Director of Development

Feel like saving the world today? Or at least giving it your all alongside a group of passionate, funny, kale-obsessed co-workers? Grist, the nation’s leading environmental news platform, seeks a Director of Development to oversee and expand the fundraising operations of our nonprofit organization. Grist is growing by leaps and bounds, with a monthly audience of more than 2 million and exciting new projects underway — now all we need is you.

As a member of Grist’s senior management team, the Director of Development will work closely with our President, Founder, and other staff to shape and implement organizational strategies and to achieve contributed income goals. Reporting to the President, you will manage a team of 3-4 people responsible for raising funds from major donors, members, and institutional sources; the team will likely grow in upcoming years. This is a Seattle-based position with significant travel required. We are seeking an exceptional someone who thrives in an entrepreneurial environment, but who also know the ins and outs of moves management. (We also like boundless enthusiasm, if you can swing that.)

Duties and Responsibilities

  • Design and manage Grist’s comprehensive fundraising strategy, plan, and budget, encompassing major gifts, legacy gifts, membership gifts, foundation grants, and corporate support.
  • Expand our fundraising operations, creating new programs to solicit funding, especially from high-level major donors.
  • Oversee collaborative initiatives across departments to identify prospects, develop proposals, and secure funding.
  • Create strategies and initiatives to cultivate donors; solicit funding from high-level major donors, foundations, corporations, and other identified targets; and steward current relationships.
  • In concert with Grist’s Founder, manage a diverse portfolio of top prospects and donors.
  • Lead and mentor members of growing fundraising team.
  • Serve as a member of Grist’s senior management team, contributing to the development and implementation of the organization’s operating and strategic plans.
  • Serve as fundraising liaison to Grist’s board — which consists of influential philanthropists, journalists, technologists, and other changemakers — including staffing the board fundraising committee and assisting with special board projects.
  • Ensure the timely, accurate creation and production of fundraising materials, including grant proposals, donor appeals, annual report, correspondence, and collateral.
  • Oversee the planning and execution of key activities such as donor events, targeted online appeals, and membership drives.
  • Supervise the timely and accurate processing of gifts and acknowledgements and reporting on fundraising results.
  • Oversee use of Salesforce database system, including improvements to it over time.
  • Perform other tasks, as appropriate, to achieve Grist’s fundraising goals.
  • Travel and flexible work schedule required.

Our Ideal Candidate

  • Bachelor’s degree required; CFRE certification preferred.
  • 7+ years of senior-level fundraising experience, with proven success in the areas of individual and institutional giving; background of developing earned-income revenue streams and shepherding corporate sponsorships a plus.
  • Demonstrated ability to build, expand, and manage a development program responsible for at least $3.5 million annually.
  • Entrepreneurial spirit, with experience creating diverse new funding opportunities and identifying fundable projects.
  • Truly outstanding written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills, with track record of engaging and influencing a wide range of donors.
  • Strong management experience (both up and down within an organization).
  • Experience managing and motivating high-impact board members for fundraising initiatives.
  • Attention to detail and strong time-management and organizational skills.
  • Experience with fundraising databases (Salesforce preferred) and strong comfort with Google Docs and MS Office, including presentation software (Google Slides and PowerPoint).
  • Strong financial skills, including the ability to develop and review budgets and to develop management reports that present a clear financial picture of fundraising activities.
  • Ability to work cooperatively and effectively with colleagues.
  • Experience with marketing and communications preferred.
  • A sense of humor never hurt!

To apply, please send a cover letter and resume, to iknowfundraising@grist.org with “Director of Development” in the subject line. We are looking for a thoughtful, personalized cover letter that displays your qualifications, enthusiasm, and communication style. No phone calls, please. Grist is an equal-opportunity employer.

About Grist

Grist is an independent nonprofit media organization that shapes the country’s environmental conversations, making green second nature for our monthly audience of 2,000,000 and growing. We reach the next generation by cutting through the noise to connect big issues like climate change to daily life, and by spotlighting the people and ideas leading us to a more sustainable future. (Also by posting videos of baby animals.) Founded in 1999, Grist has been featured by media including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC’s Today show, and Time, and has won many prestigious awards for our pioneering media work.

Community Engagement Manager

Grist publishes smart, funny green news that is mobilizing millions of people on behalf of this here planet. You want in? The Community Engagement Manager is responsible for helping Grist — a nonprofit — create and execute strategies designed to deepen our relationship with our readers, retain our current donors, and turn new readers into donors. Who you are:

  • A self-starter and digital native with a deep knowledge of and passion for emerging technologies, social media, and fundraising strategies to support journalism with a cause.
  • An excellent writer and communicator. You will be the face and voice to Grist’s community of readers, focused on deepening our relationships with our users, with the goal of moving them up the ladder of engagement — from reader to participant to donor and beyond.
  • You have a passion for journalism with a cause. In addition to driving our users to adopt and spread green values, you will increase overall user lifetime value and strengthen Grist’s economic wherewithal by reducing churn and spurring our audience to be more responsive to fundraising appeals.
  • You’re an excellent project manager and big thinker who enjoy working cross-departmentally. You’ll be collaborating with key internal teams, including fundraising, editorial, and product, and report to the Marketing & Audience Development Manager.

