Senior philanthropy and trusts manager jobs in Guildford, surrey

Senior Philanthropy Lead

We are seeking an experienced relationship-led fundraiser to grow high-value support, develop major donor relationships and help drive ambitious income growth.

Salary: £40,000-£44,000pa
Location: Remote – Travel required for donor meetings and events
Hours: Full time – Compressed Hours, 9 day fortnight also considered
Closing date:  24th September 2026 – CV’s will be reviewed on a rolling basis

About the role

This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced major donor, philanthropy or partnership fundraiser to take a leading role in developing high-value relationships for a national Christian charity tackling poverty across the UK.

Reporting to the Head of Philanthropy, you will help shape and deliver the major donor strategy, driving sustainable, multi-year income growth and managing some of the charity’s most significant supporter relationships, including gifts of £10,000 to £100,000+.

You will lead and develop a small philanthropy team while building meaningful relationships with existing and prospective supporters and partners.

Key responsibilities include:

• Developing and delivering major donor strategy, growth plans, pipelines and KPIs
• Managing and growing a portfolio of high-value relationships
• Identifying and cultivating new donors, supporters and opportunities
• Creating compelling proposals, funding opportunities and personalised engagement plans
• Leading face-to-face meetings and representing the charity at high-level events
• Working with senior colleagues, including the CEO, to deepen supporter engagement
• Line managing and developing members of the philanthropy team
• Using CRM data and insight to track performance and identify opportunities
• Delivering agreed annual philanthropy income and engagement targets

About you

You may already be working in major donor fundraising or philanthropy, or you could bring strong partnership fundraising experience with the relationship-building and income-generation skills to make the move into this role.

You will bring:

• Strong major donor, philanthropy or partnership fundraising experience
• A track record of securing significant income through major gifts, partnerships or high-value relationships
• At least three years’ experience in fundraising, partnerships or relationship management
• The ability to build trusted, long-term relationships with people of influence
• Excellent communication, influencing and presentation skills
• Line management or people development experience
• Strategic thinking and the ability to manage pipelines, budgets and income forecasts
• The confidence to engage senior stakeholders and develop new opportunities
• Flexibility to travel across the UK, including occasional evening and weekend commitments

Above all, you will be a natural relationship builder who can inspire people, understand what motivates them and turn strong relationships into meaningful long-term support.

About the organisation

You will be joining a national Christian charity committed to tackling poverty and transforming lives. The organisation works alongside churches, supporters and communities to help people facing financial crisis and build a growing movement for change.

This is a collaborative, ambitious and deeply relational organisation where Christian faith is central to its mission and culture.

Other roles you may have experience of could include: Major Donor Manager, Philanthropy Manager, Partnerships Manager, Corporate Partnerships Manager, Major Gifts Manager, Senior Philanthropy Manager, High Value Relationships Manager, Major Donor Fundraiser, Strategic Partnerships Manager or Senior Fundraising Manager.

Please note: The charity can only consider applicants who presently have the right to work in the UK and all candidates must be personally committed to the Christian faith and be able to respect, uphold and work within our client’s Christian mission, values, culture and faith statements. This individual will represent and speak on behalf of a Christian charity and as such the Occupational Requirement for an active Christian faith is justified under the Equality Act 2010 Schedule 9, Part 1, clause 3.

#INDNFP

050 Partnerships Manager

Reporting to: Fundraising Lead
Hours: Full Time (35 hours per week)
Key Relationships: Products Manager, Stewardship Manager, Fundraising Lead, Director of Development, CEO, COO, Trustees, External Partners
Location: Remote Working, with national travel requirements for meetings, events and collaboration.

Overall Purpose

The Partnerships and Philanthropy Manager will both raise money to support the sustainability of NHS Charities Together and contribute to supporting NHS Charities to increase their income.
The focus of the role is on developing and leading partnerships with corporates and philanthropy.

Overall Objectives

• To generate income across a portfolio of corporate partnerships and charitable trusts and foundations
• To support NHS charities to raise income from partnerships
• Work flexibly as part of a Development Team, supporting the range of fundraising and income generation that the team targets.

