Management roles key for street fundraisers who want to move into charity departments
Howard Lake | 7 July 2014 | News
Most street fundraisers who have gone on to build successful charity fundraising careers have acquired management experience as a team leader.
The findings of the a survey by recruitment consultancy Flow Caritas – that mapped the career trajectories of 90 former street fundraisers – found that 75 per cent had been team leaders ad 5.5 per cent had undertaken office-based roles.
However, among the proportion of respondents (which was more than 60 per cent) who rated their street careers as very useful in getting a wider fundraising job, the number who had done team-leading rose to 83 per cent while 60 per cent had done office jobs with agencies or in-house teams.
The results of the Streets Ahead study – published today at the IoF National Convention – also showed the types of skills street fundraisers thought had helped them progress in their careers.
Rated on a scale of 1-7, these were:
- Confidence to ask for donations: 6.0
- Getting used to rejection: 5.8
- Making the ‘elevator pitch:’ 5.4
- An intuitive feel for most likely donors: 5.3
- An intuitive feel for the timing of an ask: 5.2
One survey participant comments in the report: “If you get good at street fundraising, you can be good at any other kind of fundraising because street fundraising is many times more difficult.”
Rory White, Flow Caritas
Rory White, Flow Caritas’s founder and managing director, says: “This project has told us that street fundraising is not the equivalent of a bar job – for those people who are using it to learn about the sector and develop their careers, it is something that helps them to discover and match their values to their career and learn about the culture of the industry from the ground up.”
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.