Position Details

Fractional Director of Development

Reports to: Executive Director
Engagement: Independent contractor, 12–15 hours/week, six-month initial term, with continuation expected
Location: Remote, with 1–2 trips and occasional donor events
Compensation: $7,500 per month. Not commission-based and not tied to funds raised, consistent with AFP ethical standards.

The opportunity

ASF is growing quickly and rebuilding a development function from a standing start. The organization did not fundraise for roughly ten years; we restarted in earnest last year. We have real assets – Little Green Light as our donor management system, approximately 5,000 alumni (Fellows for Life, or FFL, in our language), more than 1,400 past donors – but no infrastructure connecting data and strategy to a coherent giving program.
In 2025 we achieved 100% board giving for the first time in at least a decade and ran an end-of-year email campaign. In 2026 the Executive Director has been reactivating past donors personally, through a press release announcing the 2026–27 cohort and individual outreach calls. These are the right instincts without an apparatus behind them: the work happens when leadership makes it happen, and stops when leadership is pulled elsewhere. Read this as evidence that the will exists at the top and on the board, and that what is missing is the machinery.

The role is structured for a seasoned professional. Production work goes to contractors – a grant writer already engaged, a part-time CRM and development operations coordinator, and a communications contractor – and your hours go to strategy, systems, and the decisions only experience can make. You will have unusual latitude to design this operation the way you believe it should be designed, direct access to an ED ready to be deployed in front of donors, a board that gives, and budget for the support staff to execute what you design.

The work

This is a strategy role with implementation attached – roughly 30% strategy, 20% infrastructure (front-loaded in the first quarter), 30% implementation, and 20% directing contractors. It falls into five areas.

Systems and data. Rehabilitate the LGL instance and the lapsed donor files: record hygiene, a coherent structure of groups and custom fields, gift entry standards, and a segmentation model that separates prospects worth cultivating from names worth emailing. Clean up the back office – gift processing, receipting, reconciliation with our bookkeeper – so that staff time goes to donors rather than data, and build a small reporting layer the ED and Board will actually read.

Institutional giving. The ED is already in these rooms. You hold everything else: the prospect pipeline and deadline calendar, research and qualification of what the ED’s networking produces, funder briefings, the program officer relationships, grant compliance and renewal strategy, and direction of the contract grant writer.

Major gifts. The ED carries the portfolio and makes the asks. You build the qualified portfolio out of the lapsed donor base, construct and maintain the cultivation calendar, prepare a real briefing before every meeting, draft solicitation and follow-up materials, and drive the follow-through.

The national–chapter framework. Each chapter is an independent legal entity, and Fellows for Life move across chapters, making a coordinated approach to alumni relationships and fundraising essential. An interim alumni and fundraising framework is being incorporated into our new affiliation agreements, with a full Schedule due to the Board within twelve months. Your role will be to work with chapters to define the fundraising support they need and want from National in their regions, including opportunities for National to organize and pool resources that individual chapters cannot access on their own. You will also work with chapters to clarify the roles and support they see as most valuable from National, as well as where they want to retain local ownership and leadership. You will map current chapter needs and capacity, lead the Network Fundraising Working Group in translating these needs and priorities into the Schedule, and build the corresponding infrastructure, resources and support.

Annual giving and alumni reactivation. The 2026 year-end campaign comes first and lands early – our 2025 email appeal raised roughly $10,000 including board giving, and we intend to run it again, better, with a goal of $25,000. Beyond that: the multi-year campaign that will reintroduce ASF to 5,000 Fellows for Life, and the mid-level pipeline that will feed major gifts over the next three to five years.

What success looks like

We are not setting a dollar target for this engagement. What we are asking for is infrastructure that outlasts you and that the organization actually uses – the ED working from the cultivation calendar, the Board reading the dashboard, team members running the workflows, all of it documented well enough that a successor and future development team could pick it up. You will be accountable for activity and pipeline: prospects researched and qualified, proposals submitted, ED meetings prepared and held, funder relationships moved from cold to active, deliverables landed on schedule. Revenue targets begin in year two, built from the baseline and the model you produce.

Who we’re looking for

  • 10+ years in nonprofit development, including significant time at director level or above
  • A track record in foundation relations, including supporting a CEO or ED in securing and renewing six- and seven- figure awards
  • Deep, hands-on fluency with donor management systems – you configure, clean, and query them yourself. LGL strongly preferred; comparable small-shop CRM okay if you’re a quick learner (or can make a compelling case we should switch CRMs)
  • Experience supporting a principal in major gift work: briefings, strategy, follow-through
  • Experience building or rebuilding a development function, ideally where fundraising was dormant
  • Experience supervising contract or part-time staff, including grant writers
  • Experience in a federated, chapter-based, or affiliate structure, with the diplomatic skill to negotiate among parties of unequal capacity and a range of interests

You are a builder, comfortable being the senior person in a very small room, unbothered by inheriting a disjointed system, and equally credible in a database and in a conversation with a $250,000 prospect. You would rather build a repeatable system and teach it to someone else than heroically execute a one-off.

To apply

Send a resume and a brief letter to rachel.gold@schweitzerfellowship.org addressing three things:

  1. A development function you built or rebuilt, and what it looked like when you left it
  2. A donor database you personally cleaned up, restructured, or queried at depth
  3. An institutional relationship you moved from cold to funded

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Shortlisted candidates will receive a detailed scope of work ahead of an interview. ASF is an equal opportunity employer.