Gill Raikes, fundraising director at the National Trust. chats about career highlights and explains why conservation is a long-term issue.

Can you tell me some more about how you came to be at the National Trust?

I started out as journalist on a newspaper in North Wales and started to work in the press office at the National Trust. I was mainly editing the regional newsletter and working on positive press coverage. It was a bit of a change from what I had done previously, but also wonderful. Like so many people, I thought that I would enjoy the job and stay on for three years or so, then do something else. Twenty six years later, I’m still here.

What attracted you to it in the first place?

My parents had been steeped in the National Trust and I’d been bought up on a farm so conservation was very much part of my life. The charity angle followed.

So, tell me about the leap from journalism to fundraising.

The biggest jump came in 1987, when I moved to London with the Trust to take over the role of coast and countryside appeal manager. Fundraising was very much in its infancy then, but we were starting to realise that if we asked people for help they would give it. As we began to take fundraising more seriously, I started to run the Neptune campaign. It was the first time we had mounted a long-term campaign to ask our supporters for further help over and above their membership.

How has Neptune evolved over the years?

In 1964, a lecturer in Reading set his students the task of going around the coastline and seeing what was changing. At the time, everybody was flocking to the seaside. There was a real explosion in travel and leisure. Towns and cities just burst and there were masses of caravan parks and building developments in coastal areas.

After a year of surveys, the students found that the coastline was being lost at an enormous rate. We soon realised that the only way to save something permanently is to buy it, so we established a campaign to raise £2m and the response was immediate and extraordinary.

At the time, we had 187 miles of coastline, which has grown mile by mile. We’ve made enormous strides, and people have kept on saying they want to be involved, so Neptune has become a force in its own right. We now have over 700 miles of coastline and in 2015 we’ll be celebrating 50 years of Neptune and £67m raised. People just feel passionate about their seaside resorts and coasts.

What have been your main challenges over the years?

Unlike many other charities the National Trust is a landowner. Everything we own is a liability. So, although we have a membership, visitor fees and modest rent from our farmers, it’s nothing like enough to keep this enormous charity with all its coastline, land and buildings going.

At any one time I’m juggling around eight national priorities (with smaller projects going on in the regions). Just when I think I have my feet on the ground, we’ll find another place that we need to save. I’m always running hard just to keep still.

How do you cope with donor fatigue?

We had an event recently, which a donor hosted for us, to raise money to buy a beautiful lake in Snowdonia. Inevitably, someone asked when we would be finished. We have to be honest and say that it’s conservation and it must go on. There will always be vulnerable places we need to save. We have to convince our supporters that everything we ask of them is part of an ongoing vision, which will benefit future generations.

The outcomes must be rewarding though. Do you have any highlights?

Absolutely hundreds but my favourite must be standing on a windy coastal bridge in 1990, with then minister for the environment Virginia Bottomley, as we opened our 500th mile of coastline. It was the first time that we had branched out and bought coastline that had been degraded. It had been used as a coal dump and the beaches were black. The National Trust was the only organisation that had the foresight to say if we bought it, worked hard, and let nature take its course, it could work. Sure enough, the beaches are now sandy and golden.

I was pregnant with my first child and I remember saying ‘I want this beach to be here for future generations’. If you have children you can be quite emotional about the future and we’re merely caretakers after all. We’re only here for a short time, but we must look after what we have got or we will leave a ruined world behind.

And your MBE?

I’m very unfashionably excited by that – it’s a big thing for me and I’m so thrilled.

Gill Raikes is fundraising director at the National Trust.

This interview first appeared in The Fundraiser, Issue 7, July 2011