Philanthropy Assistant

It’s an exciting time for War Child. We are sector-leading with our heritage, connections, and relationships in the world of music, gaming and events. Our friends are superbly connected and ready to use their networks to help us. With a talented, hard-working team, we deliver amazing, creative fundraising in spades that has a huge capacity to inspire people. 

We’re looking for a Philanthropy Assistant to join our dynamic and high-performing team. You will be directly supporting the Philanthropy, Trusts & Institutional Funding and Principal Giving fundraising teams through excellent administration and organisation skills, attention to detail, verbal and written communication skills and be part of the team thinking creatively to achieve our strategy goals. In doing so you’ll enable War Child to support more of the world’s most vulnerable children. 

The ideal candidate will be someone eager to learn about fundraising with a keen interest in growing their skills and experience and the enthusiasm to work with supporters to bring about positive change to children’s lives. 

The team regularly comes together in our London office for collaboration, relationship-building and key meetings. The successful candidate will be expected to attend these in person and support events in London and elsewhere, as required. 

If you share our values and believe that children’s lives should not be torn apart by war, we want to hear from you. 

Your role 

This role provides administrative and coordination support across War Child's Philanthropy, Trusts & Institutional Funding and Principal Giving fundraising teams. Working with colleagues in these functions, you will help maximise our capacity to maintain and grow relationships with high value and major donors, trusts, foundations and institutional funders. 

You will provide high-quality administrative support across a range of projects, campaigns and fundraising activities, enabling managers to effectively steward their portfolios and build strong donor relationships. As part of an ambitious and collaborative team, you'll play an important role in helping secure vital funding to support children affected by war. 

Your responsibilities 

Administration: 

• Support the team on general administrative tasks including (but not limited to) raising purchase orders, donation processing, income reconciliation, event liaison, venue & catering support, arranging travel and booking internal and external meetings.  

• Take minutes in key meetings and share action points with wider teams. 

• Monitor the team info email inbox and direct queries to the relevant team. 

• Ensure that all of team documents, reports and event documents are correctly filed on the War Child internal system for easy reference for the Fundraising Team. 

Research: 

• Lead on the research of new prospects to prepare fundraisers ahead of donor meetings or donors attending events (including creating event biographies). 

• Conduct due diligence and ethical screening of prospective donors, partners and funding opportunities in line with War Child’s due diligence policy, identifying and assessing reputational, ethical and legal risks. 

• Provide administrative and coordination support to the Philanthropy team to help deliver donor stewardship, cultivation and solicitation activities that contribute to achieving income targets, including supporting lapsed donor re-engagement. 

• Lead on the research of existing donors, foundation’s trustees and institutional donor staff to understand their networks and to maximise their potential across the Fundraising teams. 

Communications and Events: 

• Support the team to ensure communications with donors and partners are categorised, updated and stored accurately on War Child’s database, Salesforce and use Dot Digital/Salesforce to send automated comms.  

• Support on the creation of donor communications which includes (but is not limited to) creating event programmes, event proposal documents, event invitations and donor impact reports/proposals. 

• Support the Philanthropy team in particular on event planning and event delivery including supporting the admin tasks for War Child’s flagship gala, The Wassail, held in December. 

• Represent War Child with commitment and enthusiasm to build new relationships and contacts for War Child, supporting colleagues to ensure that new prospects are followed up and their interest capitalised on. 

• Develop strong relationships and maintain excellent communication channels with other teams and departments across War Child. 

• Actively participate in regular department and team meetings, contributing to strategy discussion and decisions that will be beneficial to the development of fundraising activities. 

• Contribute to creating a culture committed to the safeguarding of children and adults and compliant to WCUK’s Integrity & Safeguarding Policies.  

• We are committed to building an inclusive and equitable workplace. All staff are expected to actively contribute to this by embedding principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging into their day-to-day work, decision-making, and interactions with colleagues, partners, and supporters. 

These duties provide a framework for the role and should not be regarded as a definitive list. Other reasonable duties may be required consistent with the grade of the role. 

You are: 

• Someone with a keen interest in relationship-based fundraising. 

• An interest in (or ideally some experience of) supporting public/private events from creation, through planning and to event delivery. 

• Take a proactive approach to communication by seeking clarification when needed, escalating risks or challenges promptly, and keeping managers informed where priorities conflict or support is required. 

• Able to undertake detail-oriented administrative tasks efficiently and to a high-quality standard. 

• Familiar with managing your workload to meet deadlines, manage priorities and hit targets. 

• Able to demonstrate strong written and verbal communication skills. 

• Able to design clear, engaging and professional presentations, proposals, reports (preferably on Canva). 

• Ability to undertake basic analysis of data for research and screening purposes. 

• Highly adept at using and managing Outlook calendars and inboxes, including those that are not your own. 

• A competent user of Microsoft Office applications, including Excel and PowerPoint. 

• A true team player, able to maintain effective and collaborative working partnerships with internal and external stakeholders. 

• Able to get up to speed with fundraising regulation and GDPR, and its implications for fundraising policy and practice. 

• Able to use or effectively get up to speed with SharePoint and Salesforce quickly. 

• Naturally discreet and highly trustworthy. 

• Able to attend the London office for meetings and events, and to support events, including some occasional evenings or weekends (time off in lieu provided).