My background and approach

Catherine Miles

I’ve been a professional Fundraiser for over 20 years, growing income at a range of national charities and leading teams raising over £40m pa. I’m passionate about enabling donors to make a difference to causes they care about. I’ve taken an innovative relationship fundraising approach to understand donors’ motivations and enable them to support charities in the ways they want to. This approach has significantly grown income and supporter engagement.

A key theme of my career has been building and developing Fundraising teams who have the skills and commitment to deliver step-changes in growth. I’ve done this through training, mentoring, coaching, succession planning and using Insights profiles to better understand working styles. This has led to increased staff retention, reduced turnover and successful internal progression.

in every role I’ve synced the fundraising strategy to the organisational strategy. Too often these can diverge in charities but I have focused on ensuring the fundraising strategy produces the right amount of income of the right type at the right time to meet the charity’s needs.

I started my career specialising in Trust and Major Gifts (high net worth individuals) fundraising and led teams to deliver growing income at both Mencap and Shelter. At Shelter I led on a major Fundraising Appeal focused on Major Gifts, including developing the case for support and acting as the key contact for the Appeal Board.

I then moved to blood cancer charity Anthony Nolan where i spent 7 years as Fundraising Director. During this time we tripled net income, built an Individual Giving programme from scratch, introduced an innovative relationship fundraising approach which quintupled net income from Community fundraising and won and delivered the 2014 Virgin Money London Marathon charity of the year adoption.

In 2016 I joined Breast Cancer Now as Fundraising Director, inheriting a team post a merger and delivering £29m voluntary income and driving growth in flagship mass participation products such as Wear it Pink.

I then moved to Battersea Dogs and Cats Home as Fundraising Director, leading a team of 67 working across all fundraising income streams to deliver income of £43m pa. I secured significant investment in Individual Giving to enable the Fundraising team to deliver the funding needed to support a new organisational strategy.

I speak regularly at sector conferences and events.