 Responsibilities:

  • Create, execute, and track fundraising campaigns designed to meet revenue goals and increase audience reach, engagement, and user lifetime value.
  • Help develop and manage Grist’s audience development plan.
  • Serve as the face and voice of Grist to our community and to low-dollar donors.
  • Write, schedule, and track performance of communications to community members and donors, including fundraising drives.
  • Analyze and report generally on data and performance trends, identifying KPIs and other engagement success metrics; e.g., the points at which users become repeat visitors, donors, etc.
  • Collaborate with fundraising team to identify major donor prospects, advise on audience segmentation, and optimize fundraising-related messaging.
  • Maintain engagement content calendar, working closely with key departments to produce content relevant to predictable annual/quarterly/monthly events.
  • Organize reader meet-ups and other creative community-building efforts.
  • Participate in wider-ranging collaborative projects as needed.

 Requirements:

  • 3+ years of marketing, fundraising, or related experience
  • Bachelor’s Degree
  • A passion for journalism with a cause, and for building loyal, action-oriented communities around journalism.
  • Exceptional writing skills; you are a creative soul who can master our voice.
  • Experience managing fundraising and/or community engagement campaigns.
  • Experience using Salesforce, audience segmentation, analytics, A/B testing, email marketing, social media outreach, and other tools to deepen engagement and drive revenue and user growth. A willingness to learn new skills in these areas.
  • Budgeting, market research, and constituent relationship management skills and techniques.
  • Strong project management and organizational skills.
  • Experience producing events preferred.
  • Experience managing paid social media campaigns a plus.

Salary will depend on experience. Grist offers excellent benefits, a delightful workplace, and the opportunity to play a crucial role in an organization with a mission.

To apply, please send a cover letter and resume to communitymanager@grist.org with “Community Engagement Manager” in the subject line. We are looking for a thoughtful, personalized cover letter that demonstrates your qualifications, enthusiasm, and communication style. No phone calls, please. Grist is an equal-opportunity employer.

About Grist

Grist is an independent nonprofit media organization that shapes the country’s environmental conversations, making green second nature for our monthly audience of 2,000,000 and growing. We reach the next generation by cutting through the noise to connect big issues like climate change to daily life, and by spotlighting the people and ideas leading us to a more sustainable future. (Also by posting videos of baby animals.) Founded in 1999, Grist has been featured by media including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC’s Today show, and Time, and has won many prestigious awards for our pioneering media work.

Social Editor

Grist, the web’s foremost source for intelligent, irreverent environmental news and commentary, is looking for a social media and engagement editor.

Responsibilities

As Grist’s voice on the social web, you’ll manage our accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and beyond) and work closely with editors and writers to connect our work to eyeballs far and wide. You will also collaborate with editorial staff to create editorial projects that deliver news and insight on green issues across all social platforms. As the liaison between Grist’s sharp editors and our engaged audience, you’ll manage the stream of communication between the two, plucking observations and fostering collaboration. You will also serve as the point person for our online community, responsible for answering queries and keeping discourse lively and healthy. You will aid and coach writers and editors in best practices and methods so that their posts have the widest reach possible — and you’ll bust out posts of your own. Tracking metrics and KPIs and being able to act on them and switch tactics as necessary will be key. You’ll also partner with our product, analytics, and marketing teams when their efforts extend into the social web and support B2B efforts as needed.

The Ideal Candidate

You are a top-notch writer with the ability to distill deep dives and humorous doubletakes alike into short, shareable copy for the social sphere. You have experience in managing multiple social accounts and a nose for the latest trends, tools, and paradigm shifts in social and online media. You can juggle metrics, sword-swallow data, and cannon-fire trolls with speed and aplomb. You can master the Grist voice — trustworthy, accessible, incisive, witty, considerate (most of the time), and irreverent — and deploy it in a swift and responsive way. You understand and share our mission of making green second nature; and you’re passionate about owning and broadening the green conversation in social spaces, in service of enacting IRL change. Sanctimonious tree-huggers need not apply: Make us snort our coffee and you’ll earn serious points.

Requirements / Compensation /Etc.

