Word from the Top: The importance of proper job marketing

Talented fundraisers who can transform your charity’s prospects and outlook are a rare commodity, so why are we marketing roles to them as if they’re ten-a-penny?

Putting together an uninspiring word document that focuses on what you’re looking for and not why a fundraiser would want to take on the role, and creating an advert that does much the same, is never going to secure you the calibre of fundraiser your charity deserves.

At any one time, CharityJob advertises 3 – 6 times more jobs in fundraising than any other role specialism. There aren’t 3 - 6 times more fundraisers than any other profession …

I think this tells us all we need to know about how competitive it is out there.

We need to start acknowledging a reality: Great fundraisers don’t struggle to secure roles and people are fighting for their attention, we can either get into the fray, or we stand back and get the results that we get. The good news is most people are doing a terrible job of role marketing, so you don’t need to make too many improvements to stand out.

Good application packs are not a luxury

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve told charities that they need to improve their role collateral, only to be told that they don’t have time, or it’s not important, or it’s a ‘nice to have’.

Whilst I would always advise a fully designed application pack (our design team can help you with this if you don’t know where to start), even if you create something a little more visually interesting in PowerPoint and converted it to a PDF, or learn to use Canva (the free, online graphic design tool), your ads will immediately look better than the majority of your competitors.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, first impressions count, the idioms are numerous. It needs to look like you care about the role, otherwise why should the candidates you’re looking to attract?

Talk to fundraisers in the language of fundraising

Just because your work is interesting and impactful doesn’t mean you’re fundable. The building of a fundraising team is a huge culture clash for growing charities. It’s the first time their work is held up to a rigorous, external light, which can be uncomfortable.

The facts of the matter are that fundraising (and the rest of the organisation) need to work in tandem. You might need to change some things about the way you work to be attractive to donors and demonstrate your impact to their standards. Most fundraisers will have a horror story or two about walking into a charity and trying to work collaboratively to get them ‘fundraising ready’, only to be told to stay in their lane and fundraise for what they’re given.

Some leaders with limited experience of fundraising rationalise that a good fundraiser should be able to secure the funds and that they’re trying to change things instead of doing the hard work.

This is tantamount to an estate agent telling you that you’d get a better price if you put the fire in your house out, and you telling them to get better at selling houses.

Fundraisers will be looking for signs that you have the right information behind the scenes to ensure fundraising success.

You can demonstrate this by illustrating some of the following in your application pack:

·        Facts, figures, and metrics that demonstrate the need for your work.

·        Facts, figures, and metrics that demonstrate your charity’s impact.

·        A detailed breakdown of the income stream/s they’ll be working across - in terms of budget and portfolio size, as well as highlighting some of your more interesting products, events, partners, or initiatives.

·        Give them an understanding of the size and scale of your network.

·        An explanation of the future-plans of the income stream/s. What are they working towards? What exciting prospects are on the horizon?

You likely need fundraisers more than they need you, so spend some time telling them how exciting your programme is.

Bursting the bubble

I have to burst a pretty tenacious bubble here: Fundraisers don’t come with a ‘little black book’.  

Think about this demand for a moment. Your position is that there are people in the world who come ready made with a contact network that can fully fund your charity and that you can secure them for £40k - £50k. It doesn’t seem likely, does it? Donors are sophisticated beings and the idea that they would mindlessly follow a fundraiser around, rather than staying committed to the causes they’ve grown an affinity for, is borne of wishful thinking.

This doesn’t mean their previous experience with high-profile donors isn’t useful, but they’ll need to reach back out to those individuals and institutions through you and your contact network to have any credibility.

Fundraising is a collaborative process, which the whole organisation needs to get behind. It’s not an unpleasant task you can hire someone to sit in the corner to do while you ‘get on with the important work’.

Fundraisers will be looking for an acknowledgement of this reality, through you making efforts to sell your network, contacts, initiatives, and assets.

You need to sell the fundraiser on the tools they’ll have available to them.

Describe all the benefits available

Not telling candidates about all the benefits of working for you is like getting into a fight with your hands tied behind your back.

I’ve worked with charities who advertise benefits like their cycle to work scheme and access to a wellbeing assistance line, but don’t describe the 10% non-contributory pension, or the fact that there are annual cost-of-living increases.

You never know what might take a role from not being workable, to being ideal for any given candidate. Make your life a little easier and sell every advantage you have.

Conclusion

In my experience, the cynicism of thinking efforts in this area are unwarranted, or that you shouldn’t need to compete for fundraisers “if they really want to work for you” is fear dressed up as wisdom.

Many managers don’t know where to start (and so don’t), but version one is always better than version none.

Why don’t you try implementing a few of the pointers above and see how you get on? You don’t need to have it perfect immediately - you can work on it over time.

If you don’t have the team capacity to focus on this, or want to get to ‘perfect’ a little more quickly, get in touch on 0203 750 3111 or info@bamboofundraising.co.uk and our design team can chat with you about developing one of the best application packs in the sector.