What the job is really like
Read this before you apply. If it puts you off, it has saved us both a morning.
Open roles
The day
You meet the team in a town centre somewhere in Northern Ireland, in the morning, dressed for the weather. You are given a spot on a busy street, a tablet or a clipboard, and a cause you have been trained to explain. Then you spend the day stopping people who were not planning to stop.
Most walk past. Some are rude. A few stop, listen, and decide to give a few pounds a month to a charity they had not thought about ten minutes earlier. That moment is the job. Everything else is standing, walking, talking, and coping with rain.
The day ends at a set time. You go home. You do not take work with you.
The money
You are paid £90 for each day you work. Work three days, you earn £270 that week. Work five, £450. We do not quote a yearly figure, because it depends on how many days you work, and we would rather you did the sum yourself than trusted a number designed to impress you.
Who does well at this
People who are comfortable being told no forty times before lunch and still smiling at the forty-first person. People who can talk to a pensioner and a student in the same five minutes without changing who they are. People who turn up on time when it is cold, because the rest of the team is counting on them.
Experience in retail, hospitality, care, sport, sales or any job that involved talking to the public helps. So does having done any kind of voluntary work. Neither is required. What we cannot teach is showing up.
Who does not
If you need to be indoors, this is not for you. If you take rejection personally, it will wear you down in a fortnight. If you want to be paid for results rather than for the day, there are companies that work that way. We are not one of them.
Five to ten years on
Most people do this job for a season or a couple of years, and that is fine. The skill you leave with, talking a stranger into caring about something in ninety seconds, is worth having in almost any job that comes after: charity fundraising teams, sales, recruitment, community work, teaching, running your own business.
Some people stay and make it their career. Some go on to lead teams. We will not tell you that is the plan for you, because we have not met you yet.
The pitch you may have heard elsewhere
Some fundraising and marketing companies recruit with talk of Vegas trips, Lamborghinis, and running your own office within a year. If you have sat through one of those presentations, you will have noticed nobody told you what a Tuesday looks like.
Here is what a Tuesday looks like: a high street, a raincoat, £90, and a charity that gets a new regular donor if you do the job well. If that is enough, apply. If it is not, no hard feelings.
In their words
I thought I would hate the rain. It turns out the rain is not the hard part. The hard part is the first hour, and then it gets easier every day.
A fundraiser
Questions people ask before they apply
- Is this company real?
Yes. Quantum Marketing is a face-to-face fundraising business based in Northern Ireland, run by its founder, Joe, who interviews every applicant himself. Check us the way you would check any employer, and ask us anything at interview. We would rather you asked.
- Is it commission-only?
No. Pay is £90 per day worked.
- What will I actually earn?
£90 for each day you work. Multiply that by the days you work in a week and you have your week. We do not publish yearly figures or "on target earnings", because those numbers depend on assumptions about you that we cannot make before we have met you.
- Is it door-to-door?
Mostly it is on the street: town centres and high streets. Some campaigns are door to door. Each role page says which, so read it before you apply.
- Do I need experience?
No. It helps to have done any job where you talked to the public, but the things that matter most, turning up and not giving up, are not on anyone's CV. You do not need a CV to apply. If you have one, attach it, and a photo of a printed one is fine.
- What happens after I apply?
You get an email confirming we have your application. A person reads it. Software helps us sort applications by things like whether you can get to the location and the days you can work, but nobody is turned down by a computer, and you can ask for a person to look again at any decision. If it looks like a fit, we get in touch to arrange a conversation. Either way, you will hear from us.