Edinburgh Napier University strives to deliver the best teaching, to the widest range of students who can benefit from it, in ways that are appropriate to the needs of students and employers. Philanthropic support plays a critical role for many students by providing much-needed financial assistance and encouragement to enable them to access and complete higher education, as well as pursue extra opportunities to enhance their studies whilst they are at university.

Our Development Office works with a wide range of partners to assist the development of the University, its students, alumni and staff. It has two main aims: to raise philanthropic funds and to enhance the University's relationships with its alumni and friends worldwide.

As such, we are currently recruiting a Development Officer to grow fundraising and lead the disbursement of the University Scholarships and Awards programme by expanding the portfolio of valued donors.

The Role:

As Development Officer, you will have the opportunity to use your experience in fundraising or sales to generate income from corporate and individual donor relationships, in turn growing new scholarship and bursary funding.

Your fundraising knowledge/experience and proficiency in soliciting donations from companies/individuals will serve you well, as you lead the development and implementation of our strategy to grow named scholarships, and bursaries, in line with the department fundraising plan.

The role will also give you the chance to use your strong relationship building skills and ability to quickly build rapport, to engage with philanthropists, corporates and charitable trusts, building their sense of connection to the Edinburgh Napier students who will directly benefit from the funding that you secure, making this a truly rewarding role.

We expect that your strong attention to detail will allow you to manage the administrative duties of the post as well, and you will need to use your understanding of basic finance procedures (including overseeing income and expenditure accounts) to maintain accurate records of awards, ensuring that budgets for various student scholarship and grant programmes are managed.

This is a post that will see you making a positive and profound difference in the lives of many of the students that we support. Furthermore, we hope that this will be a logical next step for you as you build on your fundraising knowledge/experience, taking on a role that will see you meeting a wide variety of interesting people, while supporting the University in planning approaches for philanthropic backing of our academic objectives.

What we will need from you:

• Further or higher education, or relevant work experience
• Experience of sales or soliciting donations from companies or individuals
• Ability to assess funding applications and liaise with student applicants
• Experience of working in a customer-focused role including dealing with queries and resolving issues
• Experience of writing formal reports, case studies or papers.
• Excellent communication and organisational skills

Full role description

Benefits we offer:

41 days annual leave, generous pension scheme (17.6%), flexible working and professional development opportunities. Our benefits can be viewed here.

Edinburgh Napier University strives to deliver the best teaching, to the widest range of students who can benefit from it, in ways that are appropriate to the needs of students and employers. Philanthropic support plays a critical role for many students by providing much-needed financial assistance and encouragement to enable them to access and complete higher education, as well as pursue extra opportunities to enhance their studies whilst they are at university.

Our Development Office works with a wide range of partners to assist the development of the University, its students, alumni and staff.

Currently, we are recruiting a Database, Operations and Insights Manager to lead the team at the heart of our busy department and deliver an effective operating and reporting structure for data management that advances the strategic delivery of Edinburgh Napier University’s fundraising development and alumni relations.

The Role:

As Database, Operations and Insights Manager you will have the opportunity to use your strong experience of developing relational/fundraising databases to design and lead the implementation of the operations strategy for the Development and Alumni Department and manage the way our systems are developed (indexed, updated, cleansed and archived).

If you have experience of databases such as Raisers Edge or eTapestry, then your knowledge will serve you particularly well as you develop and maintain our database and financial systems to engage alumni, steward donors, manage income and award disbursements, while ensuring the efficient flow of information collected from our website to the database and vice versa.

Your management skills will also be essential for building and motivating the team, and ensuring leadership and direction to staff members, allocating tasks, monitoring progress, motivating and training, while making sure that all data processes and policies are kept up to date.

Furthermore, your skills in quality control and experience of managing data securely will help to ensure the integrity of the database and adherence to GDPR.

This is an excellent opportunity for you to use your experience in fulfilling the next step in your career as a Database Manager, supporting key activity such as funding campaigns, alumni engagement and stakeholder management, which in turn will benefit the next generation of students and see you joining an institution that prides itself on making a positive difference to all of our stakeholders.

What we will need from you:

• A degree or equivalent professional experience demonstrating success in delivering a similar role to this post.
• Extensive experience using and developing relational databases
• Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Office products – specifically Word, Excel, Access and Outlook
• Experience of quality control to ensure integrity of database and adhering to GDPR
• Leadership and management skills
• Extensive knowledge of Raiser’s Edge CRM (desirable)

Full role description

Benefits we offer:

41 days annual leave, generous pension scheme (17.6%), flexible working and professional development opportunities. Our benefits can be viewed here.

As our Donor Relations and Stewardship Officer, you will be instrumental in stewarding a diverse portfolio of donors, including trusts, foundations, individuals, and corporations. You will manage the full stewardship cycle, from initial contact and gift acknowledgement to impact reporting and ongoing communication.

You will be responsible for nurturing donor relationships, ensuring they feel valued and connected to the QMU community by building robust systems and processes to manage engagement and communications. Your work will include creating engaging content on the impact of our donors and building strong relationships with our student recipients. This is a role where you can be creative, building new and lasting ways to share the impact of our donors’ support.

In this role you will create and deliver bespoke stewardship plans for donors and spend part of your time liaising with academics regarding fundraising projects and donors. You will also spend part of your time meeting/engaging with donors, leading to spending significant time researching and creating impact reports, donor communications and individual gift proposals. Alongside this, you will steward the delivery of some key philanthropic funds and projects, ensuring that the University delivers the impact expected by our donors.

The successful candidate will have a minimum of 2 years’ experience in donor relations, stewardship, development or a related field (for example in marketing and communications). You will possess the ability to produce inspiring copy and inspire donors in face-to-face engagement. You will have a passion for bringing creativity and innovation to your work, have excellent people skills, be highly efficient and organised, and be comfortable managing a range of tasks in parallel.

This is an exciting opportunity to make a real contribution to a forward looking university that has achieved a strong positive trajectory in philanthropic income and in alumni relations in the last few years.