Yasmin Islam

Yasmin Islam

Senior Marketing Executive, Charities

Charities Aid Foundation


My career with CAF: working in the charities Marketing team



Tell me about your role at CAF?

I’m the Senior Marketing Executive for charities. My role involves marketing our donation platform, CAF Donate - as well as CAF Venturesome’s social investment funds, our charity research reports and events such as the Charity Awards.

What inspires you about marketing?

It has to be experimenting with creative and innovative ways to take customers through a journey to better serve their needs.

What I love about marketing is that it can really challenge your assumptions. So you have to put yourself to one side before you can step into the shoes of your customers. Marketing is just so versatile and every campaign is different. And it’s always satisfying to see months of hard work and planning come to fruition!

 
Some of our marketing materials for charities
 



What tips would you give to someone looking to work in marketing?

Read, read, read. With new digital marketing trends emerging all the time, it’s important to keep up to date with what’s current. There are so many free blogs available online to help you do just that. Some of my favourites include Neil Patel, HubSpot and Econsultancy.

Have you got any tips for charities who need help with their own marketing?

When you lack the support of big teams and budgets, a little creativity and a ‘test and learn’ approach can go a long way. For example, if you have a fundraising campaign coming up, put together a mixture of online and offline channels you might want to try to reach donors. At the end of the campaign, see which channel showed the greatest return and then apply those lessons to future campaigns.

We produce lots of free toolkits, webinars and resources to help charities broaden their marketing skills on our charities blog, fundraising and trustees hub.

Why not join us? Check out our vacancies page for roles in Marketing.