Key Responsibilities

The main duties and responsibilities of the role holder are as outlined below:

Partnership Development & Delivery

• Manage the range of existing partnerships across corporate and philanthropic audiences, creating and implementing bespoke solicitation and stewardship plans, generating income for the organisation or NHS Charities
• Translate our work into compelling and bespoke cases for support, making relevant and appropriate asks and soliciting multi-year strategic partnerships
• Identifyand develop new partnership opportunities whichbenefitour organisation or NHS Charities
• Develop opportunities for and deliver sponsorship income for our activity and events

Collaboration & Sector Support

• Work collaboratively with member NHS Charities to understand their fundraising needs, challenges, and opportunities.
• Build strong relationships with key stakeholders across the sector, supporting them to understand the most appropriate role for partnership-based fundraising
• Share learning and best practice from partnership relationships to inform future developments and sector growth.
• Contribute to supporting NHS Charities to raise their income, providing advice and guidance 1:1 and through supporting the delivery of member events
• Where required support the delivery of paid for consulting support to NHS charities on fundraising
• Keep abreast of trends in fundraising within and beyond the health sector.

Leadership & Financial Management

• Establish clear objectives, KPIs, and evaluation frameworks for all partnerships
• Monitor the performance and financial return of our partnerships work, producing regular reports and insights to inform decision-making.
• Provide effective line management to team members, ensuring they have clear objectives, professional development, and deliver high performance.
• Manage budgets as required, monitoring income and expenditure to ensure targets and forecasts are met, and reporting any variances promptly.
• Produce regular performance and income reports and insights to inform strategy and continuous improvement.
• Contribute to the effective running of the team, and participate in relevant training and team meetings.
• Ensure donor records are kept up to date on the fundraising database, and ensure our CRM records of key relationships are maintained
• Ensure all appropriate due diligence is undertaken and necessary gift agreements are in place.
• Ensure that all fundraising activity complies with the Fundraising Regulator’s Code of Fundraising Practice and relevant legislation.

Cross-Team Collaboration & Stakeholder Management

• Liaise with teams across the organisation to collaborate on member facing activity and ensuring our product offers fit with our member segmentation approaches.
• Support the team on other fundraising activity, for example around events, or in the cultivation and recruitment of individual donors

Competencies

Teamwork – ‘One charity’, working within and across teams

• Collaborates across teams, ensuring our activity is aligned with our wider support of members.

Building trust and respect – listen, feedback and learn

• Models our values through their work, seeking to support colleagues and understand their perspectives.
• Proactive, and adaptable to support the wider work of the organisation as required.

Responsibility – owning your part in our success

• Demonstrates commitment to delivering exceptional partnerships.
• Takes responsibility for developing and leading successful relationships which generate income.

Professionalism – creating an environment to achieve success

• Takes a learning approach to ensure we continually improve.
• Upholds the highest standards of integrity, ethics, and transparency, ensuring we always work within the Fundraising Code.

Stakeholder focus – understanding the needs of our key stakeholders and audiences

• Passionate about supporting NHS charities and helping them to increase their income.
• Seeks to understand the needs of NHS charities, shaping our support to maximise our impact in supporting them to raise income.
• Ensures our own fundraising does not compete with members.

Acumen – Sound decision-making

• Adapts and shapes partnerships based on learning to deliver success.
• Identifies and shapes member support around what is most effective.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

• Fundraising Qualification, Chartered Institute of Fundraising, or equivalent
• Significant experience of fundraising, and the role and theory of fundraising through partnerships and/or philanthropic relationships
• Experience of securing significant partnerships of at least 5 figures from corporate partners, individuals or family foundations and managing relationships with major supporters
• Knowledge of the current philanthropy and High Net Worth Individual and/or corporate landscape and insight into future trends
• Excellent project management skills with the ability to manage multiple priorities and stakeholders.
• Creative thinker with a commercial mindset
• Collaborative working style with excellent stakeholder management skills
• Experience managing and developing team members.
• Influencing skills, with experience of working across teams or partner organisations.
• Experience of database management and using a fundraising CRM system
• An excellent communicator, in person and in written work
• Experience working within an NHS charity or large health-related fundraising environment.
• Experience in building credibility with senior external stakeholders and managing relationships with diplomacy
• Experience managing external relationships with suppliers

Other duties

• Visibly live NHS Charities Togethers values, including our commitment to diversity and inclusion.
• Carrying out the duties of postin accordance withNHS Charities Togethers policies and procedures on Health and Safety and take responsibility for ensuring personal health and safety.
• Working flexibly, prioritising workload, and working effectively as part of a team. Demonstrating an ability to work calmly and effectively when under pressure of tight deadlines, to deliver work on time and to a high standard.
• Adhere to relevant legislation, best practice, policies, and processes including, but not limited to charity law, the fundraising regulator, GDPR and professional codes and standards.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of duties. The need for flexibility is required, and the post holder is expected to carry out any other related duties that are within the employee’s skills and abilities whenever reasonably instructed.

For nearly 20 years, Lively Minds has been proving that parents are the sleeping giants of early childhood development. With strong evidence and a national scale proof point in Ghana, we have shown that parent powered approaches delivered through government systems can transform children's lives at scale.

