Post Date: January 23, 2025

In our first decade, Namati’s Resource Mobilization team (RM) was small, but punched above its weight. Our ambitions for the current phase (our strategic plan spans 2024-2028) are to cultivate a team of superstars with the fundraising chops to secure a growing annual revenue goal, to drive opportunities with a spirit of bold initiative, and to promote a culture of fundraising within the organization. Each person on the RM team contributes their fundraising expertise and leadership in complementary ways to form a synergistic, generative whole greater than the sum of its parts.

About the Position

Within this team, the Senior Associate will play the mission-critical role of meticulously supporting the administration of our fundraising effort. From tracking and furthering new and existing relationships, to data documentation and management across a variety of important indicators, to internal coordination across the RM team and close collaborators, to financial forecasting – the Senior Associate will be a critical part of the administrative “nerve center” of our fast-paced fundraising shop.

We seek a teammate with a track record of experience on the operations and administrative side of an organization or company. The right person for this role will bring both precision and creative thinking to these often-mechanical systems and processes, and take pride in the seamless and ever-improving function of those systems and processes. This person should possess exemplary process management and communication skills, outstanding attention to detail, a drive to excel in all responsibilities, and an ambition to grow in response to the needs of our always-evolving team and organizational budget.

The successful candidate may already have experience as a fundraising professional, or may have held an operations-based position with some intersection with the fundraising function.

Responsibilities:

• Data capture and upkeep: The Senior Associate will lead on data entry for Namati’s fundraising systems, including our fundraising pipeline, fundraising forecast, and related internal performance metrics, meticulously ensuring that up-to-date, relevant insights about our fundraising ecosystem are available to the Resource Mobilization team. This person will work deeply in our primary systems -- Google Drive, HubSpot, and Asana -- to ensure systematic, timely record-keeping, and will proactively identify and resolve data integrity issues (such as duplicate records or missing data points).

• Prospect research: The Senior Associate will support teammates in identifying, researching, and vetting a portfolio of potential philanthropic funding relationships. This person will scour databases, review potential leads for fit and capacity, and otherwise be proactive, creative, and “a step ahead” in their work of prospecting. Eventually, this role will lead on the due diligence process for all new philanthropic prospects, vetting potential funders to ensure they’re a match for Namati’s values, strategic priorities, and internal procedures. If you usually have 30+ tabs open at any given time, you might be a strong candidate!

• Engagement support: The Senior Associate will support leadership in conducting outreach to, and preparing for, meetings with current and potential funders, ensuring that all team members go into meetings with comprehensive background information and thoughtful research regarding the funder’s priorities, relationships, and personnel. The Senior Associate will also provide support to Resource Mobilization and Communications team members to identify and prepare for funder meetings at key events throughout the year, such as the Skoll World Forum. Eventually, this role will lead planning and logistics prep for key events and conferences for the Resource Mobilization team.

• Donor relations: The Senior Associate will be responsible for key donor stewardship and retention tasks such as charting timeframes for outreach, sending thank-you notes, and tracking donors’ presence across virtual and in-person spaces, as well as managing Namati’s profile across external platforms where donors commonly search for information like Candid and GiveLively.

• Internal coordination: The Senior Associate will collaborate closely with a variety of colleagues across Namati, particularly on the Finance and Communications teams, to ensure a consistent, communicative, and coordinated approach to fundraising projects and requirements.

Here’s what you might have tackled last week –

• Conducted a deep-dive into attendees of an upcoming environmental justice conference that a Senior Manager, Partnerships will be attending, including reviewing the list of attendees, researching top prospects as determined by the Senior Manager, and developing a brief with essential information on each of these prospects.

• Updated information in the prospect pipeline about likely award amounts and our likelihood of advancing, and then use that information to update our internal performance tracking system to measure our team performance against our annual goals.

• Pulled a lapsed donor report in HubSpot to ensure data accuracy and support re-engagement efforts, and followed up by documenting clear next steps.

• After a team discussion about a new corporate philanthropy prospect, initiated a due diligence process to learn more about that corporation’s ethics and practices.

• Reviewed the internal Asana entry for a foundation prospect that has lapsed and, in learning more about their emergent program areas, identified a point of overlap with our strategy and drafted an email for the Senior Manager, Partnerships to initiate contact with the relevant Program Officer.

About You

• A deep appreciation of the role of research and operations support in nonprofit organizations: We will prioritize applications from candidates with 1-3 years of experience in the nonprofit field, with a preference for those with a fundraising background and experience in the international development space. We are also open to candidates with other types of operations experience. While prior fundraising experience is not required, candidates should deeply appreciate the importance of resource mobilization to achieving our mission, and understand that fundraising must closely coordinate with many other functions in the larger organization.

