Location:

• Full-time remote; exempt position. US or UK only. We are not able to sponsor work visas and are only considering applicants who are eligible to work in the country where you plan to live and work.

• Must be able to meet with colleagues in Eastern Time (US) (GMT-4) and Mountain time (GMT -7) most days of the week and to meet with colleagues in European time zones (GMT+1 & GMT+2) and Pacific Time (US) (GMT-8) a few times a week.

Expected Salary: $82,020 – $100,247, depending on the approximate cost of living in your area. For a complete description of how we set and raise salaries, see our salary algorithm.

Benefits:

• Comprehensive health and dental insurance. Vision insurance is available.

• Six weeks of paid vacation (four flexible and two to be used in December or January) and 12 additional holidays.

• Two weeks of paid sick leave, which may also be used for caring for human or non-human family members.

• A fully remote work environment that allows you to balance work and family requirements.

• A friendly, open work culture that encourages feedback, collaboration, experimentation, and evidence-based innovation.

• Opportunities to increase responsibility as our team and programs continue their growth trajectory.

• Leadership and colleagues dedicated to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, including a dedicated internal JEDI committee, annual staff and manager training to combat our biases at work, and support for employees with visible and invisible disabilities.

• Note: This benefit structure is what we use for our US staff and is largely similar to what we offer to many non-US staff, but may be different depending on the legal requirements of the country you work in.

Travel:

• Travel within the United States and Europe may be required for staff retreats (one to three per year), in-person conferences and events (about one to ten per year), and donor meetings (about one to ten per year, but typically bundled with other travel).

• Must possess a valid passport or be willing and able to obtain one within two months of employment.

Responsibilities

Position mission statement:

As Wild Animal Initiative’s first Development Director, you will play a crucial role in determining how quickly we can advance our mission of understanding and improving the lives of wild animals.

You will coordinate with members of other teams who contribute to development, including the Executive Director (who maintains many major donor relationships and gives public presentations), the Communications Director (who oversees our content production, social media, and press relations), the Operations Director (who oversees budgeting), and programmatic staff (who help report on the progress we’re making).

Spanning everything from front-line fundraising to organizational strategy, this role requires a wide range of skills and offers a large amount of autonomy.

• You will collaborate with other leadership to chart Wild Animal Initiative’s course forward.

• You will manage the development team.

• You will be entrusted with expanding and diversifying our donor base. (See here for a summary of our fundraising history and goals.)

• Finally, you will set a development strategy: calculating our funding needs, developing plans to meet them, forecasting the likelihood of their success, and preparing for scenarios where we raise substantially less or more than planned.

Supervisory responsibilities:

You will oversee, direct, and organize the work of the Development department. You will initially manage one direct report, growing up to five additional reports over the next one to three years.

Qualifications

For this role, we are looking for the following qualifications. Within each section, qualifications are listed in approximately descending order of importance.

Note that we do not require any specific academic credentials for you to be considered for this position, as research shows that such requirements can diminish the quality of candidate pools by deterring individuals from applying who would otherwise be a great fit for a role. Instead, we look for evidence of the skills that matter most for your success in this role. Below we’ve specified where we expect these qualifications to require prior work experience and some examples of what qualifications could look like.

If you’re not sure whether you have the right qualifications, we encourage you to apply anyway. We’d love the chance to consider your application.

Remote effectiveness

• Comfort working remotely: Proven ability to fundraise, work independently, be accountable, and build relationships with funders and staff as part of a small, remote team.

• Software: Fluent with multiple platforms including customer relationship management (CRM) such as Salesforce, virtual meeting platforms such as Zoom, email, cloud computing (we use Google Suite), project management (Asana), database, and social media, with the flexibility to learn and implement emerging technologies.

Executive leadership

• Rational decision-making: Proven ability to apply general rules, logic, and reasoning, and consider relative costs and benefits to determine appropriate courses of action in the face of uncertainty.

• Forward thinking: Proven ability to take initiative, proactively anticipate problems, and source or generate potential novel ideas and solutions.

• Emotional intelligence and effective communication: Proven ability to recognize and influence the emotions of others and adapt perceptively to communicate both in writing and verbally with donors, coworkers, and leadership with high levels of respect and dependability.

  Expected evidence — at least one year of experience as a development director or another member of the top leadership of a nonprofit organization or growth-stage startup, or at least two years as a deputy development director or the equivalent.

Department management

• Open communication: Ability to foster an environment that encourages open feedback and collaboration.

• Executive functioning: Highly organized with the ability to shift from big-picture thinking to detail execution, while maintaining momentum on multiple projects.

• Guidance: Knowledge of business and management principles and proven ability to guide strategic planning, provide organizational leadership, and coordinate people and resources.

• JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion) management practices: Personal commitment to fostering and incorporating the values of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in your team and as a manager through the cultivation of a collaborative culture that values the diversity of thought, background, and perspective.

• Systems optimization: Ability to evaluate systems (e.g., workflows, data storage, work culture norms) to identify ways to improve their efficiency, effectiveness, dependability, and measurability.

  Expected evidence — at least six person-years of management experience (i.e., managing three people for two years, two people for three years, or one person for six years).

Fundraising and strategy

• Fundraising methods: Strong familiarity with nonprofit frontline fundraising, marketing, and accounting strategies in relation to foundations, major donors, and grassroots donors.

• Achievement: Proven ability to strategically develop a comprehensive fundraising program that sets, carefully tracks, and achieves ambitious goals while upholding a high moral and ethical standard and adhering to all applicable rules and regulations.

• Integrity: Demonstrated adherence to moral and ethical principles, soundness of moral character, and honesty.

• Persuasion: Demonstrated success in frontline fundraising over email, phone, and in person. Demonstrated success in increasing donor engagement, with experience diversifying a funding base strongly preferred.

• Relationship building: Proven ability to engage and build relationships with new and existing donors, including via email, phone, and in-person communication.

  Expected evidence — at least two years achieving a fundraising goal of at least $2 million and at least one year spending a significant amount of your time working with major individual donors or foundations.

This role might also benefit from you having some of the following qualifications. You could still be a highly competitive candidate even if you don’t have any of these qualifications.

• Funder knowledge: Knowledge of the funding landscape (e.g., major donors, foundations, donor trends, communication norms) for wildlife or environmental protection and/or advocacy nonprofits.

• Grants: Proven success in researching, pursuing, and securing grants, ideally for scientific research.

• Culture: Familiarity with open feedback, coaching, and servant leadership communication concepts.

  Economics and accounting: Expertise in determining how money will be spent to get the work done, accounting for these expenditures, and producing accounting reports.