About the role
The Associate, Client Services serves as a leader in the nonprofit community, inspiring and supporting nonprofits to realize their full fundraising potential. About 80% of the Associate’s time is spent supporting a portfolio of clients, in partnership with other Aperio team members. About 20% of time is spent on business development, serving as a thought leader in the community and proactively building relationships with a portfolio of prospective clients, referral sources, and other nonprofit leaders and fundraisers.
Client services responsibilities (80%)
The Associate, Client Services supports our team of Client Services Directors in providing thought partnership and hands-on support to a portfolio of nonprofit clients. In every project, the Associate will position clients for sustainable revenue growth and fulfill client objectives. To that end, the Associate will:
- Adopt a client-centric approach
- Continually seek to understand each client’s values, objectives, and expectations
- Leverage the Aperio approach of results-orientation, creativity, simplicity, and authenticity to create value for clients
- Support Directors in mapping out a concrete, actionable project plan for strategies and Aperio deliverables
- Track and monitor action steps in Asana for Directors, team members, clients, and self
- Serve as the day-to-day leader on moving action steps forward, providing reminders to Aperio staff and clients, when needed
- Produce meeting agendas
- Take comprehensive notes during meetings to ensure strategies and ideas are captured and can move forward
- Complete substantive portions of projects for clients to lessen the burden on staff
- Seamlessly blend into the culture and workstyle of the client, building trust and working partnerships with a variety of stakeholders
- Use all available Aperio resources—expertise, experience, templates, tools, etc.—to seamlessly and efficiently advance project plans
- Contribute resources to the Aperio library through client work
- Contribute to Aperio’s efforts to fight racism and discrimination through client services
- Leverage the time, expertise, and experience of Aperio’s Expert Network to increase value for clients and accelerate service delivery
Direct project support varies by client. It can include, but is not limited to:
- Conducting assessments
- Producing reports summarizing assessment findings, recommendations, and strategies
- Interpreting data analyses
- Creating major gift, foundation, and corporate portfolios
- Supporting clean-up and SOP-development for databases and operational processes
- Creating governance models, dashboards, and trainings to implement/enhance metrics management
- Conducting moves management strategy sessions
- Preparing plans and materials for donor calls, meetings, and solicitations
- Creating fundraising toolkits
- Engaging leadership and boards in philanthropy
- Conducting qualification outreach to donors (emails, phone calls, meetings, etc.) for ad hoc donor lists or a defined qualification portfolio
- Developing and writing collateral
- Developing and writing custom proposals and stewardship reports
- Facilitating workshops
- Providing 1:1 coaching
Business development responsibilities (20%)
The Associate, Client Services serves as an ambassador for Aperio in the community to grow Aperio’s client portfolio and support nonprofits broadly in their efforts to thrive. The Associate builds and engages a targeted portfolio of prospective clients, referral sources, and other key relationships. In addition, the Associate educates, equips, and inspires other nonprofit leaders and fundraisers about what it takes to thrive. To fulfill this role, the Associate will:
- Build and engage a portfolio of 25-50 strategic relationships, sourced from personal networks and cold outreach
- Actively network to grow and strengthen the portfolio, achieving monthly activity metrics
- Leverage portfolio engagement resources provided, such as templates, scripts, segmented lists, and cold outreach prospect lists
- Approach conversations with curiosity to learn from experience on the ground
- Contribute to Aperio’s efforts to fight racism and discrimination, especially in nonprofits, fundraising, and philanthropy
- Present/facilitate and participate in conferences, workshops, and webinars hosted by Aperio and other industry groups
- Create articles and videos that educate, equip, and inspire nonprofit leaders and fundraisers
- Promote and engage with Aperio content across social media channels
Qualifications
- 3+ years experience in fundraising, ideally including experience focusing full-time on relationship-based fundraising (major gifts, foundations, or corporate partnerships)
- Experience soliciting $10,000+ gifts
- Ability to ‘manage up’
- Experience supporting leadership on donor relationships and/or projects
- Exceptional attention to detail
- Superb relationship management, interpersonal, and communication (written and oral) skills
- Experience managing projects to successful completion
- Outstanding organizational and time-management skills and ability
- Strong understanding of technology systems pertinent to major gifts (Salesforce and Raiser’s Edge a plus)
- Openness to the ever-changing, dynamic environment of a start-up company
- Eagerness to learn new knowledge and skills
- Ability to travel for assignments, as needed, up to 50% of time
What We Do
Your people are your fundraising potential.
Successful nonprofits are communities: people coming together around a shared mission. Successful fundraising is nothing more than harnessing the power of those people—staff, volunteers, donors, and clients—to turn big ideas into big leaps forward for your mission.
Aperio simplifies your path to unlocking their full potential for fundraising growth. People are waiting to do more to support your mission, whether you’re struggling to make ends meet or thriving and ready to do more. We enable your community to gain confidence, set bold goals, and make progress—quickly.
As fundraisers with experience advancing a broad range of missions—arts, education, healthcare, hunger, disaster relief, social services, and more—we bring the expertise and tools that your team needs to succeed. And we roll up our sleeves to work alongside them to go beyond great ideas and take meaningful action—and succeed.
In a year of crisis, we are re-learning the most enduring lesson of fundraising: relationships are more than important, they are everything. No technology, event, or campaign can create the magic that happens when people connect with each other personally and work together to change our world.
Now is the time to invest in your organization’s relationships and relationship-based fundraising efforts—the only reliable path to growing revenue.
Empower your clients to tell their stories. Engage your volunteers in moving the mission forward. And create ways for your donors to sustain your impact and transform our world.
