Head of Fundraising

Save the children UK has an excited opportunity for an individual with demonstrable experience of leading and inspiring Individual Giving or Customer Acquisition teams to join us as our Head of Acquisition. This role will be instrumental in delivering growth in our supporter base and income by leading a team to deliver our acquisition programme across both lead generation and direct response activity.

About Us

Save the Children UK believes every child deserves a future. In the UK and around the world, we work every day to give children a healthy start in life, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm.  When crisis strikes, and children are most vulnerable, we are always among the first to respond and the last to leave.  We ensure children's unique needs are met and their voices are heard. We deliver lasting results for millions of children, including those hardest to reach.

About the role

As our Head of Acquisition, you will lead the development and execution of our acquisition strategy to boost the growth of our Individual supporter base, secure crucial investments, and drive the expansion of our Individual Giving programme.

Beyond a job, this presents a career-defining opportunity for a candidate passionate about instigating change and transforming opportunities into reality. As a pivotal figure shaping Save the Children's strategy, you will contribute significantly to raising over £55 million and play an integral role in our mission.

This position empowers you to lead diverse, multi-disciplinary teams, ensuring ambitious outcomes in lead generation and supporter acquisition across various Individual Giving channels, including DRTV, PPC, Paid Social, Display, and offline channels.

In this role, you will be responsible to:     

Lead Core Acquisition Squad:

• Empower the team to achieve top-tier supporter engagement.
• Drive the organization's ambitious brand, fundraising, and campaigning targets.

Develop and Maintain Clear Vision:

• Create and uphold a vision aligned with the Strategic Marketing Plan, Comms Plan, and other frameworks.
• Ensure objectives are achievable within established constraints.

Champion Supporter Needs:

• Advocate for supporters using user research, testing, insight, and analysis.
• Embed understanding of supporter needs into all squad deliverables.

Collaborate Across Departments:

• Liaise extensively with Strategic Marketing Planning and colleagues in Public Income, Engagement, Campaigns, and Organizing.
• Align the vision with overall Supporter Engagement objectives and secure stakeholder buy-in.

Resource Management:

• Work with functional leads to secure necessary resources from Public Income, Supporter Data and Operations, Trading, Regional Engagement, and Campaigns and Organizing.

Support Autonomous Delivery:

• Assist squad members in autonomously completing deliverables.
• Ensure their work maximizes impact on both squad and mission objectives.

To be successful, it is important that you have:

• Demonstrable experience leading and inspiring Individual Giving or Customer Acquisition teams.
• Proven and strong leadership in data-driven, multi-channel, and multi-product marketing in charity, public, or private sector, with significant digital marketing experience
• Experience leading large and complex customer/supporter centric marketing projects through matrixed structures (e.g., squads or multi-disciplinary teams)
• Extensive experience developing and leading relationships with external partners
• Knowledge and experience of working with media agencies for planning, buying, and optimizing media.
• Practical knowledge of coaching tools in team management
• Demonstrable experience using insight and analysis to improve marketing performance.

What we offer you:  

• A diverse, unique role where no two days are the same, with huge capacity to build and acquire new personal and professional skills and create your own scope to make change within one of the world's leading international charities.  
• An organisation that believes in innovation and a diverse set of brilliant colleagues who are both experts in their fields and collaborators and supporters of innovation.
• Working for a charity provides one of the best benefits there is – a sense of purpose and reward for helping others. We also understand the importance of giving back to our employees to ensure a happy and healthy working environment and work/life balance. 
• To have the best (and happiest) employees, we focus on flexibility, inclusion, collaboration, health and wellbeing – both in and outside of work. 
• We provide a wide range of benefits which will reward your hard work, motivate you and inspire you to work to improve the lives of children every day.  
• You can find more about our employment offer by visiting our website  

To learn more about the position, please review the Job Description in the attached Documents on our website. 

Closing date: February 4, 2024

Please note: To avoid disappointment, you are advised to submit your application as soon as possible as we will be interviewing on a rolling basis and we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if a high volume of applications are received. This is to ensure that we can manage application levels whilst maintaining a positive candidate experience. Unfortunately once a vacancy has closed, we are unable to consider further applications.

Ways of Working:

The majority of our roles can be performed remotely in the UK, However, for this role, you will be required to work from our Farringdon Office- London 1 day a week. Please note that travel costs to your contracted office will be at your own expense. 

Flexible Working - We are happy to discuss flexible working options at interview.

Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion: 

Save the Children UK believes in a world that is fair, inclusive and equitable where all children have the opportunity to change their world. We apply this to our workforce and we are committed to developing and supporting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organisation where all employees have a sense of belonging and feel that they can be "Free to Be Me". We are not looking for just one type of person - we want to recruit people who can add fresh perspectives, innovative ideas or challenge that disrupts the risk of group think. 

We are especially interested in people whose childhood experiences - of life on a low income, of migration, of being in a racialised community, of the care system, of being LGBT+ or in an LGBT+ family or living with (or with someone with) a disability - help us to see things we might otherwise miss. Whatever your story is we want to hear it because we know that different voices, ideas, perspectives and knowledge, working together will enable us to better the lives of children around the world. This is the reason why we are all here.