Leadership and Planned Giving Specialist

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 focuses on enhancing operational excellence in areas such as gift programs, communications, estate management, planned gift marketing, endowment management and distributions, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) reporting, revenue forecasting, budget management, and overall CRM leverage.

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 outreach and stewardship, and grow annual revenue.

The position requires managing and executing tasks with a high level of accountability and accuracy. The Specialist must be highly collaborative with other departments and 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 a fast-paced environment.
• Self-starter with a willingness to work on projects containing uncertainty and a need to learn in the process.
• Demonstrated ability to problem-solve independently, identify, and deliver continuous improvement to processes, and learn new concepts to apply them.
• Ability to communicate effectively when solutions are unclear, willingness to dive into issues to problem-solve, recommend next steps, and move forward.
• Proven ability to think critically and translate information into action.
• Exceptional relationship-building and customer service skills to work professionally with constituents at all organizational levels. Demonstrated ability and willingness to collaborate with cross-functional teams.
• Effective verbal and written communication skills to partner with chapters, other departments, and external stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to draft communications for both internal and external high-level constituents.
• Commitment to high standards and confidentiality, with a positive approach to challenges.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Work closely with the Director of Planned Giving to assist in:
• Planned gift marketing, including content coordination with external vendors, calendar management, and CRM tracking.
• Estate management, including paperwork facilitation, gift tracking in the CRM, communication with estate representatives (including legal counsel), 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 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 processes.
• Engage donors and referrals in event-related opportunities on national and chapter levels.
• Coordinate with Finance to submit requests in the CRM for Donor Care to distribute funds from national to chapters for certain gift types (estates, endowments, donor restrictions, etc.), and communicate these actions across the enterprise.
• Develop, refine, and implement gift programs to attract and retain leadership and planned gift benefactors.
• Assist National and chapter leadership with the enterprise-wide campaign, including meeting scheduling, agenda preparation, file and resource management on DailyWISH, and stakeholder communications.