Director of Development & Communications

Company Overview: 

Since 1968, Brooklyn A has provided free legal services for low-income residents of Brooklyn, pursuing neighborhood-based mission of justice, empowerment and community development. For over half a century, we have utilized an array of legal and advocacy strategies—community organizing, affirmative civil rights litigation, and eviction defense to defend the rights of individuals and families. Collaboration with the city, state, and federal officials to enforce housing laws and develop legislative solutions is also an integral part of our strategy. Brooklyn A has three core programs—Preserving Affordable Housing (PAH) Program, Consumer & Economic Advocacy (CEA) Program, and Community & Economic Development (CED) Program—each of which has unique initiatives and plays a vital community role to ensure basic needs are met and fundamental rights affirmed.

What you will do? 

You will be responsible developing and implementing the strategic direction for all development and communication activities. By managing a small team, you will oversee and manage government and private grant procurement and management, major donor cultivation and solicitation and special events management. In addition, you will oversee and manage communication activities will include but not be limited to managing the organizations website, social networks, media outreach and public information initiatives to engage prospective clients, donors and external constituents. You will be a member of the executive leadership team. 

This will entail:

• Overseeing government and private foundation grants to ensure contract compliance, accurate and timely reporting on deliverables, renewal applications and grant proposals to expand and diversity government, foundation, and corporate partnership giving; 
• Overseeing all contracts and grants to ensure compliance, reporting is completed in a timely manner and program deliverables are being met; 
• As part of the executive leadership team, creating and implementing fundraising strategic plan with a focus on government and private foundation grants, major gifts from individual donors to garner unrestricted and restricted support and corporate giving programs; 
• Developing and implementing annual communications, marketing and outreach plan to support overall BKA goals, in coordination with the Executive Director;
• Overseeing production, distribution and editorial content of newsletters, annual report, case for giving, newsletters, fact sheets, brochures, press releases, etc.;
• Providing training and direct assistance to all staff in conveying their accomplishments, initiatives and positions to both internal and external audiences through a range of communications media, and ensuring that all such communications are consistent with overall organizational messages and brand positioning;
• Creating strategies to draw appropriate traffic levels, including online advertising, web optimization, social networking and blogging; and 
• Analyzing key traffic metrics and make recommendations based on analysis to executive leadership team and program managers.

If you are:

• A goal driven leader with exceptional strategic thinking, relationship development, and communication skills;
• Someone who understands that working with a small team requires passion, savvy and a doer’s attitude; 
• Has had successful experience securing and managing government grants and ensuring high quality and timely reporting and contract compliance;
• A minimum of eight (8) plus years of combined development and marketing/communications experience in a nonprofit organization;
• Successful project supervision and management taking a project from design through implementation and evaluation;
• Experience directly supervising staff to include organizing teamwork, providing clear directions and team priorities, setting and measuring team and individual goals/targets and ability to separate and combine tasks into efficient workflows to deliver project outputs according to clear timeframes; 
• Comfort and experience engaging with diverse stakeholders and partners with diverse backgrounds, including elected officials, government agencies, individual and corporate donors, community-based organizations, coalitions and clients;
• Data management skills to create reports from client database and collate and synthesize reports from team for weekly, monthly and quarterly reporting requirements using a variety of databases, including Donor Perfect, Microsoft Dynamics; Brooklyn A’s case management system and various funder platforms and portals
• High ethical standards and values with a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging principles; and 
• Demonstrated passion and commitment to providing legal services to our communities most vulnerable individuals, families and small businesses.