Anyone work in fundraising (esp. philanthropy)?

[workroundabout]

I had a career crisis a few years ago and in need of a break took on an entry level admin role within a charity. It's been brilliant but I'm ready to move on & keen to work out a career path within the charitable sector rather than just float from one low paid admin job to another.

I'm looking at fundraising in particular the philanthropy/major donor arena. I'm interested to hear more from anyone who works in this area what the day-to-day job looks like, would you recommend this area of fundraising? What would you look for in a candidate looking to start their journey in this field - is there anything I can do now to improve my chances of being hired? I'm 50 so no spring chicken but have lots of transferrable skills (marcomms, stakeholder management, sales, M&E etc) and now at at time in my life where I want to focus on my career and hopefully retire in 15 years on a considerably higher salary than I'm on now!

My DD works on this field for a university. She is in her early 30s and her colleagues all appear to be around the same age. She came via jobs in publishing/sales. Sheloves her job.

I sort of work in a similar field but I would say that your age and experience is a distinct asset in this. We've had younger people come in who just don't want to pick up the phone - they think sitting 9-5 at a desk and sending one cold email and not hearing back means they cross a lead off their list! I think demonstrating a terrier-like tenacity to keep following up, not being discouraged by kissing a lot of frogs, being willing to travel and do things outside of normal office hours like dinners/networking/events, and being really organised in managing a pipeline is basically 90% of the job. I genuinely love meeting people, trying to figure out what they need (and how what I'm offering is a solution!), and trying to persuade them to put their money where it can really help.

Usually, I'd say that with fundraising it's all about results and experience - I got my current job having basically done it already for myself for free quite successfully so I was able to point to things I had done that worked well. Your transferable skills are great but it would also be useful to point to what you've done personally that has worked well.

Is there any way you can help the charity you're currently working for with fundraising? Or beef up what you do on the admin side, so that you can show that you're really actually more of a fundraising bod than admin?