Senior Associate Director, Annual & Digital Giving

Association of Independent Schools in New England; Southborough (MA); On-site; USD 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

St. Mark’s School seeks a fundraising growth strategist who will reinvent an inherited annual giving program and drive donor growth with a data-driven, multichannel, donor-centered approach.

You’ll design journeys, test approaches, and partner across teams to build a scalable, intelligent fundraising engine that increases new donors, retention, and revenue. You will lead strategy from acquisition through leadership giving, collaborating with Advancement Services, Data Analytics, Donor Relations,

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience.
• Evidence of building or improving a donor growth program, not merely maintaining operations.
• Exceptional writing, editing, and storytelling with audience adaptation.
• Strong analytical fluency to interpret fundraising performance and translate insight into decisions.

Responsibilities

• Develop and implement a multi-year annual giving growth strategy, including acquisition, retention, upgrade, and leadership giving.
• Design donor journeys tailored to life stage, affiliation, giving behavior, engagement, and channel preferences.
• Lead integrated campaigns across print, email, text, web, social, peer-to-peer, crowdfunding, and emerging digital channels.
• Grow digital fundraising through responsible acquisition, targeting, landing-page optimization, and mobile giving.
• Create a recurring-giving program with acquisition, conversion, stewardship, upgrade, and retention strategies.
• Improve donor experience by reducing friction across giving pages, forms, and payment options.
• Translate the School’s mission and priorities into donor-centered content across channels.
• Establish a testing roadmap and actionable reporting to inform strategy and resource allocation.

Skills

Fundraising strategy

Storytelling

Digital fundraising

Analytics

Experimentation

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Job description

The Opportunity

St. Mark’s seeks a fundraising growth strategist, not an appeals manager. This person will inherit a successful annual giving program and be expected to reinvent it: preserving the relationships and traditions that make educational philanthropy meaningful while building a more intelligent, personalized, digitally fluent, and performance-driven approach to donor growth.

The Senior Associate Director will combine fundraising judgment, exceptional storytelling, digital fluency, analytical curiosity, and disciplined experimentation to increase donors, retention, and revenue. The successful candidate will be as comfortable interpreting a donor-retention cohort or testing a digital acquisition campaign as writing a compelling appeal or talking with an alumnus, parent, or friend about why St. Mark’s matters.

This is a builder’s role. The person will not simply execute an inherited calendar. They will assess what is working, challenge assumptions, develop a multi-year growth strategy, and create the systems, donor journeys, testing discipline, and cross-functional partnerships required for the next generation of the St. Mark’s Fund.

Position Summary

Reporting to the Director of Constituent Engagement and Leadership Annual Giving, the Senior Associate Director leads strategy and execution for broad-based annual and digital giving. The role provides strategic oversight of the donor-growth continuum, from acquisition and first-gift conversion through renewal, reactivation, upgrade, recurring giving, and movement into leadership annual and major giving. Working in close partnership with Advancement Services and Data Analytics, Donor Relations, Constituent Engagement, Major Gifts, and Marketing and Communications, the Senior Associate Director will translate institutional priorities and donor insight into segmented, multichannel experiences that are creative, measurable, and donor-centered.

