different services, as there’s more variety.

It’s worth checking the support available to you. If your manager is the Senior Trust Fundraiser, they may know a lot but they might well less experienced as a manager. A manager of a wider team will probably be a very experienced manager, but might not have done enough trust fundraising to fully understand your role.

ii. Larger trusts-type jobs

Senior Trusts Officer-type jobs involve a wider range of skills, such as: understanding of project management and working in cross-team partnerships where people may not share your agenda. It’s worth asking about (i) numbers of new projects (more means more challenges) and (ii) how many different services staff you got projects out of last year (less staff means there are more challenges in working cross-team).

However, if you’re good, confident and enjoy a challenge, Senior Trust Fundraiser jobs can be extremely interesting. You really get into the mechanics of how you help people. The work is quite varied. You can help make important new work happen.

These jobs aren’t just more demanding in terms of skills, though, they can also be more stressful.

It’s harder to set an accurate target and more scope for variation, meaning you may find yourself part way through the year worrying where the cash will come from.
The smaller number of key opportunities mean that there is more riding on key moments
You may be working on newer projects with more senior people and/or people working to their own agendas. However interesting that is, it can easily be more stressful as well.
It’s worth asking how long the management chains are that separate you from the Services colleagues you’re working with and how many new projects you’re doing – these are the hardest scenarios. In the more difficult role, you can end up with people promising you’ll have income opportunities but then too many of them don’t come through.
I’d also ask how many big funders are finishing their grants this year. (There’s often an expectation you should replace that money, possibly with no clear idea of how.)

Unless you get lucky, you may well not get a lot of skilled support from your manager. I’ve come across Heads of, say, who are skilled trust fundraisers. However, in practice quite a lot of senior trust fundraisers are reporting to someone who’s come up through corporate fundraising, or some other setting where they haven’t had to deal with the internal realities we have to handle in Trusts. The chances are that the fundraising hierarchy further above you won’t know that much about your job and in some cases it’s been very clear that they wished it involved something different from what it actually does. As a result, self-reliance (when necessary) and good people skills and political antennae will be a big help.

There’s nothing to stop you looking up your future manager on linkedIn to try and gauge how much skilled support they might be able to offer you. Their eventual successor might have more or less to offer, but hopefully by then you will be well settled in.

iii. Generalist trust fundraisers

You need a good range of skills for such roles and an even better ability to balance time spend on different sizes and degrees of depth of application. My current Head of Fundraising once remarked to me that most fundraisers have a natural speed of work, whether that’s slow and careful, pulling on lots of sources and co-workers, or fast and more superficial. As a generalist trust fundraiser – balancing small and large trust opportunities – you’ll be more stretched because the needs of the trusts are much more diverse in this regard than with more specialist jobs.

It’s not unusual for generalist trust fundraisers to get worse support from their managers, partly because they are in smaller teams and their managers just don’t have the aptitude. It can feel more isolated than in a team. (That said, even when there are a couple of trust fundraisers they can still be quite isolated from each other.)

Generalist trust fundraising roles tend to be at smaller charities than the specialists. That can mean less variety of work. However, it does mean that you probably know everyone and the shorter management chains can often (not always) mean less politics and more of a “one team” culture.

iv. Major donor-type jobs

I cannot stress enough what a small proportion of the sector major donor-type roles are, but they do seem to exist. MD-type trusts roles seem to occur more in academe. I remember reading about one (successful) trust fundraiser who never approached a trust without having had a good engagement with the funder, often with a peer-to-peer element. I once interviewed for a similar post at NSPCC.

I’ve only dabbled in this and am not the best person to speak. However: my impression is the work can be creative and it can be satisfying to be dealing with big grants, but it can also be challenging, because you’re the funder’s representative, in effect, within the charity. That’s enough of an issue if you’re a trust fundraiser when Services suddenly change their minds about your grant in some way. However, it’s even more the case with major donors, because some major donors are by nature interventionists who are used to having their views taken seriously (whereas Services would often rather that they just coughed up the money and waited quietly for a report.)

v. Bid-writers for large applications

There’s a quite admin-y job in this field, that’s entry level or a bit more sophisticated, doing Pre-Qualification Questionnaires and pulling together basic documents.

