Senior Organizational Design and Development Consultant to Nonprofit Organizations & NGOs (Remote)

Overview

About the Senior OD Consultant

We are looking for a mid-career-level consultant (in-house staff role) to join our small, skilled, highly collaborative team of OD consultants helping our wonderful nonprofit and NGO clients. We seek someone who:

• Has significant experience at the intersection of fundraising, marketing, comms, advocacy, and/or digital;
• Has broad exposure to how nonprofit organizations can work and function effectively; and
• Brings an empathic, ethnographic approach to helping organizations plan and achieve thoughtful, achievable change.

The ideal candidate is equal parts consultant, coach, and hand-holder, comfortable both planning and strategizing what’s needed and also standing alongside the client in the trenches, supporting them as they implement difficult change. This person cares as much about efficiency, governance, and process improvements as they do about healthy, sustainable nonprofit cultures and the well-being of nonprofit staff. They are comfortable serving as the lead consultant with a client, but are also thrilled to collaborate with other smart OD experts and junior consultants on complex, multi-part client initiatives. And they are highly experienced with the real, messy, sometimes-conflicting dynamics of complex human organizations, and are motivated by the chance to make meaningful contributions to some of the world’s most important causes.

Responsibilities

Leading Engagements

• Lead complex client projects such as organizational assessments, process and workflow designs, and team development/restructuring initiatives, working collaboratively with other principal and junior consultants.
• Build trust and rapport with client teams, from senior executives to middle managers and individual contributors.
• Diagnose thorny client problems and issues and help clients gain perspective on their unique needs and challenges.
• Think conceptually and pragmatically at multiple levels of granularity: the forest and the trees, but also the leaves.
• Exercise strong, proactive project management skills and best practices. (Although this is not a project management role, we promise and deliver accountability to our clients in terms of schedules, budgets, and quality.)

Mapping Change

• Work in partnership with clients to offer industry perspective, propose possible solutions, and design a clear path to desired outcomes.
• Create a variety of deliverables both written and visual to identify findings and document solutions, including business cases, findings and recommendations reports, vision summaries, proposals, and scopes of work.
• Communicate ideas in ways that empower clients to imagine, understand, and internalize the necessary change and path to get there.

Facilitation & Speaking

• Facilitate both remote and in-person collaborative meetings, working sessions, stakeholder interviews, visioning exercises, planning activities, team-building sessions, and roadmapping sessions.
• Speak at webinars, conferences, and industry events, translating abstract concepts like organizational development and capacity-building into real, relevant organizational terms.

Coaching

• Serve as a formal or informal coach to individual client leaders, creating a safe space for them to process ideas, prepare for, and undertake broader organizational and professional change.
• Help to mentor, coach, train and grow junior consultants into OD professionals. (This is not a management position, but there is potential for it to develop into one.)

Requirements

• 10-15+ years of experience in either/both: In-house leadership at a nonprofit or NGO; or In client consultation, either independently or as part of an agency/firm, with direct responsibility for nonprofit/NGO client relationships, both as a primary consultant and as part of a team
• Deep expertise in one or more of the following areas: nonprofit fundraising, marketing, digital transformation, advocacy, or communications
• Broad, nuanced understanding of the structure, needs, practices, and culture of the social sector at large, informed by multiple, diverse experience working with or within a variety of nonprofit organizations and causes
• Expert writing, presentation, and facilitation skills in a variety of contexts: client deliverables and meetings plus marketing, thought leadership, and sales
• Comfortable working directly with a range of staff from executive leadership to individual contributors in a variety of roles (e.g. strategy, supporter engagement, tech/IT, operations, analytics, and others)
• A commitment to and passion for equity, diversity, and inclusion
• Flexible, adaptable thinking and an ability to pivot as a situation shifts
• Demonstrated ability to build trust and lasting relationships with clients, colleagues, and partners with compassion and care
• A hands-on, can-do attitude with strong motivation to learn new skills and grow (We are a small, self-starting firm with a tiny team. We take the approach that no client task is beneath us, and every activity is an opportunity to learn.)
• The ability to travel occasionally to client meetings, conferences, and working sessions

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with international NGOs or complex, federated US nonprofits
• Formal training in organizational development/design or nonprofit management
• Direct exposure to complex marketing or fundraising technology projects
• US Eastern time zone (flexible for the right candidate)

Disqualifications

This job isn’t a fit for you if you:
• Have a big ego or something to prove. We believe in humility and checking our egos at the door.
• Are interested in executing a formula for change. We tailor our work to each organization’s unique needs, and have found that no two contexts are ever exactly alike.
• Have an orientation towards “fixing” organizations according to a personal ideology or set of values. Like good anthropologists, we need to understand an organization’s distinct values, and we work from their specific strengths and assets — who they are rather than who we might wish them to be or become.
• Seek perfection and purity over practical, staged change. Again and again, we’ve observed that slow progress and “two steps forward, one step back” can sometimes be the reality of complex organizational transformation.

What We Offer

This is a permanently remote position in a collaborative, distributed work environment that offers significant work/life flexibility. Compensation includes:

• Competitive salary based on experience ($115,000 – $150,000+)
• Employer-sponsored 401k plan with match
• Generous paid vacation
• Growth and learning opportunities
• Annual in-person team retreat with colleagues (pandemics permitting).

How to Apply

Please send your cover letter and resume to hello@causecraftconsulting.com. Applications without both cover letter and resume will not be considered.

About Cause Craft

Cause Craft Consulting was founded in 2018 by Alice Hendricks and Misty McLaughlin, two experts in organizational design, development, and capacity-building for nonprofits and NGOs. We are a small-scale, high-impact consulting company that helps marketing, fundraising, communications, advocacy, digital, tech, and data teams to build their internal capacity for engaging supporters. Cause Craft is a fully remote company that is 100% woman owned and led. Read more about us!