[Hiring] Vice President, Development @JGO

Role Description

We are looking for someone exceptional. Yes, this person needs to be an outstanding fundraiser. They need to know how to walk into a room, build trust, develop meaningful relationships, make significant asks, and raise serious money. But we are not simply looking for a fundraiser. We are looking for a member of our executive team who can help lead JGO into its next chapter. Someone entrepreneurial, ambitious, creative, deeply relational, and a little unconventional.

This person should be equally comfortable building relationships, building teams, building ideas, and building an organization. The Managing Director will report to the Director of Operations, manage JGO's development team, work closely with the CEO and senior leadership, and serve as one of the organization's senior external representatives.

This is a significant leadership role for someone who wants to do much more than manage a development department. We want someone who wants to build.

What You'll Own

• Raise Serious Money: Fundraising will be a major part of this role—and we are looking for someone with the track record and drive to deliver.
• Personally cultivate, solicit, and steward a portfolio of major donors and prospects.
• Build relationships capable of generating significant 5-, 6-, and 7-figure investments in JGO.
• Develop new relationships with philanthropists, foundations, community leaders, executives, and connectors.
• Spend significant time meeting with donors and prospects—not just managing fundraising from behind a desk.
• Make direct asks and confidently close significant gifts.
• Develop creative strategies for opening doors to people who don't yet know JGO.
• Build relationships that grow over years, not just through individual transactions.
• Carry a meaningful personal fundraising goal and be accountable for delivering significant revenue for the organization.

• Lead the Development Team: You will lead JGO's development team while remaining a frontline fundraiser yourself.
• Manage, coach, and develop JGO's fundraising professionals.
• Help each fundraiser build stronger portfolios, strategies, pipelines, and relationships.
• Establish clear expectations and accountability around fundraising activity and results.
• Lead regular portfolio and pipeline strategy conversations.
• Identify opportunities across portfolios and connect the dots between donors, prospects, programs, regions, and relationships.
• Create a development culture that is ambitious and accountable without becoming transactional.
• Help recruit and build the development team JGO will need for its next stage of growth.

• Help Lead JGO: This is where the role goes beyond traditional development leadership.
• Help think strategically about where JGO is going and what it could become.
• Identify opportunities, partnerships, people, and ideas that could accelerate JGO's growth.
• Represent JGO with donors, foundations, Jewish communal leaders, partners, and other external stakeholders.
• Build relationships that may begin as fundraising conversations but grow into partnerships, introductions, programs, or entirely new opportunities.
• Bring ideas to the table—even the unconventional ones.
• Challenge assumptions and help us think bigger.
• Step into important organizational initiatives when leadership, creativity, or relationship-building is needed.

• Tell the JGO Story: You should be able to make someone understand within minutes why graduate students matter to the Jewish future.
• Become deeply immersed in JGO's programs, students, alumni, and impact.
• Spend time with graduate students and understand their experiences firsthand.
• Translate JGO's work into a compelling case for philanthropic investment.
• Tell our story naturally and persuasively in donor meetings, communal settings, presentations, events, and one-on-one conversations.
• Help leadership communicate JGO's vision in ways that inspire people to participate, invest, and open doors.

• Build the Machine: Great fundraising requires great relationships—and great execution.
• Strengthen JGO's major gifts strategy, donor pipeline, and moves-management process.
• Ensure our development team uses our CRM consistently and strategically.
• Establish clear fundraising goals, metrics, forecasts, and accountability.
• Partner with the Director of Operations to build systems that allow the development operation to scale.
• Identify what's working, what's not, and what we should be doing differently.

Qualifications

• A proven fundraiser
• A relationship builder
• A builder
• Entrepreneurial and out of the box
• Driven
• A leader
• An excellent communicator
• Deeply connected to JGO's mission
• Comfortable across the Jewish community
• Hungry to grow

Requirements

• A track record of personally closing significant philanthropic gifts or comparable high-value relationships.
• Experience managing, coaching, or leading other professionals.
• Strong instincts around major gifts, donor strategy, and relationship management.
• An existing network within Jewish philanthropy or the broader Jewish community is valuable, but not required.
• Comfort interacting with major philanthropists, executives, rabbis, students, communal leaders, and entrepreneurs.
• Excellent judgment, emotional intelligence, and follow-through.
• Willingness to travel regularly for donor meetings, student experiences, and JGO events.
• A sense of humor, curiosity, energy, and the ability to operate in a fast-moving organization.

Benefits

• JGO is ambitious about our mission without believing that meaningful work requires sacrificing everything else.
• We are a family-friendly organization. Our staff's marriages, children, religious lives, and personal responsibilities matter.
• We also move quickly.
• We experiment. We build. We change things when they aren't working.
• We care more about impact than bureaucracy and more about getting to the right answer than protecting whose idea it was.
• We take the work seriously without taking ourselves too seriously.