Grants & Bids Development Officer

Purpose
This role plays a key part in strengthening Involve Kent’s ability to secure sustainable, values-aligned income that enables our mission: ensuring people and communities have the support, connections, and opportunities they need to thrive.
As a Grants & Bids Development Officer, you will help shape the future of our services by developing compelling, evidence-based applications to charitable trusts, foundations, and public sector commissioners. Your work will directly contribute to tackling inequality, expanding access to support, and driving positive change across Kent and Medway.
You will be part of a collaborative development function that is curious, positive, and committed to learning. Working closely with colleagues across operational teams, you will translate real-world insight into powerful cases for support, ensuring our bids are grounded in lived experience, strong evidence, and Involve Kent’s values.
The primary focus is trusts and bids. Legacy stewardship is welcome but not essential and will be proportionate to capacity.

Key Tasks and Responsibilities
1) Trusts & Foundations
• Pipeline management: Maintain and develop a rolling, well-qualified trusts pipeline with a clear annual submission calendar.

• Proposal drafting: Produce compelling, tailored proposals and reports aligned to funder criteria, organisational priorities, and impact goals.
• Impact & budgeting: Work with service leads and Finance to evidence need, outcomes, and impact; align restricted budgets; draft clear budget narratives and simple throughput justifications.
• Compliance: Maintain accurate records of applications, grant conditions, and reporting schedules to agreed timelines and standards.
• Reporting: Produce a weekly opportunities update and a monthly snapshot summarising pipeline status and next steps.

2) Contracts (Public Sector Bids)
• Horizon scanning & qualification: Monitor procurement portals; complete eligibility matrices; assemble bid packs; maintain a concise tender pipeline.
• Bid/no-bid support: Prepare clear opportunity summaries to inform go/no-go decisions; deliver activity in line with approved timelines.
• Compliance & readiness: Conduct eligibility and compliance checks; maintain a simple risk and dependency register for live tenders; escalate risks promptly.
• Document control & content library: Maintain a secure shared drive, up-to-date bid library, version-controlled documents, and reusable answer bank; assemble clean, compliant bid submissions.
• Drafting: Produce first drafts of standard non-technical narrative sections (approach, social value, summaries) and refine with input from subject specialists.
• Partner engagement: Coordinate partner contributions and collate documentation where collaborating on joint bids.

3) Legacy (Light-Touch)
• Stewardship: Deliver simple, proportionate stewardship as agreed each month - maintain a basic journey (welcome, updates, pledge logging), keep template copy current, and handle basic enquiries.

4) Insight & Governance
• Compliance: Ensure accurate data capture, confidentiality, and information governance compliance.
• Debrief: Log win/lose feedback and use insights to strengthen templates, processes, and content.
• Reporting: Track and report monthly KPIs; contribute insight to broader forecasting discussions.

5) Organisational Responsibilities
• Supervision & meetings: Attend team meetings, training, and supervision; actively contribute to organisational learning.
• Wellbeing & resilience: Take responsibility for your wellbeing, maintain healthy boundaries, and seek support when needed.
• Safeguarding: Uphold Involve Kent’s safeguarding policies and escalate concerns promptly.
• EDI: Promote and model inclusive, respectful practice in all internal and external interactions.
• Other duties: Undertake duties commensurate with the role as services and organisational needs evolve.

Uphold Involve’s Values
• Kindness – We treat everyone with compassion, respect and humanity
• Inclusion – We remove barriers so everyone can participate fully.
• Integrity – We act honestly, transparently, and with accountability.
• Empowerment – We support people to make choices, build confidence, and shape their future.
• Innovation – We continually improve, adapt, and seek creative solutions.