5 ways to develop professionally at work when you're pressed for time!

Professional development is important. We all want to feel like we’re making progress and learning at work. You may well set aside time to focus on it, but it’s easy to get sidetracked by fundraising deadlines, ’urgent’ emails and requests from colleagues.

However, there are ways around it. Here are a few tips to help you progress professionally in the office.

1. Sign-up to relevant industry emails and blogs

There are a host of relevant fundraising blogs, newsletters and mailing lists to help you keep up to date with the latest developments in the industry. For example, check out Fundraising UK Ltd.

There are also general charity publications such as Charity Today and the Chartered Institute of Fundraising. If you don’t have time to read them when they arrive, flag them in your inbox and read during your lunch break, in those few snatched minutes between meetings, or at the start of your day with a coffee and croissant.

2. Connect with other charity professionals

You’d be surprised how much you can learn from other people working in the charity sector. So why not join CharityConnect, the online community for UK charity professionals?

Just spending a few minutes a day reading the conversations and asking questions can be enlightening.

3. Find a mentor

Want some help and advice on growing in your current role and/or taking the next step? A mentor could be the ideal solution.

A mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person. In an organisational setting, a mentor influences the personal and professional growth of a mentee. Essentially, it’s like having your own career cheerleader!

There’s a wealth of free mentoring schemes you can sign up for. Check out the CIPD and CharityComms for starters.

4. Listen to podcasts and watch TED Talks

An easy way to increase your industry knowledge is to listen to a podcast on your commute. Charity Chat covers various topics related to the sector.

Or why not watch a TED Talk on the way home? Simon Sinek’s How great leaders inspire action is a great watch for anyone who works for, or wants to work for, a charity as it discusses focusing on ‘why’ you do what you do.

5. Catch up with your webinars on a Friday afternoon

Do you sign-up to webinars but then not have time to attend? Usually, if you sign-up, you’ll be sent a recording afterwards. So why not take the opportunity to catch up on a Friday afternoon, while doing some admin? You can have the webinar playing in the background and kill two birds with one stone. CAF have some interesting ones on a range of topics, from ‘how to build long-term relationships with your donors’ to ‘Facebook tips for small and medium-sized charities’.

It can be a struggle to find the time for learning during the working week, but the trick is to build small amounts of time into your daily routine. If you can squeeze in one or two of these quick ideas, you’ll keep your skills and knowledge on point!

If you’re looking for a job in fundraising, give us a call on 0203 750 3111.

Green fundraising: Five tips to reduce your environmental impact

The weather is heating up across the UK. It’s a stark reminder that climate change is a very real problem.

The World Health Organisation anticipates that from 2030, 250,000 people will die each year due to the effects of climate change.

And the Climate Clock shows there are just seven years before the damage becomes irreversible.

With this in mind, here are five ways you can make your fundraising more eco-friendly.

1. Include it in your mission

Your cause may not directly relate to the environment, but your environmental impact matters.

Let’s say you support children’s mental health. Knowing that by the time those children grow up, they will be at serious risk of health problems and an increasingly uninhabitable planet can’t be good for their mental well-being.

Maybe you fund research for a specific health condition.

If hospitals are overloaded with climate change-related health emergencies, there will be longer waiting times and fewer beds available for the people you help.

2. Review your purchases

Every purchase you make, from volunteer t-shirts and printer paper to laptops and light bulbs, is an opportunity to make a small but meaningful change.

Before parting with your cash, ask yourself if it’s an essential purchase.

There’s a reason the word ‘reduce’ exists in the phrase ‘reduce, reuse, recycle. It’s the easiest way to reduce our environmental impact.

If the purchase is necessary, ask your supplier if the product is sustainably made and recyclable.

If possible, buy from a local supplier, to reduce emissions from shipping.

You may not be able to tick all the boxes, but, to quote Tesco, ‘every little helps’.

3. Look at your waste

Are you creating waste by buying more than you need? Or are you throwing things away when they could be reused or recycled?

A quick audit of your bins can be very revealing.

These days, most charities recycle paper and card as standard, but plastic, organic waste, glass, batteries, printer cartridges, and coffee cups often get overlooked.

Here are four key reasons to recycle:

• Preserves precious natural resources

  Recycling items rather than using raw materials to make new things preserves the planet’s natural resources, which, in the face of population growth and growing demand, won’t last forever.

• Saves energy

  Recycling uses less energy than extracting, processing, and transporting raw materials to make new products.

• Less harm to the environment

  Think about how raw materials are extracted, and the harm these activities do to the earth. Mining, quarrying, logging, and fracking contribute to air and water pollution and destroy animal’s habitats.

