The Justgiving Blog

Back in the autumn, we blogged about looking for a new Head of Client Services to lead our charities team.

We’re delighted to announce that, after a lot of searching and plenty of conversations, Charlotte Harris has agreed to join us. With over twelve years of charity and agency experience under her belt, she’ll be working with our existing team to ensure we deliver excellent client services.

Here’s Charlotte at our recent away-day with helpdesk hero, Huu and finance legend Ryan:

For four years, Charlotte was Commercial Director at Whitewater, where she managed the start-up and ongoing strategic direction of their specialist tribute giving division, Our Lasting Tribute.

In that post, she worked with over 50 charities in the UK and another 20 in North America and Australia. Since leaving Whitewater, she’s worked for three years as a consultant with charities and third-party suppliers to the third sector.

Most recently, she carried out a large piece of quantitive and qualitative research on our behalf, to help us understand the issues facing our charities and how we can serve them better.

I asked Charlotte to explain why she wanted to join Justgiving:

“Do you remember Victor Kiam, the perma-tanned silver fox who-liked-the-product-so-much-he-bought-the-company? Well, while I’m neither tanned nor greying (well, only on closer inspection) but after spending two months working independently on Justgiving’s charity insights project, I kind of did a Victor.

I’ve worked with Justgiving in lots of different ways over the past seven years – as a charity client, as a partner supplier and more recently as a consultant – so the opportunity to take on a more formal role was too tempting to miss.

I know from first hand experience that Justgiving isn’t perfect, and there’s always room for improvement. However, I also recognise their incredible achievements. A strong theme in the charity research I did for Justgiving recently was that it’s seen as a brand of integrity and an expert in the field – which is backed up by the fact that almost 7 million donors trust Justgiving with looking after their data. That confidence in the product and the social enterprise values of the company were really attractive to me.

What are you looking forward to doing at Justgiving?

There are a fair few things on the list but first and foremost, I’m looking forward to getting out and meeting charities. One thing that’s high on my list is sharing our expertise more effectively. For example, Justgiving has arguably the single biggest repository of donor transactional information in the UK. I want to be able to see how we can translate that data into useful intelligence for our charities to help them ramp up their online fundraising.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I’m a keen ballroom dancer and am learning to rock climb, although being afraid of heights is a bit of an issue. At weekends you’ll find me at Stamford Bridge (this one, not that one). Great gardens make me weak at the knees. I don’t like chocolate which means I am looked on with suspicion by most people.”

Welcome to the Justgiving team Charlotte, we’re very glad to have you on board!