Duties and Responsibilities:
85% - Fundraising Management
Identifies, cultivates, solicits and stewards portfolio of foundations in order to secure grants in keeping with assigned academic and non-academic unit priorities. Completes work with minimal supervision.
Prospect qualification: Manages a portfolio of prospective foundation prospects. Identifies potential prospects and researches their alignment, capacity, and potential funding levels. Works to cultivate early fundraising interactions and develops useful, early stage briefing materials.
Prospect cultivation: Identifies foundations’ values, capacity, interests and key triggers. Effectively uses research. Builds meaningful engagement with Ohio State. Sustains and deepens foundation engagement through effective partnerships and leverage of university resources. Develops strategies that build trust and identify mutual areas of interest with foundation prospects.
Prospect solicitation: Raises foundations’ sights and builds context for asks. Develops, edits and submits letters of inquiry and proposals, or other forms of solicitation. Utilizes effective solicitation techniques to directly solicit a minimum of 24 major gifts/grants (defined as $100,000 and above) annually with a targeted annual fundraising dollar goal of $3 million.
Stewardship: Manages a select pool of stewardship prospects. Depending on funders’ expectations, develops comprehensive stewardship plans and periodic stewardship reports for each foundation, for the purpose of recognition and continuous engagement. Facilitates public and private stewardship activities. Responds to leadership requests related to stewardship.
Prospect management: Builds, maintains and serves as primary prospect manager for a portfolio of approximately 50 foundations. Maintains key prospect and benefactor records for relationship-building and gift/grant activities through University Advancement systems and departmental files, including Prospect Tracking and Contact Reports.
Participates in ongoing training in basic fundraising activities and strategy. Performs other fundraising duties as assigned as part of a strong Foundation Engagement team.
Metrics and Collaboration:
The annual performance of all fundraisers at Ohio State is measured by the number of qualifications, cultivations, solicitations and commitments/dollars raised the individual accrues over each fiscal year. Each fundraiser may have different expectations regarding these figures based upon, but not limited to, their experience level, unit size, prospect portfolio, past performance, etc. Goal setting is done with the individual’s manager prior to each fiscal year to assure transparency, consistency and alignment.
All fundraisers at Ohio State are encouraged and expected to collaborate with their colleagues across the institution and can be counted as ‘Secondary’ in the solicitation, commitment and dollars raised phases of the development cycle. A secondary fundraiser can be considered when a team is working on a multi-unit initiative, the fundraiser is a subject matter expert in an area critical to the solicitation, or a fundraiser has a pre-existing, meaningful relationship with the donor and their participation helps move the gift/grant forward.