Overview

Location. Remote; Vote Rev has offices in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, and additional hubs in Washington and the Bay Area. We encourage hybrid home / office work (e.g., 2 days/week in the office). Most days coming to the office is optional but you can be there as frequently as you want if you are local.

Compensation and benefits. $106,000 – $128,000 annually depending on experience, with generous medical, dental, vision, and retirement.

Role type. This is a full time, long-term role with no end date.

Target start date. Mid-July 2023

Application deadline. June 15, 2023

 

About the opportunity

The Senior Manager, Development will have a key role in managing our top donor relationships. They will help strengthen our existing donor relationships and help us cultivate new ones, working in close collaboration with the Executive Director and Deputy Executive Director to ensure the creation and implementation of an ambitious fundraising plan centered on major gifts. They will also serve as project manager for the Development team, ensuring that we are following through on commitments, tracking progress, and meeting our goals, including by managing our team meeting agendas and taking minutes. They will have a hand in ensuring that the Development team is using (and improving) systems to set us up for success, including our relationship management system, compliance systems, and project management systems. Finally, they will work inter-departmentally across the organization to ensure we are making the best case for our impact.

Vote Rev is looking for people who want to strengthen democracy and create an organization where everyone can thrive. There are no education requirements and we welcome anyone with relevant experience. Whatever background you bring, please apply if this role would make you excited to come to work every day!

 

About the organization

Vote Rev designs and quickly mainstreams field-tested voter engagement innovations to help Democrats win. In 2020 we released polling place vote tripling (PPVT) and trained dozens of partners on it, including the Biden-Harris campaign. Our partners’ 94,000 canvasser-hours of PPVT produced 1,100,000 friend-to-friend reminders to vote – 5x as many as the official Biden campaign app! PPVT was featured in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

In 2022 Vote Rev and our sister organization, Vote Rev Action Fund, provided training and materials to help partner organizations spark 450,000 relational get-out-the-vote reminders. Simultaneously, we used our ENGAGE design process to start developing the next generation of tactics. In the Georgia runoff, we ran a lightning-fast randomized trial of a new, more scalable version of PPVT with the potential to generate 10x as many votes.

In 2023 we’ll optimize our existing voter engagement tactics and design two new tactics ready for 2024. In 2024, we’ll boost tens of thousands of net votes by mainstreaming these tactics to Democratic campaigns and allied organizations!

Vote Rev is headquartered in the Culver City neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA, with an additional office in downtown Brooklyn, New York City, and employees across the country.

We are dedicated to creating an organization that reflects the diversity of the country we serve. We strongly encourage women, people of color, and others who are underrepresented in campaigns and voter engagement nonprofits to apply.

 

Responsibilities

Over the next two years, your work will touch every stage of the fundraising process. Activities will include:

  • Heavily supporting the development of an annual $6m plan to cultivate and steward an individual major donor fundraising strategy
  • Providing guidance and support to the Deputy Executive Director and staff regarding fundraising goals and workstream needs
  • Developing and managing donor communications, including overseeing and creating collateral like PowerPoints, memos, and emails
  • Building and maintaining relationships with five-figure donors across the country and in Los Angeles, CA
  • Maintaining and improving fundraising systems to help ensure proper financial compliance and reporting
  • Managing execution of the fundraising plan by tracking goals and deadlines, ensuring the members of the Development team and other internal stakeholders are filling their roles, and keeping everything organized and on track

Problems your work might solve:

  • Funding multi-million dollar GOTV efforts
  • Expanding and diversifying our base of recurring major donors
  • Building on existing project management systems to ensure efficient capture of institutional knowledge

 

Who we’re looking for

This role is designed for an early-mid career fundraising professional (7-10 years of relevant work experience). Specifically, we’re looking for someone with strong individual major donor fundraising experience, including work with donor advisors, who can quickly plug into our fundraising workstreams. The Senior Manager will work directly with the Deputy Executive Director and Executive Director, and will have opportunities for growth within Vote Rev’s Development Department. If you’re eager to build on your existing skills as an individual gifts fundraiser, please apply even if you don’t meet every bullet point in the below sections.

