Location: London
Hours: 37 hours per week
Salary: £33,456 - £42,346 per annum + generous benefits
Contract: Permanent
Closing date: 3 April 2020
Interview date: 9 April 2020
Do you take pride in your work and have an excellent professional attitude? We are looking for a Policy and Briefings Manager to work within the Policy and Public Affairs team for The National Lottery Community Fund.
About Us
The National Lottery Community Fund is the largest community funder in the UK. Last year we distributed more than £700 million to over 13,000 projects across the UK.
We believe strong, vibrant communities are built and renewed by people living in them. Communities come in all shapes and sizes, and The National Lottery Community Fund is there for all communities.
We focus on supporting organisations with great funding ideas, local or UK wide, large or small, that will create opportunities for people and communities to improve their lives by putting people in the lead. We aim to work with customers flexibly and on their terms, improving the ways we interact with communities and building partnerships with funders, VCSE sector, individuals and of course communities.
About the role
This role is unique in the team and the successful applicant will focus on supporting the CEO of the largest community funder in the UK.
We need someone with a common-sense approach, with experience within the charity sector, who can work in a fast-paced environment. This would suit someone with existing experience of briefing senior management. Importantly we need someone who is curious about the society we live in and passionate about the vital role of charities and voluntary organisations in helping communities to thrive and about the work The National Lottery Community Fund does.
You value well written, concise, audience-focused content and are willing to spend time and effort on doing the research to really understand an issue or topic and then crafting the right message. You need to be good with tight deadlines and able to work well and confidently with colleagues, especially at a senior level.
You will be drafting correspondence, speeches, presentations and briefings for the CEO, supported by our agreed key messages and policy lines to take. You will also support the Senior Head of Policy and Public Affairs with the policy work of the Fund. You will ensure all content is accurate, reflects our strategic priorities, is clear and consistent and helps to enhance the Fund’s reputation and communicate key messages to our stakeholders.
We are at an exciting stage in further developing the Fund’s policy agenda – and this role will be at the heart of a new dynamic policy team who will use the learning and insight from the projects we fund and share that with UK policy makers.
The Person
We are an equal opportunities employer and positively encourages applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates regardless of sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion or belief, marital status, or pregnancy/maternity. We are committed to increasing employment opportunities for people with disabilities and will respond positively to meet individual needs throughout the recruitment process. Once in post, the National Lottery Community Fund will ensure that any appropriate reasonable adjustments to our workplace are made, in order to support colleagues with any form of disability.
Location: Fermanagh and Omagh
Salary: £21,688 - £24,786 per annum + generous benefits
Closing date: 30 March 2020
Interview date: TBC
Are you a confident communicator who enjoys working with people?
Do you see the potential in ideas as well as the challenges?
Are you passionate about making a difference in your local community?
The National Lottery Community Fund is looking for a Local Funding Officer to work in the Fermanagh and Omagh area to ensure our grant making responds to what matters to local people and communities. Our Funding Officers build long-term relationships with people and VCSE groups to discuss their funding ideas, ambitions and assess funding requests providing useful feedback and support to our customers. Our office is in Belfast, but we are particularly keen to extend our presence in the Fermanagh and Omagh area.
We focus on supporting organisations with great funding ideas, local or NI wide, large or small, that will create opportunities for people and communities to improve their lives by putting people in the lead. We aim to work with customers flexibly and on their terms, improving the ways we interact with communities and building partnerships with funders, VCSE sector, individuals and of course communities.
We are changing the way we work in Northern Ireland by improving our grant-making processes and by moving closer to the communities we fund/support. We are looking for diverse and talented individuals who share our values and are passionate about making a difference to people and communities by advancing equalities and funding great ideas that matter most to communities.
Local Funding Officers are responsible for our grant-making activity in a geographical area, including early contact, pre-application support, assessment, decision-making and learning and support. You will ensure our funding responds to the local context and challenge yourself and colleagues to continually improve the way we work in supporting local communities.
You will build long term relationships with people and organisations in the Fermanagh and Omagh area. This will include reaching out to new and under the radar groups, supporting groups who are applying and continuing to support successful groups (post-grant being awarded) to obtain and share learning/best practice.
You will be responsible for understanding how customers funding ideas align with our funding priorities and making good judgements about when to take a funding idea further or when to signpost to other opportunities/funders.
You will combine local knowledge of communities and services, understanding of best practice and the experience of grant-holders to make informed recommendations about who and what we fund through concise report writing and effective decision-making structures.