• Organized and an exceptional project coordinator: You’re adept at tracking and managing details across complicated projects with diverse stakeholders. You understand that the background work—research, tracking, data management—are key to successful fundraising, and care deeply about managing and improving the background processes that make fundraising projects successful.

• Database savvy: You understand the stakes of keeping our internal fundraising data secure and up-to-date, and will do what it takes to protect and optimize our data management processes. Ideally, you have some experience managing complex relational databases; direct experience with HubSpot and Asana is a plus.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills: You can produce solid written products (concept notes, proposals, talking points, etc.) relatively quickly, and you value receiving feedback and collaborating with others on your written product. You’re good at understanding your audience, and you work hard to present big ideas with clarity and specificity.

• Growth-oriented: You’re always seeking to better yourself and your work, and you will push yourself to help fulfill our mission. In service of that growth, you welcome and delight in feedback from supervisors, peers, and anyone else.

Location
This position is open to candidates based in the United States. If the position is based in/near Washington, DC, this role will follow Namati’s hybrid office policy, which calls for staff to report to the office two days per week between Tuesday and Thursday, and may involve limited travel (~2-3x/year) to connect with colleagues across the United States.

Please note that candidates must already be legally eligible to work in the United States to be considered for the role; Namati cannot sponsor visas.

Compensation

Throughout the hiring process we will seek to understand your specific skills, experience, and abilities as they will fit into our team and our job levels. Namati's staff position bands range from 1 (entry level / assistant) to 9 (Managing Director). This position is at band 3. We base our compensation on the markets where our staff operate. The offer range for this position is likely to fall between $65,000 - $70,000 based on the final job level determined by the responsibility, scope, and complexity of the position; most offers are made in the first half of the offer range.

Namati offers a broad range of benefits, including:

• Health insurance: we pay 80% of the base plan premium for individuals, and 50% for dependents.

• Paid time off: new staff have 12 sick days and 3 personal days, and accrue 15 days of paid vacation (increasing to 20 after two years). Namati closes its offices organization-wide for “winter break” from December 25 to January 1, as well as federal holidays. Additionally, we provide six weeks of paid parental leave.

• 401(k) retirement planning: Namati contributes 5% of your salary plus matches your contribution up to an additional 5%.

• Professional development: we value – and set aside a professional development fund toward – staff having access to external professional development opportunities.

To Apply

Please apply by completing our online application form. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, and the position will be open until filled.

No phone calls, please. Namati is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Namati’s work has been featured in/on Democracy Journal, Amanpour & Co. New York Times, the Guardian, Devex, WIRED, the Washington Post, among others, and has been documented by the Sundance Institute. Vivek Maru, Namati’s CEO, gave a TED Talk in 2017 which has been viewed over 1.3 million times. In 2016, Namati was honored with the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and in 2017, the Schwab Foundation named Vivek Maru and colleague Sonkita Conteh two of its Social Entrepreneurs of the Year. Namati has a perfect score, 100/100, on Charity Navigator and has earned Guidestar’s Platinum Seal of Transparency.

About Namati

Since 2011, Namati has worked to build a movement of grassroots justice advocates worldwide. We’ve grown tremendously, from a small founding group of big-hearted change-makers to a global staff of 180+ people across 12 time zones in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The Grassroots Justice Network, which we co-founded and still convene to this day, has grown from 30 people in one room to the world’s largest community of justice advocates, with membership from 3,300 organizations across 175 countries.

We have supported local communities to take on thousands of justice issues, directly improving the lives of over 1.5 million people since our founding. Together with communities, partners, and Network members, we’ve envisioned - and won- transformative changes, like the Customary Land Rights and National Land Commission Acts of Sierra Leone, and the world’s first Legal Empowerment Fund.

About Resource Mobilization

Alongside the growth in our ambition and impact, Namati’s budget has increased, on average, by 18% per year -- from $5M to more than $15M in ten years. Our donor base has grown from 3 founding partners to over 40 bilateral and philanthropic funding partners. Major recent investments include an unrestricted award from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, and an 8-year, $20M award from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation through the Racial Equity 2030 competition. Many of our funding partners remain with us for the long haul. We are particularly proud that two longtime supporters, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation, went on to support the Legal Empowerment Fund, with an aim to mobilize $100M to support grassroots justice.

At the heart of our fundraising track record is our commitment to bold, inspired action as fundraisers: fundraising is organizing. Namati’s Resource Mobilization team does not take a transactional approach to fundraising; instead, we form relationships with funding partners committed not only to our organization, but to the entire Legal Empowerment movement. We strive to build and steward expansive, long-term, and high-level funding partnerships that match the ambitious scale of our vision.

This kind of fundraising requires a team of aligned, courageous, and strategic connectors who understand where Namati is uniquely placed to make a difference, who can learn continually from our work - and the work of our network and collaborators - to identify promising opportunities, and to create new ones.