It’s been almost a year now since Imogen Ward and I set up Aldrich & Ward, our leadership consulting and search practice. It’s been a whirlwind since then, we’ve done a whole bunch of projects with a wide range of fabulous organisations and basically had a blast.

And now we are moving to a new level.  Because we are now to be joined in our partnership by our great friend, the fundraising legend that is Mark Astarita.

Mark needs no introduction really, in his 14 years as Director of Fundraising of the British Red Cross he led the team to treble their voluntary income, he was an inspirational chair of the Institute of Fundraising and was so regularly voted the most influential person in UK fundraising that the magazine responsible for that survey eventually gave up running it. In all, teams led by Mark have raised over £1.5 billion for humanitarian aid, an astonishing figure.

With Mark joining, our partnership will be renamed Astarita Aldrich Ward (AAW for short, all that money we paid the brand agency was worth every penny). We will continue to develop our strategic consulting and leadership search businesses internationally.

And we can also announce that AAW has been appointed by the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement to manage their new Global Fundraising Hub, providing strategic and capacity building support to the 190 RCRC national societies worldwide.  Mark will be lead this project for AAW acting as Director of the Global Hub with support from Imogen and me as well as our growing team of Associates.

So that’s all pretty exciting really. And there’s exciting things happening at my other business, fundraising and communications agency Audience.  But that’s for another day.

Hmm..not sure I’ve got enough on really.