• Reduces the amount of waste sent to landfill

  Recycling reduces the amount of waste we send to landfill. This is important as waste rots in landfill, leaching toxins into the groundwater and soil. As it decomposes, it gives off greenhouse gases like methane, which contribute to global warming.

4. Check your energy supplier

Not all energy suppliers are created equal when it comes to sustainability.

Some still use fossil fuels, while others have committed to 100% renewable energy.

Sure, the power of a charity is in its people, but electricity helps too. So why not make it environmentally friendly?

Check out this list of 100% renewable energy providers in the UK and consider making the switch.

Want to find yourself a sustainability specialist? We can help. Give us a call on 0203 750 3111 or email info@bamboofundraising.co.uk to find out how.

Dame Deborah James: A one-woman fundraising machine

On June 29, the world lost an inspirational fundraiser, campaigner, and influencer in Dame Deborah James. She passed away at the age of 40 after stopping active treatment for bowel cancer.

In 2016, the former headteacher was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer. Following her diagnosis, she started a blog and social media account under the handle @bowelbabe, where she spoke candidly about her experiences with the illness.

She also wrote a regular column in The Sun, penned a book called F*** You Cancer: How to Face the Big C, Live Your Life and Still Be Yourself, co-hosted the BBC Radio 5 Live podcast You, Me and the Big C, and raised millions for The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, Bowel Cancer UK, and Cancer Research UK.

Fundraising Queen

Deborah underwent more than a dozen operations, and multiple rounds of gruelling chemotherapy and radiotherapy over the years. But through it all, she pushed herself to run marathons and take part in a host of challenges to raise awareness and money for bowel cancer charities.

One of her final acts was to launch the Bowelbabe Fund, a JustGiving page with which she aimed to raise money to fund clinical trials and research into new bowel cancer treatments.

On the page, she wrote: “All I ask is that next time you pop for a coffee or grab a drink with a friend, please consider donating the cost of one extra for me.”

The fund surpassed £1m in less than 24 hours, smashing her initial goal of £250,000.

Her incredible fundraising efforts saw her receive a damehood from Prince William.

What inspired so many people to donate?

Dame Deborah inspired us with her incredible zest for life, despite facing her own mortality. She refused to let cancer define her and enjoyed every day, whether she was dancing at home with her kids or cracking jokes from a hospital bed.

Her indomitable spirit, coupled with her infectious sense of fun endeared her to millions and inspired us to donate over seven million pounds.

As Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid said following her death, “Dame Deborah James has left an incredible legacy and changed the national conversation around cancer. These figures reflect the powerful and lifesaving impact she has had – inspiring countless people across the country to get informed, get checked, and speak up”.

Final Word

Dame Deborah James was a phenomenal fundraiser who touched many people’s lives. If you’re inspired by her story and want to make your mark in the charity sector as a fundraiser, give us a call on 0203 750 3111 or email info@bamboofundraising.co.uk.

How to Shortlist Candidates

You’ve written a stellar job ad for a fundraising vacancy you're looking to fill. It’s been live for 30 days and has received an encouraging number of applications.

Your next team member is waiting to greet you like a warm hug on a winter’s night, however, to find that individual you need to trawl through 80 CVs and cover letters. Of the 80 hopefuls, you want to whittle it down to say, five or six people to interview.

It’s an arduous and time-consuming process. But it’s a vital piece of the recruitment puzzle.

For those of you who are new to the process, what’s the best way to shortlist candidates? Here’s a short guide.

1. Decide how many candidates you want on your shortlist

There’s no ideal number to shortlist to find your dream hire, nor is there a minimum or limit on how many people you can interview. So, it all comes down to how much time you have to invest in the shortlisting and interviews.

2. Determine your shortlist criteria

Once you’ve determined the length of your shortlist, you need to decide on the skills and knowledge you feel are needed for the role (incidentally, these details should at least in part, have been captured in the job description and person specification).

The criteria should correlate with job performance, based on the qualities and traits of the top performing employees in your charity who work in a similar role.

In broad terms, your shortlist criteria should include the following:

• Education: Does your new hire need to meet a minimum entry requirement, such as a degree with a minimum classification?

• Work experience: Do they need to have had experience at a particular type of charity, or in a particular field, such as corporate or major donor fundraising?

• Skills and knowledge: Do they need job-related expertise, such as data analysis or project management skills?

• Personality traits: Are interpersonal skills, effective team-working, or the ability to negotiate and influence people important for the role? If not, what is?

