Special Event Manager

Leukaemia UK – Our Charity

Leukaemia UK is growing! We are expanding our team to achieve a step-change in income, profile and impact in 2025 and beyond. 

We are a ‘small but mighty’ charity with one big ambition: to stop leukaemia devastating lives. Over the next 10 years we want to help save and improve the lives of more people with leukaemia through finding and funding life-changing research.

Despite progress in recent decades, someone in the UK is diagnosed with a blood cancer every 16 minutes and survival rates are among some of the worst of any cancer.  And the physical and psychological impact can be lifelong. 

Our current strategy outlines our plan to increase our investment into ground-breaking world class research and policy development focused on improving access to kinder, more effective diagnosis, treatment and care for leukaemia and other blood cancers. To do this, we are embarking on a period of significant growth, investing strategically to grow our income, profile, influence, and engagement and impact.

As we begin the fourth year of this ambitious 5-year strategy, we are seeking a passionate and pro-active Special Events Manager to support in the delivery of our growing special event portfolio.

Team

We are a close-knit team, who are all passionate about Leukaemia UK and putting those affected by the disease at the heart of everything we do.  We are all focused on “keeping it real” with pragmatic, practical solutions, as well as ensuring that our charity gets the funding it needs to continue to help those diagnosed with leukaemia and other blood cancers.

From us you can expect fun and creativity, as well as great challenge and support. We may not be about the corporate life here, but we are all about delivering exceptional expertise and making a real change to people’s lives.

Leukaemia UK and You 

We have plans to increase our Special Events income from £300k in 2024 to over £500k in 2025 and you would play a leading role in allowing us to achieve this significant growth.

This role requires someone who loves organising, developing and delivering unique and memorable events. Do you have a strong track record in building a portfolio of sector-leading events that appeal to, engage with and retain, high value supporters? Do you enjoy meeting and bringing people together?

We are looking for a creative, hardworking and results driven Special Events Manager, who has experience of planning, developing and implementing a varied portfolio of high-quality donor-focused events and who is passionate about the impact our events can have in supporting the leukaemia community. In this exciting role, you will lead on the development and delivery of our flagship fundraising event, Who’s Cooking Dinner? working with the UK’s top chefs and restaurants. You will also play a key role in new and returning events such as a celebrity golf tournament ‘The Mini Masters,’ and our annual cultivation event.

This is a great role for someone looking to lead an area of significant growth for the charity, delivering exciting and unique events which raise funds and support our wider ambitions across philanthropy and the wider charity. You will also have line management responsibility for our newly created Special Events Officer role.

It’s a really special time to join the Philanthropy team at Leukaemia UK, as we look to achieve ambitious plans to raise even more funds through this income stream – which we know we can only do with a collaborative, high performing and ambitious team. We hope you’ll consider joining us!

Skills and Experience

• An ambitious but focused mindset, dedicated to delivering results
• Excellent relationship management skills, with diplomacy and discretion in working with high profile supporters
• Excellent verbal communication, networking and relationship-building skills
• Experience in managing and delivering Special Events within the charity sector
• Experience in working with an event committee and developing and managing key external stakeholders
• Experience in managing external agencies, suppliers, and freelancers
• Expertise in using CRM packages such as Salesforce
• Experience of tracking income and expenditure against budgets
• Effective project management skills, with experience of delivering high quality events
• Experience of working to ambitious team objectives and reporting against these
• Effective time management skills
• Line management experience

Job Specifics

• Hours: Full time hours are 37.5 Monday to Friday
• Location: We are very flexible! Our hybrid working policy is a minimum of two days per month in our London Office office. For the Philanthropy team this will vary dependent on meetings with internal and external stakeholders so your flexibility is a must. Our aim as the Philanthropy team is to work together in the office together one day a week, if and when possible.
• Salary range £40,000 - £48,000 (FTE)  
• First interviews will be held via Teams on Tuesday 14th January 2025  
• Second interviews will be face to face in our London Offices – at 26 Great Queen St, London WC2B 5BL on Wednesday 22nd January 2025.
• We are proud of our benefits – see a summary on our website Work with us - Leukaemia UK 

If you feel you have the passion for our work and the right mix of skills, energy, and flair to embrace this broad and challenging role and enable our strategy to fly, then we would love you to apply. Please also see the full job description attached to the advert.  

Application instructions: To minimise unconscious bias, we use anonymous recruitment and are unable to consider direct applications. Please apply via the CharityJob website with your CV and covering letter.

Closing Date: Midnight Sunday 5th January 2025

We look forward to hearing from you! 

Charlotte Holmes

Head of Philanthropy