Manifesto grows transformation and growth team

To support this move, Louise Lai takes up the role of transformation director, joining Manifesto after nearly eight years at a leading fundraising agency.

She says: “This is an unprecedented period of change for the sector, with many organisations seeing individual giving decline. While legacies are making up the shortfall for now, solving this long term will require going beyond new products and overhauling marketing strategies. It calls for a complete rethink of how you organise and secure funding to achieve a greater impact in the future.”

As part of the change, Manifesto’s dedicated innovation hub FutureFoundry (which has helped run rapid innovation for clients including NSPCC and The National Trust) will fall under Louise’s remit and operate under her new change and growth team. The team will also encompass Manifesto’s existing digital marketing capability, which marked 2019 with target-breaking results for organisations including The Salvation Army and Diabetes UK.

To support the design of end-to-end services that go beyond digital and reach the organisation’s people, processes, systems and tools, Zoe Bierman joins as experience director. Her appointment bolsters Manifesto’s service design capability, which launched in 2018 to help organisations reinvent how they deliver services that consider all stakeholders. Having previously worked extensively with global corporations, local and central government and not-for-profit organisations, Zoe brings a wealth of experience to the team.

Bierman says: “I’m really excited about the possibility of working with clients across the not-for-profit and cultural sectors to genuinely design what they do and how they do it. Organisations are living things; often, their organic growth takes on a life of its own and creates inexplicable ways of doing things.

"I’m here to help understand the needs that sit at the heart of an organisation's purpose and translate that into better ways of doing things.”

Commenting on plans for the coming year and the opportunity he sees at Manifesto, CEO Jim Bowes says: “I’ve worked with the not-for-profit sector for over a decade and at a moment charities face some huge challenges. In the coming years, with growing societal need, changing giving behaviours, legacy technology platforms and 20th century ways of working; we have to do more to support transformation in the sector.

"I’m truly excited about having such extremely talented people join our team to support these organisations in designing themselves for the 21st century.”