Specialist, Leadership and Planned Giving

Position Summary:

The Leadership and Planned Giving Specialist serves a critical role on the Leadership and Planned Giving team at Make-A-Wish America, reporting to the Director of Planned Giving. The role of the Specialist is to enhance the operational excellence of the unit in the areas of gift programs, communications, estate management, planned gift marketing, endowment management and distributions, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) reporting, revenue forecasting, budget management, and overall leverage of the CRM.  Through this work, the Specialist will enhance the ability of the Leadership and Planned Giving team to successfully work with lifetime benefactors and estate representatives, maximize the breadth and depth of benefactor outreach and stewardship, and grow annual revenue.

This position is expected to manage and execute tasks with a high level of accountability and accuracy.  The Specialist is expected to be highly collaborative with other Make-A-Wish America departments and Make-A-Wish chapters to achieve excellence.

Knowledge and Abilities:

• Strong organizational skills, ability to manage multiple stakeholders and deliver against deadlines.
• Proven ability to manage and execute highly detailed work, while managing deadlines and multiple priorities.
• Flexibility to quickly shift priorities, multi-task and juggle simultaneous requirements in fast paced environment.
• Self-starter with willingness to work on projects that may contain uncertainty and necessity to learn in the process.
• Demonstrated ability to problem solve independently, identify, and deliver continuous improvement to process, and to learn new concepts and apply those learnings to work.
• Ability to communicate effectively when solution may not be known, willingness to dive into issues to problem solve, recommend next steps, and move forward with solutioning.
• Proven ability to think critically and to translate information into action.
• Exhibits exceptional relationship building and customer service skills to work professionally with constituents at all levels of the organization. Demonstrated ability and willingness to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams.
• Effective verbal and written communication skills to partner with chapters, other departments within the organization, and externally.
• Demonstrated ability to draft communications for both internal and external high-level constituents.
• Commitment to high standards and confidentiality, and approaches challenges with a positive approach and attitude.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Work closely with the Director of Planned Giving to assist in the following:
• Planned gift marketing, including content coordination with external vendors, calendar management, and CRM tracking
• Matured estate management, including paperwork facilitation, gift tracking in the CRM, communication with estate representatives including any legal counsel for Make-A-Wish America, and revenue forecasting
• Stewardship of Legacy Society benefactors, including responding to planned giving questions from the public and existing donors
• Chapter communications, including gift distributions, estate updates, collateral requests, and overall planned giving support
• Collaborate with the Leadership Gift Officers to ensure:
• Effective coordination with Stewardship, Donor Care, and Prospect Research/Data Analytics teams
• Administer Board member financial support tracking and reporting  
• Create and execute donor pledge reminder process
• Donors and referrals are engaged in event related opportunities on the national and chapter levels
• Coordinate with Finance and submit requests in the CRM for Donor Care to make distributions of funds from national to chapters for certain gift types (estates, endowments, donor restrictions, etc.), and then communicate these actions across the enterprise.
• Work closely across teams to develop, refine existing, and implement gift programs which will attract and retain leadership and planned gift benefactors.
• Assist National and chapter leadership with the enterprise-wide campaign, such as meeting scheduling and agenda preparation, file and resource management on DailyWISH, and any communications to stakeholders.

Qualifications:

• 2-3 years of prior work experience in a detail-oriented setting
• Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Office applications required, especially Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and SharePoint
• Salesforce or other CRM experience preferred.
• Familiarity and experience with AI tools including CoPilot, preferred
• Planned giving experience, especially with matured estates, preferred
• Nonprofit organization experience preferred

Working Environment:

• Ability to thrive in a remote environment.
• Travel may be required for internal and external meetings, up to 10%.
• May require work outside a traditional Monday – Friday work week, and outside normal business hours. This includes weekends and early evening weeknights.