You will represent The National Lottery Community Fund within the Fermanagh and Omagh area including at funding fairs, external meetings, events/conferences, and create opportunities for groups and people to come together through outreach and community engagement. You will share learning from your conversations, events, grant holder reports and evaluations with other colleagues across the Fund so that we can maximise our impact and make meaningful change to the lives of people and communities who we support.
You’ll be part of the North Western Local Team, led by a Funding Manager and including a number of other Funding Officers. Therefore, excellent team working skills are essential in this role.
We are looking for individuals who are passionate about making a difference through our funding, who really understand communities, including the VCSE sector.
Essential
Strong written and verbal communication including report writing skills and confidence to operate in a wide range of environments
Ability to build, maintain and strengthen excellent working relationships
Excellent knowledge and understanding of the VCSE sector in Northern Ireland and the context it operates in.
Desirable
Sound IT skills
Confidence to use your own judgement, take initiative and challenge when appropriate
Be a supportive team player who shows interest in others, and develops a range of contacts outside own team to get the job done
You can work from a location within the Fermanagh and Omagh area, including your home with the expectation that you will be flexible in order to get the best outcomes for our customers. The role involves travel around the Fermanagh and Omagh area and travel into the Belfast office and travel expenses will be paid.
Location: Flexible / England
Salary: Competitive
Closing date: 5 April
Interview date: WC 13th April
About us
The National Lottery Community Fund is the largest community funder in the UK - we’re proud to award money raised by players of The National Lottery to communities across the UK. Last year alone we gave out over half a billion pounds (£508.5 million) of National Lottery funding to over 11,000 community projects across the UK, enabling even more people and communities to bring their ideas and ambitions to life. We support a wide range of health, educational, environmental, and charitable projects with grants ranging from as little as £500 to multi-million-pound programmes. 86% of our new grants were for less than £10k.
At the heart of everything we do is the belief that when people are in the lead, communities thrive. National Lottery funding is open to everyone and we’re privileged to be able to work with the smallest of grassroots groups right up to large UK-wide charities. We have changed how we work across the Fund to help us serve people and communities more effectively, working flexibly and on their terms; working closer to communities.
This is an exciting opportunity within our England Funding Directorate to develop and drive forward the delivery of our strategic framework and operating plan. The aim of the role is to support us on our journey to becoming an organisation that makes more informed choices about the resources given to us by National Lottery players: be it knowledge, people or money.
A key role in our England Directorate Senior Leadership team, you will lead on our performance, planning, insight and continuous improvement practices, using data and MI to identify key trends and opportunities for improvement, and steer the strategic direction of the function.
You will lead on our performance and planning practices, further developing our approach to operational management by developing our capability and capacity to regularly access and analyse key data and build it more explicitly into our decision-making processes. You will monitor our operational performance and implement timely corrective action where required; further developing our resourcing model and deepening our understanding of how we can optimise the use of resources across our different funding streams, locations and functions. You will further develop our planning processes to ensure we have, across England, a common understanding of our direction of travel and priorities, relevant to all teams and that are sufficiently agile given the ever-changing environment in which we operate
Alongside this, you will also lead on our insights, working with the wider Fund teams to further develop our approach to knowledge and learning, ensuring colleagues have access to required data and insight and work cross-functionally to share lessons learnt and best practice, incorporating learning in both our strategic and day to day grant making approach. You will also leverage internal and external stakeholders and networks to further develop our ability to deepen our understanding of the external context in which we work.
You will also lead our continuous improvement agenda, driving forward our effort and ability to work in an agile way, ensuring we are flexible and continue to improve in line with the insights we develop and feedback we receive both from customers and frontline staff.
You will be reporting to the Director, England and will be a key member of the England Senior Management Team, maintaining strong relationships with other members of the ESMT as well as with colleagues in other country portfolios and in our Corporate Functions, specifically IT, the Service Design Team, the People Team and the Insight and Engagement Team. This role cannot function in isolation and we need to ensure alignment, not only across England, but also across the Fund as a whole. You will manage a team of people with expertise in performance and planning, insight and continuous improvement to help you achieve the objectives of this role.
About you
As an experienced senior leader, you’ll have a passion for our purpose and an appreciation of our sector combined with a focus on delivery and operational excellence. Solutions-focussed you’ll have an eye for identifying improvement opportunities and outstanding interpersonal and communication skills, you’ll also need to demonstrate your experience and qualifications in these areas:
For you
We seek to develop our staff and offer a wide range of personal development opportunities.
