Development Director

About Spark

Spark accelerates progress in emerging, high-impact climate fields. By working directly with scientists, policymakers, and peer organizations, Spark supports the growth of emerging fields with the potential to limit warming, monitor and manage Earth systems risk, and help enable our return to a safe climate. Spark focuses on expanding the portfolio of mitigation and adaptation approaches that enable our return to a safe climate and minimize environmental and social risks along the way.

Spark’s first programs focus on large, under-addressed methane areas that currently represent unmanaged risks to our overall climate trajectory, including work on enteric methane mitigation, atmospheric methane removal research, natural systems feedbacks, and additional innovation areas to assist efforts to mitigate super climate pollutants.

Spark's work is made possible through support from the Grantham Foundation, Quadrature Climate Foundation, Spitzer Charitable Trust, Astera Fund, Additional Ventures, and additional generous and audacious funders.

About the Role

The Development Director will lead the design and implementation of a philanthropic fundraising strategy for Spark and spinout non-profit initiatives, collaborating closely with Spark’s program and organizational leaders. This is an opportunity to pioneer the position at Spark and meaningfully contribute to growing overall efforts in neglected, high-potential climate fields, starting with livestock methane mitigation, atmospheric methane removal, transformational agricultural nitrogen management, and climate feedback science. This work is crucial in parallel with the energy transition to decrease overall climate risks and create possible pathways to safe and stable climate futures, and the person who takes on this role will be a key partner and enabler in that work.

As Spark's first development hire, the Development Director will zoom in and out between strategy and execution, partnering with the rest of the team to engage with funders and increase the resources available in critical climate fields. The Director will be accountable for fundraising targets and funder relationships.

Spark’s target fundraising goal will grow to $20-50M/yr over the next few years to be able to support transformational re-granting in the fields we work in alongside our smaller operational budget. We aim to support the growth of the climate fields we work in beyond our direct work and re-granting, and we also highly value helping partner organizations find the funding needed for their aligned efforts.

You Are (Skills)

• An expert fundraising strategist and major gifts fundraiser. You’ve led $5M+ fundraises for novel efforts, ideally, those that touch on climate, policy, science/research, or field-building. You have a strong network and understand how to manage relationships for joint impact partnerships in the long term. You understand how to effectively leverage relationship building, events, and communications to create and sustain a fundraising flywheel.
• A kick-starter and comfortable with ambiguity. You’re excited to build new systems and develop strong processes. You know how to think big and also get stuff done. You know how to manage competing priorities and deadlines to deliver results.
• Highly organized. You consistently prioritize tasks and create structure and plans from diverse information streams. You can work with multiple people and systems to keep everything on track while responding rapidly to many high-stakes community members.
• Independent leader and strong partner. You can operate independently and also thrive on partnering with other organizational leaders, collaboratively ideating and sharing needs and opportunities, then helping them to appropriately triage their time and inputs to the fundraising and partnerships process.
• Exceptional communicator. You can engage with nuanced concepts from scientists, policy advocates, and organizational leaders to understand their work and translate it into compelling materials for potential funders. You have experience writing and editing fundraising materials and grant proposals. You can work with professional designers and other staff to ensure that our materials are of the highest quality and finely edited.
• A high-trust team player. You will collaborate closely with Spark leaders and our existing philanthropic backers and partners. Colleagues and philanthropic funders you’ve worked with would say they always had high confidence in their working relationship with you and would partner with you again.

You Will (Duties)

• Drive and own our fundraising strategy. Given knowledge of our unique field-building model in emerging climate fields, funding needs, and timeframes, you will design and lead our overall development strategy.
• Cultivate and own deals within fundraising pipelines and partner with organizational leaders to cultivate and close deals.
• Own fundraising materials. With input from organizational leaders, you will refine external-facing fundraising materials to be most effective, recognizing the need to bring new funders into each field we’re working in.
• Work closely with our existing funders to align on shared goals and support our ongoing partnership.
• Own our CRM to aid in the management of new and existing relationships.
• Help the leadership team manage their time on development and communications-related tasks and priorities.
• Help shape our external communications strategy to optimize for funder growth and sustainability.
• Develop our funder event and meeting strategy.

In 6 months you will have (6 month goals)

• Understood the essence of Spark Climate Solutions, the fields we work in, our programs and spinout initiatives, and why they uniquely matter towards overall climate progress. You can articulate this comprehensibly to people less steeped in the work and highlight new, highly relevant partnership opportunities.
• Designed our development process. Unified diverse materials, notes, and conversations into a prioritized fundraising roadmap and CRM.
• Refined/developed key fundraising materials.
• Honed in on key deals. You’ll have zoomed into particular projects at high granularity and designed a deal-closing strategy based on the project’s unique purpose, needs, and network.
• Put together at least one major donor cultivation event.
• Built relationships with key people in and around the Spark sphere

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Location

For this role, being located in the San Francisco Bay Area is preferred, though candidates located anywhere in the United States will be considered. All candidates will need to be able to travel for in-person funder meetings; the travel load for candidates outside of the Bay Area will likely be higher.

Compensation

This is a full-time position with generous benefits. The starting salary range is $200,000-$230,000 / year, depending on experience and location, and may be higher for more senior candidates. In addition, Spark Climate Solutions provides exceptional benefits, including generous PTO, sick time, holidays, a 401-k match, health insurance coverage, fully covered dental/vision/life insurance, and parental leave.

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