However, the following is about the “proper” bid writing role focussed on six- and seven-figure bids. This might involve some mixture of lottery grant writing, tender writing and statutory grants.

I wouldn’t want to take this kind of role on unless I’d been a Senior Trust Officer for a few years at bare minimum, or come in as a Services Manager who had written various tenders (unless you’re just doing Pre-Qualification Questionnaires and other generic materials). The reason is that you need a LOT of skills to do this work well.

They’re great jobs for someone who likes to get deeply absorbed in something, though. If you want to be where the action is in terms of big bids, big change and making tough things happen, it can be terrific fun.

The work needs the skills of a Senior Trusts officer, but in addition you need:

A lot of understanding of service models. Otherwise, Services will see themselves as having to spoon feed you and can wonder why they aren’t doing all the work themselves. As my editor Rbyn McAllister reminded me, there’s also a lot of service design that happens in these roles, especially when you’re writing statutory contract tenders. Commissioners often have requirements that mean your charity’s ‘off the shelf’ service model needs radical rethinking/reshaping. It’s a significant advantage to have worked in the main field of work that you’re writing about, yourself. That’s because the applications involve sophisticated descriptions of the service and excellent writing involves making as many good points in answer to each question as you can possibly fit in each box.

Skills at sustaining clear arguments (that are still dense with points) over tens of pages. You need to be able to hold a very detailed project model in your head, see how changes in one area impact all over and to lay it out clearly. You need the coordination skills of a project manager, as the chances are the work will be split between different staff at different levels and the critical path to get everything done on time will be hard to see but your responsibility to deliver. (On some huge bids, I’ve not been able to get on with my own work until the afternoon, because there was so much too coordinate.)
Be prepared to work hard and handle stress. It’s very time sensitive and time focussed work. Being a tender writer involves huge moments and can sometimes become incredibly hard work, with long evenings trying to work as fast as you possibly can.
You also need excellent judgement and self-confidence. I was in a bid writing team of five where some members of the team only had a couple of wins a year. You need to go “all in” on small numbers of projects.

Posts in capital appeals

Capital appeals are a thing in themselves, so you’ll need to be up to speed about those to evaluate this job opportunity. Marion Alford’s book Charity Appeals is dated but very good.

My own experience of capital appeals is that they’re hit-and-miss. There are normally few paths to success, so things might or might not work. A common experience is of spiralling costs, for example due to everything takes longer than expected (building inflation) or unexpected costs related to complications in refurbishments.

On the other hand, I’ve certainly found it an extremely rewarding feeling to be able to walk past a building and say to myself “That’s there because of my work.” You can still be doing that 10 years later.

Key questions you need to hear the answer to are:

“Will I be approaching trusts that are part of the normal group that the charity is approaching?” Yes, there are trusts that will only fund you for capital works. However, there isn’t a massive stack of them and some Heads of FR believe that one just needs to wave a capital appeal in front of trusts and all their money will get hoovered up.

“Who did the fundraising evaluation and how far does it go?” Evaluating the income that’s out there is a skilled task and if it’s not done well by someone who knows what they’re doing, it’s easy to get wrong.

vii. Trusts team manager

As there are a lot less managers than front line trust fundraisers, if you want a manager role, you might find you need to compromise in some way to get in – travel more to work, take on a maternity role – or be in the right place at the right time – unless you already have line management experience as well as trust fundraising experience.

I’d argue against becoming a trusts manager before you have very significant trust fundraising experience. That’s because there are so many judgement calls to be made. My own approach as a manager is very hands off – I trust people to do their jobs the way they choose, within reason and I am mainly there to encourage and be a sounding board. However, even then (1) there are enough moments when you have to ask “Is this person really sufficiently skilled/motivated?” and that requires a lot of skills to really determine; (2) if you can’t keep developing people, they’ll get bored and eventually leave; and (3) if you can’t help people with their problems, they’ll eventually leave.

