What recruitment services does Fern Talent offer?

Fern Talent offers freelance fundraising placements, interim cover, and executive search for UK-based charities, schools, and social enterprises. Our recruitment is led by fundraising consultants and tailored to your needs and budget.

Do you only work with large charities?

No. We regularly support small and medium-sized charities, independent schools, and nonprofits. Our flexible models and sector experience mean we can adapt to a wide range of organisation sizes and budgets.

Can you help with income strategy or mentoring?

Yes. In addition to recruitment, we offer consultancy on income strategy, fundraising planning, team structures, and mentoring for new or transitioning fundraising staff.

The Blog.

Tim Barnes 29/11/2018 Tim Barnes 29/11/2018

Bamboo retrospective: Tim on Channel 4’s Battlefront

With youth unemployment the same hot topic it was in 2012, we trawled through the archives to find Tim’s appearance on the Emmy Award-winning show ‘Battlefront’.

With youth unemployment still the same hot topic it was in 2012, the Bamboo team trawled through the archives to find Tim’s appearance on the Emmy Award-winning show ‘Battlefront’.

Tim, who was relatively new to charity recruitment at the time, was targeted by Channel 4 execs to be the perfect foil to the head of recruitment at Microsoft, Gok Wan, and the ‘Fairy Job Mother’ herself, Hayley Taylor.

With no expense spared, he was whisked off to a warehouse in North London to conduct a recruitment ‘speed date’ event with three unemployed young people to see how they managed under the pressure of an interview.

Whilst not the polished recruiter he is today, you can see by the insightful questions he asked (in the 30 seconds that didn’t end on the cutting room floor) the instinctive knack for recruitment that would lead him to the upper echelons of senior management at Bamboo.

Featured

The Great Funding Shift: Why UK Public Services Are Turning to Fundraising Professionals

Mentoring Matters: Why Every New Charity Fundraiser Needs a Guiding Hand

How The 93% Club's Success Points to Untapped Development Potential in State Schools

UK charity fundraising requires institution-wide leadership

Making the Case for External Fundraising Consultants: Delivering Value for UK Nonprofits

The Heart of the Matter: Why Hiring Values-Aligned Fundraising Leaders Is Non-Negotiable for Independent Schools

The Political Merry-Go-Round Has Picked Up Speed

Mind the Funding Gap: How the Right Fundraising Consultant Helps Schools and Charities Thrive

Tim Barnes 28/11/2018 Tim Barnes 28/11/2018

Tenuously Fundraising

Read on for the most tenuously fundraising-related blog ever written.

We’ve been staring at this cursed blinking caret (we had no idea that's what the text cursor is called), trying to figure out how to crowbar some kind of fundraising analogy to the picture below.

There’s something around two types of fundraisers. Some are like dogs - they greet everyone and love to be out there making friends and bringing them into the fold. And some are like cats - independent thinkers, constantly testing, and trying to figure out how things work.

We planned to end on some sort of laboured point about cats and dogs working together to make the world a better place.

But it just looked like what it was - the Bamboo team trying to shoehorn a picture of Graham’s dog (Ricky) and cat (MoonCake) looking cute together into a blog post.

Let us know if you're a fan, and perhaps we’ll set up some sort of Ricky and MoonCake Corner. Or don't bother, as we’re likely to do it anyway.

Featured

The Great Funding Shift: Why UK Public Services Are Turning to Fundraising Professionals

Mentoring Matters: Why Every New Charity Fundraiser Needs a Guiding Hand

How The 93% Club's Success Points to Untapped Development Potential in State Schools

UK charity fundraising requires institution-wide leadership

Making the Case for External Fundraising Consultants: Delivering Value for UK Nonprofits

The Heart of the Matter: Why Hiring Values-Aligned Fundraising Leaders Is Non-Negotiable for Independent Schools

The Political Merry-Go-Round Has Picked Up Speed

Mind the Funding Gap: How the Right Fundraising Consultant Helps Schools and Charities Thrive

Tim Barnes 21/11/2018 Tim Barnes 21/11/2018

Seven minutes of fame: Graham on the Victoria Derbyshire Show

See Bamboo Director Graham Drew’s admirable performance under pressure on the Victoria Derbyshire show, talking about prejudice against blind people.

Less than 12 hours after receiving the call from BBC top brass, Bamboo Director, Graham found himself on the Victoria Derbyshire show talking about prejudice against blind people.

After a change in the running order that neither he nor his BBC-supplied driver was informed about, he was hustled straight from car to hot seat by panicky producers in less than three minutes.

Check out his admirable performance under pressure below, from his arrival on set to the closing shot of Ricky looking bored to tears.

Featured

The Great Funding Shift: Why UK Public Services Are Turning to Fundraising Professionals

Mentoring Matters: Why Every New Charity Fundraiser Needs a Guiding Hand

How The 93% Club's Success Points to Untapped Development Potential in State Schools

UK charity fundraising requires institution-wide leadership

Making the Case for External Fundraising Consultants: Delivering Value for UK Nonprofits

The Heart of the Matter: Why Hiring Values-Aligned Fundraising Leaders Is Non-Negotiable for Independent Schools

The Political Merry-Go-Round Has Picked Up Speed

Mind the Funding Gap: How the Right Fundraising Consultant Helps Schools and Charities Thrive

Tim Barnes 14/11/2018 Tim Barnes 14/11/2018

#1 Stats: Salary vs Job Title

We’ve often wondered if there’s an underlying logic behind job titles for fundraisers in the charity sector.

