Save the Children UK has an exciting opportunity for a collaborative and influential individual with extensive Individual Giving and acquisition leadership experience to join us on a 12-month fixed-term contract as our Head of Acquisition, where you will lead a multi-disciplinary squad to deliver sector-leading supporter engagement and drive ambitious growth in our mass-market supporter base. You will shape and deliver our Individual Giving acquisition strategy, working across Save the Children to ensure a unified, human-centric public engagement approach.

About Us

Save the Children UK believes every child deserves a future. In the UK and around the world, we work every day to give children a healthy start in life, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm.  When crisis strikes, and children are most vulnerable, we are always among the first to respond and the last to leave.  We ensure children's unique needs are met and their voices are heard. We deliver lasting results for millions of children, including those hardest to reach.

About the role

As Head of Acquisition, you will play a pivotal role in delivering growth in our supporter base and income by developing and delivering an ambitious acquisition strategy across multipleIndividual Giving channels. You will lead our Core Acquisition Squad, secure investment, champion supporter-centric design, and ensure our Individual Giving programme diversifies and advances to contribute to raising over £55m. Operating in a fast-moving and dynamic environment, you will build strong cross-functional relationships, cut through boundaries, and keep supporters at the heart of everything we do.

In this role, you will: 

• Lead the Acquisition Squad to deliver sector-leading supporter engagement and drive brand, fundraising, and campaigning targets.
• Develop and hold a clear vision and roadmap for achieving acquisition objectives, aligned with organisational plans and budgets.
• Champion the supporter—embedding insight, user research, testing, and analysis into all activity to ensure a brilliant and consistent supporter experience.
• Build strong relationships with colleagues across Public Impact, Strategic Marketing, Campaigns & Organising, Operations and external media and creative agencies.
• Own and manage squad deliverables, prioritising effectively, removing obstacles, and enabling squad autonomy to maximise impact.

About you

To be successful, it is important that you have:

• Demonstrable experience of leading and inspiring Individual Giving or customer acquisition teams to meet income targets and build supporter life-time value.
• Proven experience in multi-channel, data-driven marketing, including strong paid media expertise.
• Extensive experience working with external partners, including paid media and creative agencies, to plan, buy and optimise acquisition campaigns.
• A strong track record of delivering mass public fundraising campaigns, and/or supporter-centric marketing across complex structures.
• Evidence of using insight and analysis to improve marketing performance and commercial effectiveness.
• Commitment to Save the Children's vision, mission, and values.

What we offer you:

Working for a charity provides one of the best benefits there is – a sense of purpose and reward for helping others. However, we understand the importance of giving back to our employees to ensure a happy and healthy working environment and work/life balance.

• We focus on flexibility, inclusion, collaboration, health and wellbeing both in and outside of work.
• We provide a wide range of benefits which will reward your hard work, motivate you, and inspire you to work to improve the lives of children every day. You can read more about our benefits here.

To learn more about the position, please review the Job Description in the attached Documents.

Closing date: Wednesday 17th December, 2025

Please note: To avoid disappointment, you are advised to submit your application as soon as possible as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if a high volume of applications are received. This is to ensure that we can manage application levels whilst maintaining a positive candidate experience. Unfortunately once a vacancy has closed, we are unable to consider further applications.

Ways of Working:

The majority of our roles can be performed remotely in the UK, but for this role you will be required to work from our Farringdon Office - London 1 day a week, some weeks this might be slightly more, some weeks could be slightly less. This will be agreed with your Line Manager and team and is intended to be time spent on collaborating with colleagues and relationship building.

Please note that travel costs to your contracted office will be at your own expense. 

Flexible Working - We are happy to discuss flexible working options at interview.

Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion: 

Save the Children UK believes in a world that is fair, inclusive and equitable where all children have the opportunity to change their world. We apply this to our workforce and we are committed to developing and supporting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organisation where all employees have a sense of belonging and feel that they can be "Free to Be Me". We are not looking for just one type of person - we want to recruit people who can add fresh perspectives, innovative ideas or challenge that disrupts the risk of group think. 

We are especially interested in people whose childhood experiences - of life on a low income, of migration, of being in a racialised community, of the care system, of being LGBT+ or in an LGBT+ family or living with (or with someone with) a disability - help us to see things we might otherwise miss. Whatever your story is we want to hear it because we know that different voices, ideas, perspectives and knowledge, working together will enable us to better the lives of children around the world. This is the reason why we are all here. 

To see our full statement please visit this link: https://jobs.savethechildren.org.uk/our-policies/diversity/

Salary Structure: 

Save the Children is committed to paying staff in a fair and equitable way and will benchmark all salary offers in line with the pay of existing staff. To see our full offer please visit this link: Save the Children | Careers

Interview Expenses: 

Candidates should note that unfortunately it is not our policy to reimburse expenses accrued when attending interviews at Save the Children UK unless you are requested to attend an interview in an alternative location to where the role is based.

Pre-employment Checks:

Any Employment with Save the Children UK will be subject to the following checks prior to your start date:

• a satisfactory police record check to include a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check and/or an International Criminal Record Check (If applicable)
• receipt of satisfactory references
• proof of eligibility to work in the national location for this role

If you have any questions, we have an FAQ section here.

For anything else you can email us on: careers@savethechildren.org.uk