There are maybe two types of trust manager: the manager of one person (the norm) with their own portfolio of trusts, who may have more focus on staff development (in charities outside central London that aren’t “name” organisations, it’s hard to get sufficiently experienced people into more junior jobs); and managers of a number of staff at a very large charity, who probably has to deal with a fair amount of politics, problem solving and getting good systems in place.

viii. Consulting

You do come across people who’ve made a living at consulting. I’d say that a lot are mainly doing temporary work for more money, by setting up in business on their own.

I’ve consulted a few times (mainly doing Lottery applications) and would say:

You’ve got to be extremely independent and self-motivated. Even if you’re effectively doing interim-type contracts, there can be periods where it’s just you in your room and no one else cares.
You have to be very pragmatic and driven by the market in terms of what you want to do. I did a lot of short calls to Heads of and Directors of Fundraising when I first tried consulting properly and quickly learnt they didn’t want what I wanted to sell them, but wanted something else and had a different attitude to price than I did.
There’s a lot of “hurry up and wait”. It’s quite hard to control your workflow, because the Heads of / CEOs that you work for expect to keep to their own timescales and won’t always be clear about/ understand those. As one very experienced consultant (basically a sole trader) put it to me, “You’re either working hard to generate leads or you’re working incredibly flat out to fulfil them.” The flipside of that is that you can seem a bit unreliable to your clients, as you generate unpredictable amounts of work through your marketing, coming through at different times to when you expect it and then struggle to juggle the changing demands of the portfolio of charities.
If you keep plugging away, you can definitely come to make more money. Against that, you may struggle to get a mortgage and the amount you earn will vary, whereas the amount you’re taxed will be assessed against your previous performance. If you don’t have a steady contract, the income can really come in fits and starts.
You can charge more money if you were a Head of Fundraising with some background in trusts than a very experienced trust fundraiser. (That’s ironic, as I was a much better trust fundraiser than them, but it’s true.)
You may be able to combine working part time with some consultancy. It probably depends on the contracts you want – it would never work with statutory bids, for example, but I managed it doing Lottery bids. (I’m not recommending consulting on Lottery Community Fund bids these days, btw.)
The most lucrative situations you can find will involve you working for very extended periods on more money. I didn’t want to do that because it felt unethical, but in the UK there CAN be work covering vacant posts for shorter periods, where your greater knowledge and skills mean you’re really providing a good value service. The tax situation is complicated though, to the extent that it may not always work – you’d need to look into the HMRC rules.
There are very occasional ongoing roles within big firms of consultants, usually as a researcher.

ix. Farmer or hunter?

Some jobs require that you be a “hunter” – going out in search of lots of new, cold, funding opportunities. Others strongly focus on “farming” what you have. They work quite differently:

Hunting jobs are more “sales-y”. You have to be better at making things happen externally and quickly getting things internally to match with you’ve learnt. Skills like excellent detective work, which are “nice to haves” in farming-type jobs, are essential in such jobs. You’re very much making your mark, finding new ways to write things for new funders. I find the adrenaline goes more in those jobs, because there’s so much uncertainty. There are a few types of “hunting” jobs:
- New posts that grow the charity’s income. These often aren’t very well researched – it’s more that there’s just a gut feeling there could be more money out there than a scientifically proven fact. The rates of return often aren’t that great – if you look at a lot of organisations, most of the money has come from a limited number of donors, and you’re being asked to operate outside of that, approaching people who may well have been approached and said “No” on previous occasions. However, if trust income is in a growth, rather than a mature, phase, these posts can be rewarding as long as everyone’s being realistic about opportunities and success rates.
- First trust fundraising posts (see separate web page on these, above).
- One-off appeal-type posts, such as capital appeals. (See separate description, above.)
In other, “farming,” jobs you are working mainly with funders who’ve given to the charity in the past. These feel more secure and lower stress (still not “no stress” – you’re in the wrong industry for that). They seem to be more predictable, with a solid calendar of dates that you know are mostly realistic, because someone’s kept to many of them before. These roles won’t stretch you as much or be so much fun, but I’ve found they are quietly satisfying if your heart is in the organisation.