We offer a wide range of generous benefits including:
Generous annual leave and company pension scheme
Flexible working to support staff with their work/life balance, taking into account things such as caring responsibilities, worship and attendance at religious festivals
Enhanced paid maternity, paternity and adoption leave
Season ticket and cycle to work loans
Paid volunteering leave
Equality, diversity and inclusion in our grant-making, and amongst our people, are all vital to our success in supporting people and communities to thrive. We believe our people should represent the communities, organisations and individuals we work with. We are committed to being an inclusive and great place to work, and recognise our people come from diverse backgrounds. We are a Disability Confident employer and positively welcome applications from disabled people.
Closing date: 29 March
Interview date: WC 6 April
This is an exciting opportunity to join the England Senior Management Team and lead our responsive funding across our 6 regions. Our regions span a diverse and complex geography and our grant portfolio reflects this, with awards from £10.000 over a few months to multi-million over a number of years across a wide variety of themes. As a generalist funder aiming to respond to what matters to communities we have, within our framework, the flexibility to fund a wide range of projects and organisations; we are present in almost all communities across England and our funding supports communities to address almost all of what matters to them today. You will oversee the allocation of our £200m commitment budget, and will lead a team of c.150 largely remotely-based, mobile team members across the regions.
The aim of the role is to maximise the impact of our funding and lead the strategic direction and management of our regional grant portfolio. You will be accountable for all aspects of strategic and operational management, including development of funding priorities, management of our grant budget, operational excellence, staff support and development and key stakeholder management. With the regional teams and our new ways of working embedding and a new grant-making system in place, our focus now needs to move on fully achieving the ambitions of our Strategic Framework which will require, amongst others:
maintaining a nuanced balance between being responsive to the local context but being strategic at portfolio level
further deepening our understanding of how our funding can best contribute and add value
further connecting with others, be it other funders, stakeholders in the community as well as statutory bodies to look for ways to collaborate and share learning
Working with the 6 Heads of Region who report into you, you will ensure a level of consistency in the ways of working across the regions so that our customers and staff enjoy a unifying National Lottery Community Fund experience, while allowing flexibility where appropriate to recognise local differences.
As a senior leader, you will be a key representative of the National Lottery Community Fund, supporting the Director, England in further developing our relationships with key stakeholder at national level and cross-regional level and support the Heads of Regional Funding as required to further develop relationships within the regions.
You will be a key member of the England Senior Management Team, maintaining strong relationships with other members of the ESMT as well as with colleagues in other country portfolios and in the corporate support teams (specifically the Insight and Engagement Team and product development team); this role can not function in isolation and we need to ensure alignment, not only across England, but also across the Fund as a whole.
We’re looking for someone who is passionate about making a difference through our funding, with a deep understanding of the communities we serve. You will have experience of building and leading teams and driving a high-performance culture through your ability to coach, inspire, and empower people. Your ability to build and maintain excellent relationships with a range of senior level internal and external stakeholders will be second to none, and you will be a confident communicator, comfortable in all environments. You will demonstrate an ability work in an agile way, ensuring we are flexible and continue to improve in line with feedback and insights from customers and frontline staff.
Our regional teams
As part of our transformation to working more closely to the communities we support, we have created 6 regional teams across England, run out of 6 regional offices: London, Birmingham, Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds and Exeter. Team members are dispersed, based in their local communities. The regional teams are mainly responsible for awarding and managing our grants over £10,000, but, crucially, are also responsible for developing the local understanding and local connections that will enable us to ensure that our funding makes the most difference to local people and communities.
Relationships are at the core of the way the regional teams work; relationships with applicants, grant holders, other funders, local decision-makers and other stakeholders and, of course, the local community.
Our local ways of working need to respond to the local context but remain sufficiently consistent across our organisation – we are all part of the National Lottery Community Fund and our core goals and principles need to transpire in whatever we do, wherever we do it.
As an experienced senior leader, you’ll have excellent understanding of the sector combined with a focus on delivery and operational excellent, an eye for improvement opportunities and outstanding interpersonal and communication skills. In addition to this you’ll need to demonstrate your experience and qualifications in these areas:
Experience and understanding of the environment we operate in and the communities we serve
Excellent leadership capabilities and highly developed people skills, using your gravitas to enable and develop the regional teams and motivate them to succeed. Introducing consistent and realistic core principles, priorities and deliverables based on an understanding of the organisational as well as local context
Good decision-making skills, considering evidence, analysis and personal experience to take and mitigate risk as appropriate
Critical thinking, with a natural inclination to challenge the status quo as and when required to drive improvement
Implementing effective performance management, planning, risk analysis and governance resulting in greater impact and efficiency
Developing and enhancing relationships with senior stakeholders across sectors, representing the Fund externally
Experience in budgeting and data analysis, as well as developing and delivering annual and longer-term strategic operating plans
Values-driven and passionate about the Fund’s purpose