In this post we look at the most common job titles, the average salaries, and the ‘ranking’ of job titles by salary.

We’ve often wondered if there’s an underlying logic behind job titles for fundraisers in the charity sector.

After all, one charity’s ‘Head Of’ can be another charity’s ‘Senior Executive’. And someone with the uncomplicated job title of ‘fundraiser’ can get paid in excess of £50k at one charity and less than £25k at another.

Although it would be lovely to live in a world where your job title doesn’t matter, and it’s what you do that counts, unfortunately, we don’t.

Many people turn down jobs because the title is ‘manager’ rather than ‘head of’ when the role is in fact leading a team and reporting to the director of fundraising. So it is, in all but name, a ‘head of’ role at most other charities.

This got us thinking – within fundraising, what are the most common job titles, average salaries and what is the ‘ranking’ of job titles by salary?

For simplicity's sake, we’ve kept it to Greater London-based roles, advertised directly by charities, across three charity job boards.

This means all the following information may be useless, but when we get around to doing this again, we can compare the numbers and draw something a little more useful.

First things first, we’ve discounted job titles where there were less than a handful advertised. We’ve included the upper limit where a range was included and removed the highest and lowest salaries (to create a truncated mean).

And it’s worth reiterating that this is all based on jobs that are currently advertised.

The Results

Assistant

Mean: £23,714
Median: £24,000
Standard Deviation: £487

Coordinator

Mean: £28,250
Median: £26,000
Standard Deviation: £5188

Officer

Mean £29,261
Median: £29500
Standard Deviation: £3414

Fundraiser

Mean £31,200
Median: £31,500
Standard Deviation: £5731

Executive

Mean: £31,666
Median: £31,000
Standard Deviation: £3524

Senior Executive

Mean £32,611
Median: £31,000
Standard Deviation: £1414

Senior Officer

Mean £34,561
Median: £34,250
Standard Deviation: £1707

Manager

Mean £38,372
Median: £40000
Standard Deviation: £4525

Senior Manager

Mean £41,444
Median: £42,000
Standard Deviation: £3166

Lead

Mean £44,734
Median: £44,000
Standard Deviation: £11,313

Head of

Mean £51,666
Median: £49,000
Standard Deviation: £11,587

Director

Mean £62,821
Median: £60000
Standard Deviation: £6260

We wondered whether coordinator, officer, and executive were interchangeable. (anecdotally, we suspected that (at least in terms of salary) a coordinator was the most junior, then the exec, then the officer.)

Whilst coordinators do get paid less, it seems that officers, on average, get around £1000 less than executives. And bizarrely, senior executives get paid around £2000 less than senior officers and only around £1000 more than execs. Go figure.

Initially, we thought it was a surprisingly small difference between the average salary of a manager and a senior manager, but the £2000 pay rise for the addition of the word senior seems to be consistent, so fair enough.

Moving up the chain of command, things start to get a little more variable.

The standard deviation between salaries of ‘Heads of’ and ‘Leads’ (or team leaders) is in excess of £11k in both cases, suggesting there isn’t much consensus across the sector as to how much someone with this job title should get paid.

This makes sense. If you’re leading a 20-strong DM team at a charity with £300m of voluntary income, you should probably get paid more than a ‘Head of’ major donor role, where you’re leading a team of two.

So, after all that, nothing too surprising. As we had all the data in an Excel spreadsheet, we thought we’d add a graph for the hell of it:

We’ll revisit this again and see if things have changed.

Featured

The Great Funding Shift: Why UK Public Services Are Turning to Fundraising Professionals

Mentoring Matters: Why Every New Charity Fundraiser Needs a Guiding Hand

How The 93% Club's Success Points to Untapped Development Potential in State Schools

UK charity fundraising requires institution-wide leadership

Making the Case for External Fundraising Consultants: Delivering Value for UK Nonprofits

The Heart of the Matter: Why Hiring Values-Aligned Fundraising Leaders Is Non-Negotiable for Independent Schools

The Political Merry-Go-Round Has Picked Up Speed

Mind the Funding Gap: How the Right Fundraising Consultant Helps Schools and Charities Thrive

Tim Barnes 09/11/2018 Tim Barnes 09/11/2018

Idealism of the Charity Fat Cats

A regular feature from our columnist Peter O’Pinion, taking his hand to dissecting charity bashing articles, both old and new, from the Daily Mail Online.

Straight to calculator

While this isn’t a new topic, it’ll no doubt rear its head again after the recent announcement of Persimmon boss Jeff Fairburn’s £75m bonus payout.

So, we did some digging on the Daily Mail website and found an article that offers a wonderful contribution to the “charity fat cat bosses” discourse.

