WWF UK has merged its communications and fundraising streams into one combined department.
The wildlife charity has made the move as part of its five-year strategy for 2013-18. And the head of this newly-merged department, executive director of communications and fundraising Tobin Aldrich, told civilsociety.co.uk that the initiative comes as part of the organisation’s desire to homogenise its resources.
“We have merged the separate fundraising and communications departments into a new team, called simply communications and fundraising,” said Aldrich. “WWF has a new five-year strategy with quite a lot of changes coming as a result. One of the things we decided we need to do was work together and integrate better.”
He said that the goal was to achieve greater synergy between public engagement and fundraising “to make sure that they support each other” – with a particular focus on the charity’s digital activities.
“We’re a growing charity in terms of supporters and income, but we decided that we were doing too many different individual activities and wanted to do a smaller number of joined-up ones instead.
“You’re more likely to see us doing larger, integrated campaigns going forward.”
Changes in personnel
The move has also meant a recruitment drive has been necessary. Recently WWF has advertised for a number of roles, including director of public fundraising; donor appeals manager; innovation project manager – fundraising; and senior fundraising campaign manager.
“As part of the restructure we’ve done quite a lot of rejigging of the old teams and as a result we’ve had some news jobs created and existing jobs go,” Aldrich explained. “It’s been a major recruitment exercise that we’re just coming to an end of now – we’ve created some new fundraising teams, one of which is public fundraising.
“We implemented the restructure a couple of months ago and are now just finishing it of in terms of recruiting.”
Another change is that heads and managers of teams have now been rebranded ‘directors’.
Aldrich added that the changes did not come from any financial pressures, and that overall WWF is deploying a similar number of resources and people, but the charity is merely organising them differently.