We are now at a pivotal moment. We have the evidence, the model and the momentum, and we need the funding, profile and influence to match our ambition. This is a rare opportunity to lead income generation and external voice for an award winning NGO entering an exciting new phase of growth. You will lead our fundraising strategy and direct engagement with Funders ensuring that we maximise all funding opportunities as we continue our strategic evolution. You will also shape a compelling external narrative that will help position Lively Minds as the definitive partner for governments strengthening their early childhood development systems.

If you are an exceptional fundraiser and communicator who is equally comfortable in a strategic conversation and writing a winning proposal, we would love to hear from you.

Read the full advert and apply below. Closing date: 3rd September 2026.

About Lively Minds

Lively Minds is an award-winning NGO with nearly 20 years of experience designing, testing and scaling early childhood development (ECD) solutions across the Global South. Our core idea is simple but radical: parents are the sleeping giants of ECD. Governments and donors have long overlooked parents, assuming that poverty and low literacy make them unable or unwilling to support their childrenʼs development. We have spent two decades proving otherwise. With RCT-backed evidence and a national-scale proof point in Ghana, we have demonstrated that parent-powered approaches, delivered through government systems, can achieve meaningful child development outcomes at scale.

Our 2026–2028 strategy marks a pivotal shift. Having demonstrated what is possible, we are now helping pioneer an innovative model of country-led sustainable scale. Rather than delivering programmes ourselves, we provide lean, time-limited technical advisory support to governments to help them integrate parent-powered ECD into their own systems, budgets and institutions. We are currently working with the governments of Ghana, Uganda, Oromia state (Ethiopia) and The Gambia in 2026, growing to six or more country engagements by 2028. Our ambition is to catalyse a sector-wide shift, positioning Lively Minds as the definitive partner for governments seeking to strengthen their ECD systems.

Our scale strategy rests on three interdependent pillars: fixed-term Technical Advisory partnerships with governments; the development of a modular radio model simple and affordable enough for governments to adopt and fund independently; and an advocacy and sector influence agenda designed to make parent-powered ECD the norm globally.

Purpose of the Role

Lively Minds is at a critical inflection point. We have the evidence, the model and the momentum. We now need the funding, profile and sector influence to match our ambition. The Director of Fundraising and Communications is a priority hire, created to provide the dedicated, experienced leadership that this moment demands.

The Director will own and drive Lively Mindsʼ income generation, building new funder relationships, managing and deepening existing ones, and ensuring the organisation has the pipeline, discipline and quality of engagement to meet and exceed its fundraising targets. Working in close partnership with the Founding CEO, who retains ownership of a small number of long-standing strategic relationships, the Director will take primary responsibility for securing the funding that makes the 2026–2028 strategy deliverable, and that opens the door to greater scale beyond it. We need to raise approximately £3.4m over the next 3 years to deliver our strategy. But our ambition is to exceed that target so we can support additional governments.

Alongside fundraising, the Director will provide strategic leadership to Lively Mindsʼ communications and advocacy work, ensuring that the organisationʼs external voice is compelling and that we are building credibility in the spaces where funding decisions are made. The Director will lead and provide strategic coherence to a small but outward-facing team, including Head of Partnerships and Advocacy Lead who are active on the international stage. Lively Minds is committed to thought-leadership and active external engagement, but equally committed to ensuring that communications resource is deployed with discipline and rigour. The Director will set a clear strategic filter for where the organisation shows up, what it publishes and who it engages: prioritising focus and quality over volume, and always asking whether external activity is building the relationships and reputation that ultimately drive income and/or systems change.

Lively Minds is a dispersed, remote organisation. The Directorʼs team the Advocacy Lead, Development Manager and Communications Officer - are internationally distributed. The ability to lead, develop and maintain high standards across a dispersed team is essential. The role requires regular travel to international conferences and events.

Key Responsibilities

Fundraising Strategy & Income Generation

• Own and deliver the multi-year fundraising strategy with clear priorities, targets, income streams and a disciplined pipeline to support the 2026–2028 strategy and future scale
• Steward existing funder relationships, turning strong partnerships into long-term supporters, advocates and connectors to new funding opportunities.
• Lead the shift towards Big Bet and catalytic funding, personally cultivating and negotiating high-value, multi-year partnerships and positioning Lively Minds for system-level scale
• Maintain a high standard of fundraising quality, pipeline management and forecasting, while coaching the team to produce compelling, sophisticated fundraising materials
•  Build and continuously strengthen a diverse funding pipeline, identifying emerging opportunities, new funding markets and strategic partnerships that reduce concentration risk and support long-term financial sustainability