• Competencies: Does the candidate need to excel at certain things, such as problem-solving, decision making or leadership?

Once narrowed down, you’ll need to categorise the criteria into ‘essential’ and ‘desirable’.

Essential criteria are the things a candidate must meet to be considered for the role. While desirable criteria are those that would make someone a stronger candidate for the role but are not deal-breakers.

Bear in mind that, by law, the criteria you use must not discriminate against legally protected categories of applicants such as their age, sex, religion, or any disabilities they may have.

3. Create a shortlist scorecard

The next stage is to take your essential and desirable criteria and create a scorecard.

If you’re hiring someone for a community fundraising role, for example, your scorecard might include excellent organisational skills, strong interpersonal skills, and volunteer coordination experience. In each case, you’d provide a score of say 1-3 based on how well they fit each criterion.

Having a shortlist scorecard serves two purposes: it will ensure you’re applying each criterion fairly and consistently across all candidates and enable you to easily identify the strongest candidates.

4. Rank candidates against the scorecard

You’re now ready to start shortlisting. Firstly, reject all the applications that are missing essential criteria. Next, consider your desired criteria. Your approach here will depend on how far away you are from your target shortlist number. If you’ve got a lot of candidates to exclude, start by rejecting the ones with the fewest desirable criteria. Once you’re nearer your target, score each candidate based on how many of the desirable criteria they meet. You can then compare candidates and keep the best ones on your shortlist.

5. Pick up the phone

If, after all of the above steps, you still need to eliminate more candidates, you can always introduce a further screening aspect into your shortlisting process, such as a Skype chat or phone call.

If you go down this route, prepare a set of job-specific questions and be sure to ask each candidate the same questions in the same order. Make notes on their responses and score each answer in a matrix.

6. Let unsuccessful applicants know the score

This final point is an important one that many employers don’t bother with - and that’s to make sure you inform unsuccessful applicants that they’ve been… well, unsuccessful.

An email or short phone call is all it takes. It’s an act of courtesy that will make all the difference to the jobseeker and will do wonders for brand perception and public relations.

Final Word

These are a few of the basic steps you need to take to shortlist candidates. But the best way to ensure you get the best person for the job is to enlist the help of an expert.

This is where Bamboo comes in. Give us a call on 0203 750 3111 to get the process started. 

What to do if you make a bad hire

After a long search, you’ve hired someone to fill a vital position in your charity. Their CV was spot on, their interview flawless, and they had all the skills needed for the role.

And yet, a few weeks in, you can tell something’s not quite right. Maybe your new employee isn’t meshing with co-workers, or their work isn’t up to scratch and other employees are having to pick up the slack.

Instead of solving problems, your new employee is the problem.

Hiring the right person for a role is never easy, but what do you do when you realise that the person you hired isn’t the right fit for the organisation?

Here are 4 tips for dealing with a bad hire.

1. Get your facts straight

The first question to ask is whether the problems you see are just teething problems, or whether they reflect something deeper and more long-term. It’s important to speak to their team members, to get a comprehensive picture of what is going wrong, and why.

Speak to the new recruit’s direct manager and colleagues and get their take on it.

Speak to their line manager, HR, your onboarding team, and those responsible for training and discuss possible solutions.

Take the time to analyse and understand the feedback you’ve had from other team members: what are the higher-level insights, what isn’t working — and why?

2. Do some soul searching

Time for some soul searching: are you giving new recruits the support they really need? Could it be that this ‘bad hire’ is struggling because of you and not them?

Look back over your new hire’s application to help you understand where any mismatch of expectations might have come from.

3. Be honest with the new hire

“Bad hires” deserve honesty, too. No one likes surprises, so the employee needs to understand that they are not meeting expectations.

Share your concerns with them honestly but respectfully. You never know, they may be aware of the issues and be feeling the same way.

If it feels right, explore solutions that might satisfy you both.

4. Make sure you have a probation period in place

It might sound obvious, but this is exactly what probation periods are for.

Most employment contracts open with a clear period of time during which you can support your new recruit and find out whether they can succeed. Three months is a recommended trial period.

Spare yourself the cost of a bad hire by outsourcing

One of the most difficult tasks for any company is hiring new employees. Not only can it be a time-consuming process that detracts from your core focus, but it can be hard to know how to find the right candidate for your position and culture. That’s where we come in.

We can help you attract, select, and hire top candidates. We can act as an extension of your charity and handle all or part of the recruiting process.

If outsourcing your recruitment seems like the right move for your charity, give us a call on 0203 750 3111