Working at Oxfam: Colin Firth, coffee and fundraising

It's not in every line of work that an award-winning Hollywood actor makes you a coffee, but looking after Oxfam's fundraising is not exactly a normal job. You can hardly call meeting up with Colin Firth to discuss a new film initiative that would benefit Oxfam and support independent film typical.

My role as fundraising and supporter marketing director is to help Oxfam raise money from individuals in the UK, in whatever form they'd like to give. The work may involve overseeing the development of an advertising campaign, deciding whether we go to a full appeal campaign during a humanitarian emergency, signing off communications to supporters on how we have spent their money, or advising the marketing team who are constantly developing new fundraising products and ideas.

To give you an idea of scale, there are around 850,000 people who give us money each year – that's more than the number of people who are members of Britain's three main political parties put together. This weight of support, as well as being the financial backbone we depend on to do our work, gives us great legitimacy with governments or other bodies we're lobbying for change.

The variety of what I have to do gets me out of bed in the morning. I can be working with everyone from Annie Lennox on a big fundraiser (talking through with her who to invite or what entertainment we should have, and agreeing with her what the programme content should be) to one of her biggest fans who might be putting on a gig for our Oxjam music festival.

Sometimes I have to be in all sorts of places at all sorts of times: it's not a job for regular hours and predictable days, but that comes with the territory. For example, I found myself taking part in our annual challenge on the South Downs that involves walking 100km in 24 hours – I lost five toenails and ended up soaked to the skin.

I also recently visited a remote community in Cambodia, that we could only reach by boat up the Mekong river. I met a woman who had lost her husband to malaria, and had since benefited from malaria nets thanks to our Oxfam Unwrapped Christmas catalogue and now her children were safe. She received a cow from the same scheme, and could now afford to send her children to school. Her three children were the same age as my own children, so this was a particularly moving encounter for me.

What's on my mind now is our latest fundraising idea: 100% giving, which is a partnership with PayPal in which they pay for the running costs on every donation made to us online. This was in the pipeline for many months, being tested on audiences and remodelled according to what they told us. The process of coming up with a new fundraising idea and bringing it to life is really fascinating. I created an innovations team whose task it is to come up with ideas like this, and I use my commercial experience to help steer and advise through to completion.

Because Oxfam is such a big name that's been part of so many people's lives for 60 years, most people approach it with some preconceptions, whether they mean to or not. Some people think Oxfam is all about charity shops, or that all we do is help in emergencies. Others just equate us with celebrities, like Chris Martin supporting us.

I had a good grasp on what the charity was all about before I joined, as I had been a regular donor for a number of years, so I didn't have too many preconceptions that were confounded when I joined. One thing I did notice though, was that the focus was really on very long-term, very sustainable change, not on quick fixes, which I was not expecting.

The reality is that this is a huge and extremely complex organisation – we're a humanitarian relief and campaigning organisation, a lobbying group and a high street retailer, all at the same time. What struck me when I joined was the enormous professionalism of the people here.

How did I get here? I have spent 25 years working in retail and buying in the private sector, ranging from commercial director at Borders and head of books at WHSmith to a regional vice-president for consumer products at Disney, looking after budgets of hundreds of millions of pounds.

I have always been fascinated by how the world works – this was the main inspiration for reading economics and politics as my undergraduate degree. Through my work in retail, I got to see first hand how supply chains squeeze poor countries to meet demands in the developed world. After more than two decades in the private sector, I decided, as many other Oxfam staff have done, that I wanted to use the skills I'd amassed to make a difference.

The charity sector and the private sector, although they're becoming similar in some ways, partially due to how we're increasingly working together, are still quite different, sometimes in unexpected ways. What struck me first was that the planning times in the charity sector are longer – the sense of how long meaningful change takes to happen means that timeframes are very forward-looking. Ther private sector in retail, always tended to run in one-year cycles and suffers from a sense of "let's just get past this Christmas".

In order to do my job I think the main skills are: to be commercially-minded; able to market a range of different things to sometimes entirely different audiences; and most importantly be able to build, develop and sustain relationships with everyone from major philanthropists to Oxfam volunteers.

If I had to give just one piece of advice, it would probably be to share something I picked up quite early in my career that I have found really useful: don't wait for authority to be given to you to do something, because it rarely is. Just take on the responsibility yourself and do it as people tend to assume it was your responsibility in the first place and give you the credit for it.

By the way, if you were wondering – Colin Firth makes an excellent cup of coffee.

Cathy Ferrier is fundraising and supporter marketing director at Oxfam