Communications, Brand & Advocacy

• Own and deliver Lively Mindsʼ communications and marketing strategy, balancing visibility and sector influence with the need to strengthen fundraising and systems-change objectives
• Partner closely with the CEO to shape and steward a coherent external narrative, brand and messaging framework across all audiences and channels
• Oversee high-quality core communications and fundraising materials, including cases for support, pitch decks, website content, proposals and donor reports
• Provide strategic communications expertise to Advocacy, Partnerships and MEL, ensuring evidence and learning are translated into compelling narratives and consistent external messaging
• Lead efforts to strengthen Lively Mindsʼ profile and thought leadership in the ECD sector, identifying opportunities for strategic media, events, publications and external platforms that reinforce its positioning and influence

Organizational Leadership&TeamDevelopment

 

• Contribute actively to SMT and organisational strategy, bringing funder intelligence, external perspective and communications expertise to strategic decision-making.
• Work closely with Finance and MEL to align fundraising targets, forecasting, budgets and evidence, ensuring proposals are credible, accurately costed and evidence-led
• Act as the organisationʼs communications subject matter expert, providing guidance and challenge to ensure high-quality, consistent external communications
• Lead and develop the Advocacy Lead, Development Manager and Communications Officer, fostering a team culture of quality, accountability, strategic clarity and continuous improvement
• Build strong cross-organisational collaboration, ensuring teams understand how fundraising, communications, advocacy and evidence work together to advance Lively Mindsʼ strategic priorities

Person Specification

Essential Experience & Skills

• 10+ years of significant senior-level fundraising experience within international development, education, philanthropy or a comparable sector
• Proven track record of securing major grants from foundations, institutional donors and high-net-worth individuals, alongside demonstrated experience securing or meaningfully progressing large-scale, catalytic funding from Big Bet philanthropy programmes such as the Audacious Project, Skoll Foundation or comparable funders. A strong understanding of what these funders look for and how to position an organisation compellingly within their processes is essential
• Exceptional fundraising writing skills, with the ability to personally develop compelling cases for support, funding proposals, award applications and pitch decks tailored to sophisticated impact funders. This is a hands-on role requiring both strong writing capability and the ability to coach others to consistently produce high-quality fundraising content
• Experienced in developing and owning a marketing and communications strategy, with a strong understanding of how to balance organisational visibility, thought leadership and sector influence with coherence, strategic focus and income generation
• Demonstrated ability to work closely with a Founding CEO to shape and steward the organisationʼs external narrative and brand. Comfortable working in a founder-led environment, providing expertise and constructive challenge while ensuring the organisation maintains a clear, consistent and coherent external voice

Desirable Experience

• Experienced fundraising for a technical advisory, systems change or government-facing organisation
• Knowledge of the ECD, education or early childhood sector and its funding landscape
• Familiarity with the Big Bang Philanthropy network or equivalent impact-focused funder communities
• Experience working alongside advocacy and partnerships teams, providing communications expertise and strategic coherence to their external activity
• Familiarity with the funding landscape for organisations operating in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Experience working remotely across multiple countries and effectively collaborating with cross-cultural teams

Behaviours & Ways of Working

• A doer, equally comfortable in strategic conversations and writing a funding proposal
• Sets a high bar for quality and clarity in all external communications and holds it consistently
• Builds a strong, trust-based partnership with the Founding CEO, provides honest challenge and operates effectively within a founder-led dynamic without losing their own voice or judgement
• Collaborative and cross-organisational. Invests in strong relationships with programme, MEL and finance colleagues, understanding that the best fundraising is grounded in organisational reality
• Calm and focused under pressure - able to manage competing priorities and maintain quality when the stakes are high

What We Offer

• Competitive salary commensurate with experience
• 25 days annual leave
• Health insurance
• Pension contribution
• Generous learning and development budget
• Flexible, remote working

Application Instruction

Interested candidates are encouraged to read the Job Description carefully before applying to ensure they understand the role and meet the required criteria.

To apply, please complete the pre-screening questions and submit your updated CV

PLEASE NOTE - Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.

Timeline

Closing Date: 3rd September 2026

Our Stance

Lively Minds operates a strict Safeguarding Policy and is committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of children and vulnerable people. As part of our recruitment process, the suitability of successful candidates will be verified through appropriate background checks including professional references and police checks.

Lively Minds is fully committed to equity, diversity and inclusion and to providing equal opportunities throughout our recruitment process. We want this commitment to be reflected in the diversity of the people who work for us, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities, experiences and perspectives.

We are committed to ensuring that recruitment decisions are based on merit, skills, experience and suitability for the role, and that all candidates are treated fairly and with respect throughout the recruitment process.