Donor Development Officer
Wood Green Animal Shelters

Georgie S

00:00:03 My name is Georgie S and I am a Donor Development Officer at Wood Green Animal Shelters. My job is to raise income for the charity. Wood Green does not receive any income from the government or any lottery funding, so it comes purely from members of the public. So my job is to increase donations from them and get new supporters onboard.

00:00:28 At school, my favourite subjects were sports and all the creative subjects. So I loved English language, English literature, drama which was great for actually for fundraising. The subjects I was not so keen on were maths, science, those kind of subjects. The reason I didn’t want to go to university was it had never appealed to me. I don’t have a history in my family of people going to university, I would’ve been the first one.

00:01:00 And it just genuinely never appealed. I never wanted to move away from home at that stage either. So, because I didn’t know what my career path was going to be, I would never have known what degree to have taken. In terms of my job, I don’t have any regrets about not going to university, because fundraising is about experience. It’s much more important to have the experience in fundraising than it is to have the qualifications.

00:01:26 On a personal level, if I had my time again, I probably would’ve done the English language degree and I could still do that. I believe the turning point for me would’ve been when I joined the marketing department at the RSPB. The previous positions I held were absolutely relevant in terms of the experience I gained from them, but the passion for working for an organisation like that did not occur until I got into marketing.

00:01:58 And I saw skills that I had wanted to be, so I wanted to be a novelist but I was able to be creative, I had a creative outlet which I’d never had before. I think also the people that I met in marketing were very different from the people I’d met in the previous roles. Marketing people are very passionate, very flexible, very outgoing, very target-driven, and we’re very committed to the cause and I had not worked with those types of people before.

00:02:31 And so when I joined them, it opened my eyes up to feeling differently about my career and where I was going. My parents are very, very hard working. My Father has particularly got a very strong work ethic and fundraising is not a nine to five job, so I get that from him. He’s always been quite an inspiration in terms of what he does.

00:02:58 My Mum though was very concerned when I was offered the job at Wood Green. Animals are my passion, particularly dogs, and there was a big fear in her mind that I would come to Wood Green, I’d see these animals and I would be bringing them all home for me and she was very concerned and so she was very supportive, she was pleased I got the role but there was an initial concern about that.

00:03:24 I’m going to stay in fundraising always, and my dream role would be to help bears, polar bears, working on safari, fundraising in South Africa. Or my other passion is stately homes, so I would work for some sort of beautiful stately home. Locally we have a safari park here called Woburn Abbey which is a beautiful house and safari park as well, but it would combine the two ideally if not one or the other.