Key Responsibilities

• Annual and Digital Giving Growth Strategy (60%)
• Build the growth strategy. Develop and implement a multi-year plan for annual giving revenue and donor growth, with clear strategies for acquisition, first-to-second gift conversion, retention, reactivation, upgrade, recurring giving, and leadership annual giving.
• Design donor journeys. Continually innovate and refine annual giving outreach through coordinated donor journeys tailored to life stage, affiliation, giving behavior, engagement, channel preference, and philanthropic potential.
• Lead integrated campaigns. Own the strategy, creative brief, audience, offer, channel mix, sequencing, and results for print, email, text, web, social, peer-to-peer, crowdfunding, and emerging digital channels.
• Grow digital fundraising. In close partnership with Advancement Services and Data Analytics, develop responsible approaches to digital acquisition, conversion, audience targeting, retargeting, landing-page optimization, mobile giving, paid media, and other opportunities appropriate to St. Mark’s audiences and resources.
• Create a recurring-giving program. Build and grow a compelling monthly or recurring-giving proposition, including acquisition, conversion, stewardship, upgrade, and retention strategies.
• Continually enhance Giving Day. Lead Giving Day and other concentrated campaigns, building on their strengths while testing new approaches to storytelling, ambassador activation, digital engagement, real-time optimization, and new‑donor conversion.
• Advance peer-to-peer fundraising. Collaborate closely with colleagues across Constituent Engagement to develop and refine volunteer and ambassador models that make participation easy, authentic, inclusive, and measurable.
• Improve the donor experience. In partnership with Advancement Services, continuously reduce friction across giving pages, forms, payment options, acknowledgments, follow‑up, and next‑best actions in partnership with colleagues and vendors.
• Tell consequential stories. Partner with Marketing and Communications to translate the School’s mission, strategic priorities, student experience, and impact into persuasive, donor-centered content across channels.
• Analytics, Testing, and Innovation (15%)
• Establish a testing roadmap. Create and manage an annual agenda of disciplined experiments involving audiences, messages, ask amounts, offers, signatories, timing, channel sequencing, landing pages, stewardship, and other variables; document learning and scale what works.
• Build actionable reporting. In partnership with Advancement Services, develop dashboards and cohort analyses that move beyond activity metrics to illuminate conversion, retention, reactivation, upgrade, recurring giving, revenue, ROI, donor value, and pipeline migration.
• Turn insight into action. Use donor behavior, engagement signals, qualitative insight, and philanthropic history to improve segmentation, personalization, forecasting, and resource allocation.
• Use emerging tools responsibly. Explore and apply appropriate technology, including marketing automation, artificial intelligence, and predictive methods, to improve insight, personalization, content development, workflow, and donor experience while honoring privacy, data governance, brand standards, and human judgment.
• Manage the channel and vendor ecosystem. In partnership with Advancement Services, evaluate platforms, partners, mail houses, consultants, and media investments for effectiveness, integration, cost, and strategic value.
• Reunion and Peer-to-Peer Giving (10%)
• Prioritize reunion giving as a significant near‑term opportunity for donor participation, renewed engagement, and increased support. Treat reunion classes as distinct donor segments within the broader annual‑giving strategy, with differentiated journeys, goals, messages, volunteer roles, and stewardship.
• Partner with Constituent Engagement and gift officers to develop milestone giving strategies that strengthen participation, encourage stretch and multi-year commitments, and identify leadership and major‑gift potential.
• Support the fundraising dimensions of Reunion Weekend and use the experience to deepen relationships, capture insight, and sustain post‑reunion engagement.
• Leadership Annual Giving and Pipeline Development (10%)
• Manage a focused portfolio of leadership‑level annual giving donors to remain close to donor motivations and test strategies for qualification, renewal, upgrade, and migration.
• Conduct purposeful donor conversations and solicitations, with goals based on portfolio composition and coordinated with the Director of Constituent Engagement and Leadership Annual Giving.
• Create systematic identification structures to handoff prospects to Major Gifts and Planned Giving when annual donors demonstrate capacity, inclination, engagement, or behavior that warrants deeper relationship management.
• Budget, Planning, and Institutional Partnership (5%)
• Develop and manage the annual giving operating budget, forecasts, production calendar, contracts, and vendor relationships; allocate resources based on expected return and strategic value.
• Serve as a generous, proactive partner across Advancement and the School, contributing expertise while advancing shared institutional goals.
• Maintain accurate, timely records and uphold the highest standards of discretion, data integrity, donor intent, and professional ethics.

Measures of Success

Success will be evaluated through a balanced scorecard of financial performance, donor health, innovation, execution, and collaboration. Measures may include:

• Annual giving revenue, unrestricted current-use support, and progress against forecast;
• New donors acquired and cost to acquire, where applicable;
• First‑time donor renewal, overall retention, reactivation, upgrade, and downgrade rates;
• Growth in recurring donors and leadership annual donors;
• Conversion rates, average and median gift, channel performance, and return on investment;
• Movement of qualified donors into leadership, major, and planned giving pipelines;
• Quality, pace, and documented learning from the testing roadmap;
• Improvement in the ease, relevance, personalization, and consistency of the donor experience; and
• Effective collaboration, sound judgment, reliable execution, and positive contribution to team culture.

Participation will remain an important indicator, but it will be considered alongside revenue, retention, engagement, donor quality, and long‑term philanthropic value.

Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education and relevant experience.
• Approximately 5–7 years of progressively responsible experience in annual giving, digital fundraising, direct-response fundraising, growth marketing, constituent engagement, or a related field. Demonstrated sophistication and results matter more than a specific number of years.
• Evidence of building or materially improving a program, channel, campaign portfolio, donor journey, or growth strategy, not solely maintaining established operations.
• Exceptional writing, editing, and storytelling ability, with the judgment to adapt message, voice, offer, and call to action for different audiences and channels.
• Strong analytical fluency and the ability to interpret fundraising and marketing performance, draw sound conclusions, and translate insight into decisions.
• Experience designing or using segmentation, testing, personalization, and multichannel campaign strategies.
• Excellent project management, prioritization, and operational discipline across complex calendars, stakeholders, budgets, vendors, and deadlines.
• Ability to collaborate across fundraising, communications, data, engagement, and leadership functions while establishing clear ownership and accountability.
• Strong interpersonal skills and comfort engaging donors and volunteers in writing, by phone, virtually, and in person.
• Curiosity, creativity, humility, resilience, and a willingness to test, learn, and change course based on evidence.
• Commitment to St. Mark’s mission and to inclusive, ethical, donor-centered philanthropy.

Preferred

• Experience in a sophisticated fundraising, membership, subscription, e‑commerce, direct‑to‑consumer, or other relationship‑based growth environment. Candidates from education, healthcare, arts and culture, public media, social‑impact organizations, or other sectors are encouraged to apply.
• Experience with a fundraising CRM such as Raiser’s Edge NXT or Salesforce; email or marketing‑automation platforms; digital fundraising platforms; web analytics; paid digital media; and dashboard or visualization tools.
• Experience developing recurring‑giving, digital‑acquisition, peer‑to‑peer, crowdfunding, or ambassador programs.
• Familiarity with responsible uses of artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, or automation in fundraising or marketing.
• Experience working with alumni, parents, volunteers, or other affinity-based communities.

Working at St. Mark’s

This position requires occasional evening and weekend work and periodic travel for donor engagement, events, and professional responsibilities. The final posting should include the School’s current employment benefits, workplace expectations, background‑check language, physical requirements where applicable, and approved equal‑opportunity statement.