We’re always hiring. We only occasionally post jobs.

How to read this

If this reads like a manifesto, a screed, or the work of someone cutting letters out of magazines, this is probably a bad fit and we wish you well.

If it reads like a necessary argument about where nonprofit fundraising is headed, and the job you have been waiting for someone to write, we should talk.

The role

The Account Director owns the senior day-to-day relationship with a portfolio of Agency of Record clients. This is the person the client calls, trusts, questions, and occasionally argues with. You would not be taking orders and relaying them to a production line. You would be leading.

DonorVoice already has a point of view and a method. You do not need to invent one. What we need is someone who can understand it cold, speak it fluently, and then do the harder work: read each client’s idiosyncratic situation and determine what the method demands for this organization, this year. That is where the judgment lives.

This is an implementing-change job, and the change comes from every direction. A new AOR client changes nearly everything, because their prior agency relationship was often night and day from how we work. Onboarding is a rebuild, not a handoff.

From there the work becomes a multi-year rollout. Year two should not look like a louder version of year one. Year three should not look like a louder version of year two. Each year gets a deliberate growth plan: better segmentation, better cadence, better offers, better measurement, and a clearer theory of how the organization grows.

The hardest change is the one we make on ourselves. This role comes with serious training, because it has to. If you arrive certain you already have fundraising figured out, we wish you well somewhere else.

As Mark Twain put it, it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. The people who do well here challenge what we think we know, point directly at what we do not know, and treat closing that gap as work that is never finished.

This role is for you if

You are intellectually curious, and you want to learn DonorVoice’s Human Operating System because you have watched the volume model up close and seen its permanent limitations.

You are willing to lead a client, press on a weak idea, and hold the line on quality when the timeline gets tight and the pressure is real. You like work that is never solved, only evolved.

Why the work is different

This is not a slogan. Everything connects, and the connection is the point. The budget is matched to the strategy. The strategy is matched to the audience. The audience is matched to the offer, the message, the channel, the cadence, and the ask. That coherence shows up in the details:

• Segmentation, copywriting, budgeting, and measurement are built from the same model of donor decision-making, not bolted together after the fact.
• We hold a defined view of how fundraising teams should use brand spend, rather than treating it as someone else’s line item.
• We treat donor irritation and tune-out as costs, and we account for them instead of pretending volume is free.
• Our measurement framework is built around causal KPIs that point toward client growth, not vanity reporting dressed up as analysis.

What you would own

These are not the full list. They are the ones that matter most.

Client leadership

• Serve as the senior point of contact for your AOR clients.
• Run weekly and monthly results, editorial, planning, and production meetings.
• Lead the relationship rather than service it. Make the case for change, grounded in the method and the numbers, and bring clients along on decisions they did not come in asking for.
• Build trust through consistency, judgment, and follow-through.
• Own account health, scope awareness, and billing.

Annual planning and roadmap

• Own each client’s annual roadmap, including the one-year scorecard, opportunities map, and Gantt that sequences the year.
• Build the fiscal-year budget, pricing memo, and budget versions, then present and defend them to the client.
• Drive the standing projects that move the program forward, including cadence and segmentation testing, reinvestment scenarios, and journey development.

Campaign direction

• Own the comprehensive campaign brief, including audience, segmentation, personalized matching, channel approach, and story direction.

Results and reporting

• Turn results into the next decision, not just a recap of the last one.
• Know when the numbers are giving signal, when they are giving noise, and when everyone in the room is pretending the distinction does not matter.

Required

• 7+ years in direct response fundraising.
• A track record of leading clients rather than only serving them. You have changed a client’s mind, and you were right.
• Project management depth across complex, multi-stakeholder workflows.
• Clear, direct communication.
• True fluency across offline and online channels.
• Low tolerance for sloppy work, including your own.

Preferred

• Working knowledge of behavioral science applied to fundraising.
• Familiarity with donor databases, CRMs, and data processing workflows.
• Very high comfort with AI, not to write your emails or slide decks, but to automate process and improve efficiency, judgment, and follow-through.
• Regular use of Claude and Cowork is a plus.

What we offer

• Training in DonorVoice’s Human Operating System and the psychology of donor decision-making, so the work you direct is grounded in how people actually decide.
• A seat where your judgment carries weight and your recommendations reach the client unfiltered.
• Work that changes how organizations raise money and how donors experience giving.
• A culture built on accountability, intellectual honesty, laughter, and teamwork rather than bureaucracy.
• A company that takes its own medicine on autonomy, competence, and connection.

The role

The Account Manager is the day-to-day partner for a portfolio of nonprofit clients, managing the development, production, and performance of direct response fundraising programs. This is an execution-critical seat for someone who runs on clarity, accountability, and follow-through. You would coordinate complex workflows across creative, data, production, and digital teams so that fundraising programs are produced accurately, on time, and at a consistently high standard.

The job is executing intelligently and confidently, and protecting quality when timelines are tight and the pressure is real. You would be trained in DonorVoice’s Human Operating System and the psychology of donor decision-making so you understand the reasoning behind the work you manage. That understanding is what lets you explain decisions to clients, spot risks early, and keep execution aligned with how people actually decide.

What you would own

Client partnership and representation

• Serve as a day-to-day contact for assigned client accounts.
• Incorporate client feedback constructively while pushing back when needed to protect quality and integrity.
• Build trust through consistency, transparency, and follow-through.

