Director of Advancement Communications

Job Description

TITLE: Director of Advancement Communications

DEPARTMENT: Advancement Department

Classification (FLSA): Exempt, Salary

REPORTS TO: Executive Director of Advancement

GENERAL DESCRIPTION: The Director leads robust and growing direct response and content marketing programs that attract, build, and expand donor and subscriber involvement with Christendom. The Director manages all planning, quality control, and implementation for integrated direct response fundraising (including acquisition and house file), content marketing (including free online courses and the Principles journal), and foundation proposals-expanding the reach of Christendom and the impact of its Catholic educational mission "to restore all things in Christ."

SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES:

- Oversees the daily workflow of the department.
- Manages Advancement Digital Manager, Annual Fund Manager, student employees, and vendors.
- Recruits, interviews, hires, and trains new staff when necessary.

CHIEF DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

Overseeing Advancement Messaging and Communication
- Oversees Advancement communications and marketing to ensure they are in line with the mission and strategic priorities of Christendom; works closely with Executive Director of Advancement to ensure communications priorities are implemented.
- Manages and creates Advancement communications documentation (including talking points, style guides, and major gift opportunity descriptions) and helps managers and fellow directors integrate well-aligned communications into all Advancement appeals, informational materials, and proposals.
- Assists where needed in creating major gift opportunity proposals, documents, talking points, and briefing memos for presidential visits, donor meetings, and stewardship interactions.
- Maintains a growing and deepening understanding of the priorities, trends, and principles that are important to Christendom College and its audiences in order to build greater donor and subscriber involvement with the college.
- Develops and manages the budget for direct response, content marketing, and other special projects.

Directing New Donor Acquisition
- Oversees strategic direction of acquisition (both digital and direct mail), sets and measures performance targets (new donor numbers, CPL, LTV, and other key metrics), and calibrates for the right channel mix
- Provides high-level strategic, creative, and messaging guidance for acquisition projects; reviews, signs off, or seeks approval where necessary for creatives, landing pages, and donation flows produced by staff or vendors.
- Defines testing priorities and evaluates results; ensures A/B and multivariate tests are statistically valid and mission-aligned; recommends new tests, offers, and budget allocations for acquisition optimization.
- Oversees vendor selection and relationships to ensure third-parties provide good ROI and high-quality work.
- In collaboration with Director of Advancement Technology and Services, ensures list strategy, suppression rules, and segmentation policies are properly aligned with major gifts and subscriber pools.
- Ensures compliance with charitable solicitation laws and ensures institutional privacy policies are updated.
- Works with Director of Advancement Technology and Services to ensure performance dashboards are properly designed, updated, and actionable to assess attribution, ROI, channel health, and other key metrics; recommends strategic pivots and resource reallocation.

Directing House File Appeals
- Leads and implements annual giving strategy, goal setting, and communications calendars for house file appeals (both mail and digital); delegates execution to managers while maintaining oversight of timing, audience strategy, and spend.
- Ensures effective strategies are in place for appeal themes, summaries, and major creative concepts.
- Works with Alumni & Donor Engagement Director to implement integrated donor journeys (welcome process, stewardship, and upgrades) and monitors lifecycle performance.
- Receives and reviews campaign performance reports; sets retention and upgrade targets and guides managers on optimization priorities.
- Leads planning and provides strategic oversight for annual Giving Day-setting objectives, segmentation strategy, campus and other on-site engagement strategy, and executing post-event analysis; works closely with Directors and staff across Advancement Department to ensure successful Giving Day.

Directing Content Marketing Initiatives
- Oversees Christendom's free online courses initiative, Principles journal, and other content marketing; ensures projects remain in alignment with college's mission and priorities.
- Builds and maintains good relationships with Christendom faculty members, external professors, and other relevant experts who provide the primary talent for Christendom's content marketing initiatives; collaborates with engagement and events team to share ideas for speakers, lecturers, and writers.
- In close collaboration with Director of Advancement Technology and Services, sets metrics and tracks the performance of impressions, website visits, enrollments and subscriptions, donor conversions, downstream giving, and other key benchmarks to ensure success; discerns and recommends content updates, new investments, and redesigns to ensure content and strategies remain cutting edge.
- Ensures that all content produced is free of grammatical and stylistic errors; works closely with professors to ensure arguments and ideas presented are in line with Catholic teaching and relevant academic disciplines.
- Oversees budget allocations for content production, advertising, and vendor engagements.

Managing Foundation Proposals Strategy
- Leads strategy and stewardship for foundation proposals; oversees the creation of and helps create case statements, impact narratives, and major asks.
- Coordinates with cross-departmental teams (major gift, academic, business office, and college leadership) to ensure that strategic priorities of the college and foundations are in alignment.
- Oversees and delegates drafting and research tasks to managers and vendors.

Supervision and Collaboration with Staff
- Serves on the Advancement Department's strategy team and positively contributes to the shared direction and decisions that help the department achieve its goals as a united whole.
- Directly supervises the Advancement Digital Manager and the Annual Fund Manager; sets strategic objectives, conducts performance reviews, and supports their professional development.
- Holds managers accountable for execution quality, timelines, budgets, compliance, and campaign performance.
- Collaborates with fellow Advancement directors to align strategy and messaging across Advancement; consults frequently with Advancement VP and Executive Director to keep strategy and messaging accurate.

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time for the needs of the College, but a discussion between the employee and supervisor will take place prior to this change.

Qualifications

- This position must be held by an individual who is an active, practicing Catholic who is committed to the Church's mission on earth.
- Must have at least 7 years of experience in direct response, digital marketing, content marketing, and/or related fields.
- Must have at least 5 years of experience managing teams.
- Must have excellent writing and editing abilities.
- Must have excellent verbal communication.
- Must be proficient in using MS Office programs.
- Experience with a nonprofit CRM (preferably Raiser's Edge).

PHYSICAL / MENTAL / EMOTIONAL REQUIREMENTS:

Must be able to:
- Work for prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
- Lift up to 40 pounds.
- Make quick decisions.
- Appropriately balance urgent and important tasks.
- Be calm in stressful situations.

About the Employer

Christendom College (http://www.christendom.edu) is a Catholic coeducational college institutionally committed to the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. The particular mission of Christendom College, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, is "to restore all things in Christ," by forming men and women to contribute to the Christian renovation of the temporal order. This mission gives Christendom College its name. www.christendom.edu