Chief Executive
The Role:
Quartet Community Foundation
The Client:
Quartet Community Foundation (herein ‘Quartet’) is an independent charity and company limited by guarantee. Originally founded in 1987 as the Greater Bristol Trust, they serve a population of about 1.1 million people in the four unitary authority areas of Bristol, Bath & North East Somerset, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.
Quartet is a part of a national network of 46 quality accredited Community Foundations that match those who want to give money locally with those organisations and charities working to improve local communities.
The main focus at Quartet (Registered Charity 1080418) is to change people’s lives for the better across the West of England, giving as many people as possible the chance to fulfil their potential.
They do this by working closely with a wide variety of donors to harness their passion for helping others and match it to vital projects that meet community aspirations and make a profound difference to people’s lives.
The Campaign
The Chair and Board were seeking a new Chief Executive to work with the Board, staff and volunteers to provide high quality philanthropy advice and support for people and organisations within the region.
The Chief Executive’s brief was to continue to grow Quartet through its next phase of development, collaborating with local and national organisations. They were also keen to appoint a person who will empower all those involved with Quartet and whose personal values aligned with their organisational values which are to be:
Professional
Trusted
Cost-effective
Local
Permanent
Flexible
Responsive
Our Approach
We adopted a thorough search and screening process to enable us to fully assess each candidate’s experience, background, and soft and hard skills against the search criteria. We ensured that they had the confidence and technical knowledge to excel in the role and understand fully the future aspirations of Quartet.
The Challenge
From the outset, we saw this instruction as extremely high-profile, requiring a calibre of candidate that inherently understands how the City operates in order that they could leverage connections appropriately.
This type of strategic leadership at Board level, involving strong and effective stakeholder management, meant this was a multi-faceted role - raising the profile of the organisation, by attending and speaking regularly at a wide variety of events and acting as an ambassador for Quartet.
In addition, we sought a Chief Executive for Quartet that would be capable of looking at the philanthropic aspects, retaining existing supporters and looking at the development of new funders for both endowment and flow-through funds, and most importantly demonstrating a deep knowledge of the social needs of the region.
Only at this point, with all parties’ content, did we move to an NDA process and subsequent full disclosure meetings. In this way, we cautiously built our shortlist to present to the main Board.
The Solution
This was a high-level campaign with a detailed brief. Quartet has a great team in place and the previous Chief Executive had been in situ for a number of years.
It was important that we searched the region extensively, in order to present a credible shortlist of candidates who could potentially build rapport with the Board and wider staff team and also someone for whom the values and aims of Quartet resonated with their own personal career goals.
Sue Mountstevens, Chair of the Board at Quartet said:
‘We chose Moon because of their reach, knowledge of the region and their long history of working with Quartet, as well as their attention to detail and precision in their search methodology. We were delighted to appoint Suzanne Rolt as our New Chief Executive, who joins us from St Georges, Bristol.’
Vanessa Moon said:
‘Both Simon Quinn, our Director of Search, and I really enjoyed supporting Quartet and the depth and breadth of this campaign. So many candidates were incredibly positive about the work of Quartet and it was an honour to be part of this search.’
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