In case you’re not keen on clicking a Daily Mail link, here’s a summary of the delightful article from Stephen Glover:

“Why I no longer give to charities whose bosses take home fat cat salaries.

Many charity bosses are no longer low-paid idealists who spend their lives working for one or two charities. They flit between the charitable and private sectors. And if they end up as chief executives of charities, they are likely to be paid amounts which some people will think obscene.”

Shouldn’t charity bosses be paid less than their counterparts in the private sector by virtue of the job they do?”

We realise there’s an element of editorial sensationalism at play here, but it’s surprising how little regard for any degree of factual analysis Stephen Glover has when attacking the cornerstone of the short-lived Torie wet dream, “the Big Society.” Don’t get us wrong, we’re all for a little bit of objective mirror gazing from time to time, just not blasting misguided lasers into mirrors that others are using.

Let’s start with the first quote. Stephen, you’re kidding no one. We don’t believe that you ever have or ever will give to charity, although it depends on whether you count political donations to UKIP as donations.

Given the appalling lack of research and insight in your article, it strikes us as characteristically incongruous that you’d choose to do such diligent research on where your monthly philanthropic pennies should be spent.

Charity Bosses Should be Paid Less

Next, taking aim at his easily checkable assertion that charity bosses should earn less than their private sector counterparts - they do.

Bosses of the FTSE 100 receive an average annual pay award of £7.7m*
Bosses of the FTSE 250 receive an average annual pay award of £2.5m*
Bosses of the top 100 UK charities, by income, receive an average annual pay award of £187,900*

We know what you’re thinking, hands dusted, and move on to the next article. But, no. Ol’ Stephen goes on to state that charity bosses should be idealists.

Why do they want massive stacks of cash for doing good work? Should good work not be its own reward?

Let’s ignore how infantilising that particular narrative is for a moment and move on to the next point.

Where have all the idealists gone?

We were going to start by attacking the distinct lack of common sense in asking Uncle Derick to consider running Save the Children (£1.5bn turnover / 24,000 employees / operates in 120 countries / CEO salary of £227,300 / currently employing the ex-Prime Minister of Denmark as their CEO) as he has a bit of time on his hands since retiring from the City and taking to pottering his country pile.

But we then realised Stephen thinks he has us by the short and curlies because what he is asking of charity CEOs is so ethereal that he thinks there’s no objective way for us to dispel his unscientific blathering.

How wrong he is.

I present to you the (patent pending) Idealism Rating Formula.

If we accept the following facts:

We can see that Charity CEOs are taking home 97.6% less than their counterparts in the FTSE 100, and 89.6% less than their counterparts in the FTSE 250.

But we all know Stephen isn’t convinced by such trivial things as comparative analysis, so why don’t we delve a bit deeper using our friend, pop science?

This is how the above salaries look as a percentage of turnover:

FTSE 100: 0.04%*
FTSE 250: 0.21%*
Top 100 Charities: 0.06%*

Surprisingly, our good friends in the UK’s biggest companies are taking an altruistic 0.02% less than these fat cat charity bosses, although that’s probably because even the folks over at GlaxoSmithKline would probably have to admit that paying their CEO a salary of £65 million (which is what it would be if using the FTSE 250 ratio) would be a little gratuitous.

If the charity sector were to match the 0.04% ratio of the FTSE 100, charity bosses would pull an average salary of £116,800, which is still higher than the ‘ire benchmark’ of the Daily Mail.

That being said, we need to combine the ratios of the FTSE 100 & 250 to get an average for the sector that the charity sector is competing with when it comes to talent.

This gives us a private sector ratio of 0.125% vs the charity sector ratio of 0.06%.

If we assume that a large part of the idealism of charity sector leaders and staff is that they choose to work in a sector where the salaries are up to 97.6% lower in real terms, it’s also worth noting that the average private sector Chief would expect to be paid £365,253 in the charity sector, meaning charity bosses are paid 51.5% less in adjusted terms.

With that preamble out of the way, it’s time for the moment you’ve all been waiting for:

Charity avg. CEO pay = ©

Charity avg. revenue = £

((FTSE 100 avg. CEO pay / FTSE 100 avg. revenue * 100) + (FTSE 250 avg. CEO pay / FTSE 250 avg revenue * 100) / 2)) = $

(© / ((£/100) * $)) * 100 = Idealism Rating

The next time some pip squeak starts sounding off about overpaid charity staff at a dinner party, or your supporter care team receives a strongly worded email about something someone read in the tabloids, be sure to send them the above.

The way the rating works is simple. The higher the number, the less idealistic charity bosses are. 0 = working for free, 100 = no idealism at all.

It’s possible to have an idealism rating higher than 100, but you’d have to start asking some serious questions.

We’ve provided a handy calculator below so you can work out the idealism rating of any Charity CEO you like. Go nuts.

[CP_CALCULATED_FIELDS id="6"]

*The figures have been calculated using our own original workings. See below for details.

Each of the charity top 100, FTSE 250 and FTSE 100 were calculated using a sample of 10 organisations for each. These organisations were selected through the incredibly scientific method of picking them out of a hat.

If you want to question our methods, we don’t blame you.

FTSE 250