Campaign execution and oversight

• Manage end-to-end direct mail workflows, coordinating copy, creative, data, and production.
• Own timelines, flag risks early, and keep work moving without last-minute fire drills.
• Review copy, creative, and data with a high bar for accuracy and execution.
• Partner closely with Production to prevent errors, control costs, and keep programs running smoothly.

Quality, standards, and velocity

• Balance speed and precision, recognizing that clients judge quality and timeliness almost equally.
• Maintain executional discipline under heavy timelines and competing priorities.
• Raise the bar for clarity and consistency across every campaign.

Internal and external evangelism

• Act as a steward of the DonorVoice way of working with clients and internal teams.
• Reinforce high standards for fundraising writing and execution across the organization.
• Represent DonorVoice’s point of view professionally and credibly in client interactions.

Required

• 5+ years in direct response fundraising or nonprofit direct mail management. Agency experience preferred.
• Strong project management skills and comfort overseeing complex, multi-stakeholder workflows.
• Clear, direct, professional communication.
• Comfort working with performance data, testing concepts, and campaign analytics.
• High attention to detail and low tolerance for sloppy work.

Preferred

• Experience with digital fundraising channels such as email, landing pages, SMS, or paid social.
• Familiarity with donor databases, CRMs, and data processing workflows.
• Exposure to behavioral science concepts.
• Very high comfort with AI, not to write your emails or slide decks, but to automate process and increase efficiency and effectiveness.

What we offer

• Training in DonorVoice’s Human Operating System and the psychology of donor decision-making.
• A role where execution is taken seriously and done by people who know what they are doing.
• Work that directly influences how organizations raise money and how donors experience giving.
• A culture built on rigor, accountability, and intellectual honesty rather than bureaucracy or theater.
• Laughter, teamwork, and a company that takes seriously your need for autonomy, competence, and connection.

If this reads like overkill, it is not for you. If it reads like the role you wish existed in this sector, we should talk.

Read this part first

Most organizations that say they use behavioral science mean they have a list of biases and a habit of citing Cialdini. We are not that, and this is not that job.

We have two behavioral scientists on staff. One came out of experimental cognitive psychology and works on memory, framing, attention, and the design of field experiments. The other came out of the self-determination theory tradition and works on motivation quality, personality, and why people sustain a behavior after the first time they do it. They disagree productively and often.

We are looking for the third perspective. Not a copy of either one.

The role

You would be a subject matter expert whose discipline is not already covered here, brought in to widen the set of explanations we can reach for. Moral psychology, social identity, judgment and decision-making, affective science, sociology, cultural psychology, behavioral economics, narrative and communication science: any of these would add something we currently have to borrow.

The work is applied. That word does real damage when it means watered down, so here is what it means to us. Your theory has to survive contact with a live fundraising program that has a budget, a calendar, a client with an opinion, and a sample size nobody consulted you about. You would design tests that can actually be fielded, read results that are messier than a lab’s, and say clearly which findings are load-bearing and which are noise that happened to reach significance.

Pragmatism is the requirement. Modesty is not. The reason we want a PhD in this seat is that someone has to be able to tell when the sector’s received wisdom is a real effect, a badly measured one, or a story that never had evidence behind it. That judgment does not come from a summary of a summary of a paper. It comes from having done the work.

What you would own

Theory into method

• Bring your discipline to bear on donor decision-making, and translate it into things a fundraising program can actually do: a segmentation logic, a message structure, an offer, a measurement approach.
• Interrogate the DonorVoice Human Operating System from the outside. Find where it is underspecified, where it overreaches, and where a different literature explains the result better.
• Work across disciplines with the rest of the science team rather than staying in your lane. The refinement happens in the argument.

Research and measurement

• Design and analyze field experiments on live client programs, and studies that measure what donors think, feel, and value.
• Build measures that hold up. Construct validity is not a formality here, because we make segmentation and copy decisions off these scores.
• Be honest about statistical power, effect sizes, and what a null result does and does not mean.

Pushing the boundary

• Take on questions the sector has not answered, including the ones where the honest answer is that nobody knows yet.
• Publish, speak, and write for practitioners. Our blog, the Agitator, is where a lot of this lands. Being read by fundraisers is part of the job, not a distraction from it.

Client-facing science

• Present findings to clients directly, including findings they did not want.
• Explain a mechanism to a room of non-scientists without deforming it.

Required

• PhD in psychology, behavioral economics, sociology, cognitive science, or an adjacent social science, with a research record that shows genuine expertise rather than exposure.
• Real methods and statistics depth: experimental design, measurement, and inference. You can run your own analysis.
• Evidence that you can apply your work outside the lab, or a clear reason to believe you want to and can.
• Ability to write for practitioners. Clear prose, no hedging fog, no jargon as a substitute for precision.
• Comfort being wrong in public and changing your position when the evidence moves.

Preferred

• Field experiment experience in a commercial or nonprofit setting.
• Familiarity with charitable giving, prosocial behavior, or consumer behavior literatures.
• Very high comfort with AI as a research and automation tool.
• A discipline that is not cognitive psychology or self-determination theory. That is not a disqualifier, but the marginal value of a third perspective is what we are after.

What we offer

• A rare seat: applied behavioral science on charitable giving, at an organization where the science drives the recommendation rather than decorating it.
• Colleagues who will argue with your reasoning and expect the same in return.
• Live programs at real scale to test on, with clients who signed up for exactly this.
• Autonomy over how you work, and a company that takes its own theory seriously enough to apply it internally.
• Work that changes how organizations raise money and how donors experience giving.