 

A successful candidate will be:

  • A skilled and knowledgeable fundraiser
  • Expert in managing multiple team members’ work on fundraising proposals, materials, and solicitations
  • Adept at providing insight and guidance that informs fundraising strategy, and the strategy with particular donors
  • Skilled in donor research, strategic communications, and creating preparatory materials for high-stakes meetings
  • Capable of working cross-departmentally, and up and down the org chart, to vet and refine new strategies to get them into a fundable, implementable form
  • Knowledgeable about the progressive / electoral funding ecosystem including funders, major movement organizations, and key connectors
  • A collaborative and motivated team member
  • Eager to manage their own, and their team members’, development, including by contributing to a team environment that fosters the team’s ability to seek feedback
  • Skilled at scoping and managing multiple projects simultaneously for quality and timely delivery, and able to pivot quickly to meet the evolving needs of the Development department
  • Able to understand different team members’ working styles and leverage their strengths and skillsets
  • Partner-oriented
  • Skilled at relationship management, including strengthening tenuous relationships, managing partners’ expectations, and evangelizing
  • Skilled at communicating with all audiences, including facilitating meetings effectively to bring about desired results, and producing high quality written products with minimal revision
  • Willing to travel up to 8 times per year for donor convenings, meetings, and conferences
  • Excited about the opportunity to work with some of the movement’s most hands-on, supportive, and sophisticated donors

 

Key skills and experience:

  • 7+ years of experience as a political or civic engagement fundraiser specializing in individual giving, including PAC and 527 fundraising
  • Demonstrated ability to manage donor relationships, including prospecting, cultivation, stewardship, and solicitation best practices
  • Experience producing donor collateral like funding memos and powerpoints
  • Demonstrated ability to manage funding proposal development and subsequent narrative and financial reporting for funders
  • Working knowledge of fundraising tools like ActBlue; common CRMs like NGP, Salesforce, or Copper; mass mailing tools like Mailchimp and Yet-
  • Another-Mail-Merge; office tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Helpful but not required:

  • Experience with C4 and fiscally-sponsored fundraising
  • Experience using Asana, or a similar tool, for project management
  • Working knowledge of evidence-based civic engagement tactics and associated terminology, including ‘net votes,’ ‘votes per thousand dollars,’ ‘randomized-controlled trial,’ and ‘percentage-point increase,’ among others
  • Knowledge of contemporary issues in the voter engagement space including (i) volunteer recruitment & retention, (ii) relational organizing, and (iii) voter registration
  • Experience with graphic design tools like InDesign, or at least skills in the aesthetic elements of Word and PowerPoint

Compensation and benefits

  • Compensation: $106,000-$128,000 annually depending on experience.
  • Benefits: Choose from a variety of fully employer-subsidized vision, dental, and medical HMO or PPO plans. We also offer partially subsidized coverage for spouses and dependents. In addition, we offer generous paid family medical/parental leave.
  • Retirement: After three months of service, Vote Rev will automatically contribute 6% of your base salary to your retirement account every month, no employee contribution required.
  • Paid time off: Employees accrue 1.5 days of PTO each month. All federal holidays and December 24th to January 1st are company holidays.
  • Flexible schedule: Team members must be available 9am-2pm Pacific Time (12-5pm Eastern Time). Outside those times they’re usually able to work with their supervisors to set the hours that work for them.
  • Flexible work location: We encourage hybrid home / office work (e.g., 2 days/week in the office). Most days coming to the office is optional but you can be there as frequently as you want.
  • Relocation allowance: We can provide a relocation allowance for those who need to relocate to LA.

 

This search is being led by NRG Consulting Group. Email jobs@nrgconsultinggroup.org for more info.