  •  At least 3 years of writing or editing experience, preferably online
  • Experience managing social media channels
  • Ability to manage and interact with multiple online communities and audiences
  • Ability to work in a fast-paced environment, juggling multiple priorities
  • Experience and comfort with technology, social media, and digital tools for journalism
  • Facility with desktop writing tools and Web technologies for newsgathering and publishing
  • Ability to multitask, manage to deadlines and thrive under pressure.
  • Ability to work independently, demonstrate good personal judgment and exercise a commitment to ethical conduct toward sources, story subjects, and readers.
  • Excellent communication, interpersonal, and writing skills. Demonstrated poise, tact, diplomacy, and the ability to interact with individuals at all levels of the organization.
  • Excellent analytical and process improvement skills. Practical solution orientation.
  • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in journalism, communications, English or related fields

Salary will depend on experience. Grist offers excellent benefits, a delightful workplace, and the opportunity to play a crucial role in an organization with a mission.

To apply, please send a cover letter and resume to iknowsocial@grist.org with “Social Editor” in the subject line. We are looking for a thoughtful, personalized cover letter that demonstrates your qualifications, enthusiasm, and communication style. No phone calls, please. Grist is an equal-opportunity employer.

About Grist

Grist is an independent nonprofit media organization that shapes the country’s environmental conversations, making green second nature for our monthly audience of 2,000,000 and growing. We reach the next generation by cutting through the noise to connect big issues like climate change to daily life, and by spotlighting the people and ideas leading us to a more sustainable future. (Also by posting videos of baby animals.) Founded in 1999, Grist has been featured by media including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC’s Today show, and Time, and has won many prestigious awards for our pioneering media work.

Front-End Web Developer
with experience in WordPress development

Grist is looking for a front-end Web developer with strong experience with WordPress plugin and theme development. If you have experience working in the media, aim for excellence, see failure as a learning opportunity, and believe it’s possible to crack a joke and change the world at the same time, this could be the job for you.

A Great Place to Do Good Work

Grist is a great place for a developer to work. We are a small company where you can have a big impact. We have a 4-person product team composed of developers and designers. Developers collaborate closely with designers and journalists. There are no tossing of comps over the wall – it’s a place where your product ideas can help contribute to the success of our mission. We practice Agile scrum in 2-week sprints. We ship code regularly. We have flexible schedules, including “10% time” for side-projects and work-from-home opportunities. It’s a chill office with jeans-and-tshirt dress code and there is beer in the fridge. Our developers get opportunities for professional development and travel to conferences.

As a media company and a non-profit looking to do good in the world, we often get visits from leading authors, eminent scientists, and world-changing technologists. The product team gets the unique opportunity to meet and speak one-on-one with these innovators and thought leaders in an informal setting. Our work is inspired and invigorated by these visits and they help make Grist a unique workplace.

Save the planet one line of code at a time

We use modern technologies and development methods at Grist. We work daily in WordPress and our responsive theme is built using Zurb Foundation, SASS, and HTML5 APIs. We use vagrant and grunt to build out our local environments.

We’re hosted on the reliable WordPress.com VIP service, which means we spend our time thinking about the product as a service to our readers and not managing hardware and networks. We also do side-projects with emerging technologies.  We contribute to open-source projects and share our own code with the community.

Grist is a fast-growing organization that combines the energy, creativity, and initiative of a young internet company with the spirit of a nonprofit. Yeah, we said nonprofit;  It means walking into work with the feeling that what you do actually matters. That’s a good feeling, trust us.

Opportunities

  • The challenge to develop for a rapidly growing mobile audience.
  • The chance to be creative and participate in product design.
  • Work with journalists on stories built with new Web technologies.
  • Work in WordPress in an enterprise environment.

You will work in close collaboration with designers and developers on a new Macbook Air in a daily scrum to develop our Zurb-Foundation 4 based WordPress theme with a focus on creating a great reading experience. Your  passion for  UX and modern Web design will help deliver a great experience to our readers. You are experienced with responsive design techniques and have a deep appreciation of the challenges in designing for mobile audiences. You’re interested in taking our site to the next level by employing backbone.js and developing new features for both our readers and authors. You’ll help us tailor our site for a majority mobile audience and will help us optimize for the reading experience though A/B testing and Website performance.

Benefits

  • Stay current. Professional development and conference budget
  • Use a shiny MacBook Air and a big screen monitor
  • Get around town for free with a free Orca Card
  • 3+ weeks vacation, personal flex time
  • 401K matching
  • Jeans and t-shirt office style
  • Welcome to Seattle’s sandwich district.  Team lunch 2x month
  • Great health care coverage
  • Locally roasted coffee
  • The warm feeling you get for doing good in the world

This is a unique opportunity to be part of a growing organization that combines the energy, creativity, and initiative of a young internet company with the spirit of a nonprofit. This is a full-time salaried position with good benefits. Our team is located in downtown Seattle.  While we do like candidates who can work with us in person, we know that good talent can be found anywhere and we’re well versed with working with distributed teams, so do apply.
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