Vice President, Development
Jewish Graduate Organization (JGO)
Full-Time | Remote
About JGO
Jewish Graduate Organization (JGO) is building the Jewish future by reaching young Jews at one of the most consequential stages of their lives: graduate school.
Graduate students are becoming tomorrow’s doctors, lawyers, business leaders, academics, entrepreneurs, communal leaders, and philanthropists. Yet for many, graduate school is also the moment when they become disconnected from organized Jewish life.
JGO exists to change that.
We build Jewish community on graduate school campuses and create meaningful opportunities for graduate students to connect—to Judaism, to Israel, to one another, and to the broader Jewish community.
Since 2011, JGO has grown into a national organization reaching thousands of graduate students across campuses throughout North America. And we are just getting started.
The Opportunity
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.
Someone who can sit across the table from a major philanthropist in the morning, coach a fundraiser in the afternoon, brainstorm a completely new initiative with our leadership team an hour later, and spend the evening talking with graduate students about what they actually need from the Jewish community.
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.
The Managing Director will:
- 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.
You will:
- 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.
The Managing Director will be a thought partner to JGO's Director of Operations, CEO, and senior leadership on questions that extend beyond fundraising.
You will:
- 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.
We don't expect this person to stay neatly inside a job description. In fact, we'd prefer that they don't.
Tell the JGO Story
You should be able to make someone understand within minutes why graduate students matter to the Jewish future.
You will:
- 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.
You will:
- 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.
Who We're Looking For
There isn't one perfect résumé for this role.
What matters more is who you are and what you've accomplished.
You Are:
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.
What We'd Love to See
- 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.
Our Culture
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.
Proven major-gift fundraiser with significant philanthropic results, team leadership experience, strong donor strategy, excellent communication, judgment, follow-through, and willingness to travel regularly.
Key Responsibilities
- cultivating donors
- leading fundraisers
- representing JGO
Skills & Tools
CRM
Job Details
- Category: Business Development
- Seniority: Senior Level
- Commitment: Full Time
- Workplace: Remote — United States
- Languages: English
About Jewish Graduate Organization (JGO)
A national Jewish organization building community and meaningful connections for graduate students across North America. — Industry: Non-Profit Organizations and NGOs