Grants officer

Reading interviews in Trust and Foundation News, it’s clear that some people love being a grants officer and the turnover is lower than for trust fundraisers. In the States, a Center for Effective Philanthropy survey in 2017 found that 48% of grants staff planned to stay in philanthropy for the remainder of their careers. That said, there are plenty of grants officers who then become trust fundraisers. If you look on LinkedIn, plenty of grants officers started out as trust fundraisers.

There are several types of grants officer: administrative roles; grants managers; assessors; directors (who are often former CEO types). There are grants officers who are “technicians”, who understand projects and the assessment process (a good fit with a trust fundraising background); and those with a much stronger policy or professional background, who can shape and drive policy more and implement that using their grant assessment and management skills.

My impression, from doing bits of the work, is that being a grants officer is rewarding in the sense of making a difference. It’s fairly pure and rigorous, you’re trying to make the very best use of limited funds that you can. As a fundraiser there’s a right answer, in that your charity’s work should be funded and the aim is just to get everything as good as they possibly can be, given your limited influence. Otherwise, you’re trying to do the very best you can.

As a grants officer you need to be respectful of the foibles of your grants committee. I’ve read about struggles between the committee and the officers. Trustees tend to be more conservative, less educated in the grants process and less respectful that it’s a difficult profession. It’s perhaps no surprise that, of the four recent books on grant-making by grants staff in the UK or America, all are manifestos for reform of the sector!

An Inside Philanthropy 2020 survey of more than 200 program officers, found that they feel largely aligned with their colleagues, but not with their boards. It’s notable that all four recent “inside foundations” books that I’ve read are reform manifestos by their grants officer authors! Edgar Villanueva’s left wing book Decolonizing Wealth, about grants staff in big foundations in the USA made very clear the tensions between the cultures and assumptions of some grants staff and those of the trustees who set overall policy. However, ethical dilemmas happen in our roles as trust fundraisers too, so I’m sure many of us can relate to these issues. Like with fundraising: yes you have power (more so as a grants officer) but no, you don’t actually have freedom to just do what you think is right.

It’s an intellectually stretching role. You see hundreds of different kinds of causes and ways of addressing issues. You’re constantly trying to apply criteria and spot strengths and weaknesses.

Of Belbin’s team roles, I’d say it best suits a Monitor-Evaluator: sober, unemotional, prudent, with judgement, discretion and hard-headedness. It’s also useful to have Belbin’s Company Worker qualities: dutiful, predictable, hardworking with practical common sense.

You have a sense of real power and you’re determining some of the future of the voluntary sector (within the constraints of the trust and your grants committee). Applicants generally treat you like royalty. People generally enjoy listening to your stories. I think if anything, there’s a challenge to avoid it all giving you an ego.

I thought the work had real stresses, though. It’s very tiring – everyone presents their causes in different ways, even when there are forms. There’s a lot to assimilate. It’s hard not to glaze over. At the same time, I’ve been aware that there could be something wrong with any project I was assessing; so there’s the pressure to spot things and make good decisions – which could be second guessed by your manager or your committee – even though you’re tired and trying to do things at speed. I’ve also read various reports of grants officers having to work longer hours than trust fundraiser typically do (e.g., this comment from during the pandemic, when things were at their worst: ‘all I did was read applications and sleep’ – Bull and Steinberg, 2021).

You never get that far into anything, which means you don’t appreciate the work as much as with trust fundraising. You don’t usually have so much of a team. You’re not part of things in the same way.

The money is mixed compared with trust fundraising. There are well paid roles and very poorly paid ones. I’ve read there’s a glass ceiling, where people develop a depth of skills and understanding but then see the senior jobs filled mainly by people from outside the grants sector. That accords with what you see on LinkedIn.

Footnote on this section

If you are thinking very long term about your career, I’d say: take what you were thinking of doing and add AI. What thinkers in that field always say is: we don’t know when AI is going to change things, but whenever it happens, it will eventually replace anything that’s about analysis but it may not affect the more soft skills, the more human side of things. If you think about your job, or look at this site, there’s a lot that’s about things like empathy and a lot that’s about analysis.

b. Salaries for different fundraising roles

Harris Hill do surveys of salaries for different fundraising roles. These are covered in the recruitment page on this web site.

c. Temporary work? Part time work?

Some agencies do offer temporary work. I’ve a friend in London who also works in major donor fundraising who has temporary roles for a couple of years. I did the same in London for several years, a decade ago (to give me breaks to go on retreat between jobs) though I used to do it on contract to make it a lot easier for the charities to take me on.

Harris Hill and I suspect others of the main trust fundraising recruitment agencies offer some temporary work. However, I only got one role from that route and suspect it’s an emergency fallback or a way of bulking out a consultancy career.

There’s a degree of part time work around in our field. For example, a relative of a colleague was a trust fundraiser trying to find part time work in Cornwall and found a surprising number of opportunities. A proportion of those posts will be charities dipping their toes in the trust fundraising water. In such cases, you want need to ask some hard questions about whether they know what they’re getting you into.

3. Kinds of charities you can work in

Roles in our field do differ and it’s useful to know what you’re getting yourself into:

a. Fields of work

Although it’s undoubtedly easier to get into a charity similar to the one(s) you’ve been in before, I’ve been able to move around very easily – the only exception being that none of the arts and culture charities I’ve sent my CV to have been interested, maybe they see themselves as different. (I haven’t tried to do medical research and have only dabbled in academe.)

It’s inadvisable to work for a cause you don’t come to love (it will affect your work, it will be more boring and if you’re a Londoner – hey, why should you?) However, my personal experience is that I started out hugely committed to overseas development as THE key issue, for a host of reasons – but as I moved around, I started also to be moved more by a range of causes.

b. Local or national work?

My only scepticism about local charities is: will there be enough trusts who’d fund the work to justify your post? Look at their histories before you join and be a bit sceptical about suddenly building something new. If the funders are there, you might be able to see more of the work and develop more appreciation of the areas where your project is, to go with your other understandings. You can also feel good about the fact you’re doing what some, rightly or wrong, will seem a harder job (a factor that should be reflected in your targets, so it’s not more stressful).

c. New projects or consistent services?

Charities doing a lot of new work are more exciting to work for and more stressful. New projects are a lot more demanding to fundraise for, requiring more skills and understanding, so they’re better handled a bit later in your career.

Some people see new work as more attractive to funders. Certainly, you’re not that likely to be getting massive grants to just do more of the same. However,) there are lots of great things about existing services (if you can get Services to pass the detail over to you) so if you think you can’t be a “proper” trust fundraiser without them, that’s a mistake.

d. Smaller or larger charities?

Firstly – some “large” charities actually function a bit like small charities, because you are only allowed to fundraise for a narrow area of work. However, large charities CAN involve more services, more varied work and more relationships, which is more demanding and more fun. You can get in bigger grants and feel like you’re having a bigger impact. However, large charities tend to involve more politics – because of the lengths of the management chains that separate you from the Services staff and because there can be more issues known only to the Senior Management Team.

4. Scale of involvement in the process of developing the project

In most roles, your role will be, to use Bill Bruty’s analogy, the waiter rather than the chef. It can vary a bit more than that in practice, however. If you’re a specialist grant-writer for large applications then involvement in developing projects is more the norm. However, in some jobs it’s the norm anyway, or a way you can take the job if you want, and occasionally (often in big nationals or where you have a small role in tenders) you can play more of a coordination role for some applications.

Whatever the realities, if your prospective manager is a fundraiser but not a grants fundraiser, they may not see you as involved in developing the projects or they may not be able to say it. My involvement in project development has come as an interesting surprise to some managers, once I had my feet under the desk!

Resources

Episode 41 (Ben Swart episode) of the Do More Good Podcast looks at careers in FR more generally.