Individual Giving Manager

The challenge: Santa Cruz Local is at the forefront of a new wave of independent, nonprofit, startup local news outlets. We are building a new, sustainable business model that relies on donations from the community we serve. We have a $1M budget in 2026, mostly from local individual giving.

The job opportunity: This position has two goals:

• Support our CEO to grow our major donor revenue.
• Update our community and potential funders on Santa Cruz Local’s civic impact.

This role is all about relationship building. We’re looking for someone who loves working with people, believes in the value of local news and wants to connect with many communities in Santa Cruz County.

As our sole dedicated development staff member, you would work closely with the CEO to steward donors and grow our fundraising systems. You’d be a linchpin in a high-impact, growing startup on the frontier of local news.

Our company is growing and changing quickly. An ideal candidate would be a thought partner to the CEO — they want to be a leader on our team and will be ready to offer ideas. We want candidates who have the ambition and excitement to work with the CEO on growing your career within the company.

Santa Cruz Local employees are encouraged to push new ideas, disagree, offer opinions and alternative solutions. You’d have a strong voice in shaping the company’s long-term direction.

You would report to the CEO.

Responsibilities

Donor prospecting and relationship management

• Build relationships with donors through direct personal contact – phone calls, emails, events and individual meetings. Share our work and gauge alignment and capacity for mid-level, major and planned gifts. Make direct asks for donations. Maintain strong relationships and donor retention. You’d work with our CEO to co-steward a portfolio of about 120 donors.
• Continually expand and refine our donor prospect list through research and connections. Proactively identify, prioritize and cultivate relationships with individual donors and family foundations aligned with our mission. Find and attend local and regional events to meet and connect with prospective donors.
• Segment our donor prospect list based on type, giving level and other factors.
• Create and execute an effective engagement strategy with our donors to encourage involvement and loyalty.
• Build, refine and maintain a system to track progress on our donation goals and our communication with donors.
• Call and write to our donors to schedule meetings, follow ups and thank yous.
• Keep our CEO and board members on track with donor moves management.
• Maintain our CRM and support our CEO with scheduling meetings with donors.

Communications & Events

• Regularly survey our audience to understand and gauge our impact.
• Create reports to convey our civic impact in compelling, creative ways.
• Draft messages to our supporters to share and build excitement about our progress.
• Build outreach strategy and attend community events to grow our network and share our mission. Represent the organization to funders and partners with professionalism and authenticity.
• Plan and coordinate quarterly events to deepen our relationships with our supporters, including communications, operations and followup.
• Help readers with all things membership, such as updating credit card info and upgrading tiers.

Innovation & Collaboration

• Partner with the CEO to develop and execute a fundraising plan that’s tied to Santa Cruz Local’s strategic plan. Set goals and create workflows. Find ways to engage the editorial team and board members in fundraising.
• Create and run fundraising-related experiments. For example, what are new ways we can try to grow our “customer funnel” of potential donors? Create a hypothesis, set a metric of success, run a 2-week test and document our learnings.
• Work on internal project teams to run experiments on our top two organizational goals of growing civic engagement and tripling our loyal audience. Provide a fundraising lens to these experiments.

Planned Giving

• With the CEO, design and launch a planned giving strategy to seek and steward donors who want to include Santa Cruz Local in their estate plans.
• Build collaborative partnerships with foundations and nonprofits that specialize in planned giving.

Requirements

• High emotional intelligence, with a strong belief in the importance of relationship building.
• Minimum 2 years’ experience and proven success at fundraising, nonprofit development, sales, membership or account management roles.
• Experience asking for donations to support an organization’s mission.
• Values local journalism and understands journalism ethics and standards.
• Demonstrated skills at effective communication and building meaningful relationships with mission-aligned organizations and people.
• Able to listen and communicate with people of different cultural backgrounds.
• Openness to giving and receiving feedback. A love for continual learning and iteration.
• Proficiency with Mailchimp (or similar newsletter platforms), CRMs, Airtable, Google Workspace and mail merges.
• Fluency in English, spoken and written.
• Strong writing skills, especially related to marketing and value propositions.
• Ability to travel within Santa Cruz County and the Pajaro Valley. We can offer Uber transportation to work-related events if you don’t have a car.
• You must be 18 or older.

We welcome applicants from a broad range of professional and educational backgrounds. A college degree is not required.

How we’ll assess candidates

You’re our ideal candidate if you are:

• Diligent at operations and project management: Can lead a large, systematic, weeks-long project and hit deadlines. Communicates effectively with all team members involved. Can work independently with good time management and troubleshooting skills. Knows how to create a clear plan and milestones, but is also adaptable when circumstances change. Knows when to ask for help.
• A critical thinker: Can see the bigger picture and make effective, analytical decisions. Can use prior experience, research and experiments to guide decision-making. Knows how to consider alternate methods to completing a project.
• Emotionally intelligent: Skilled at reading interpersonal cues and situations. Can adjust communication style to fit different situations. Can make others feel like they are understood and belong, no matter their background. Can guide conversations toward a subject or goal. Receptive to constructive feedback. Comfortable challenging ideas respectfully. Can manage conflicts or disagreements respectfully, calmly and successfully. Can maintain appropriate tone and positive body language.

Our ideal candidate has these skills:

• Able to build relationships with potential donors in-person, over the phone and by email: Able to represent the company and at the same time have the other person feel seen and heard. Able to guide conversations toward a topic or goal. Able to build rapport and accomplish goals efficiently.
• Good at writing emails: Ability to craft a message that is on brand, concise and compelling. Highly effective communicator through email. Understands Santa Cruz Local’s unique value.
• Collaboration: Not a “follower.” Able to think critically about a situation, offer ideas and feedback, compromise and work with other team members on large projects.

Bonus points for:

• Experience with all phases of the donor relationship, from identification to solicitation to stewardship.
• Experience at a news outlet.
• Deep connections in Santa Cruz County and/or the Pajaro Valley.
• Experience with customer funnel analytics, including Google Analytics 4.
• Conversational fluency in Spanish. We expect your work with donors will be in English, but we are a bilingual news organization. Spanish fluency would help you understand our work more deeply.

If you worry you’re not qualified, please give it a shot and apply anyway. You do not need an educational degree to apply.

Five weeks per year of paid company holiday, paid flexible time off, paid federal holidays, health care reimbursement and retirement benefits.

Fluency in English, spoken and written, is required. Bonus points for conversational fluency in Spanish. We expect your work with donors will be in English, but we are a bilingual news organization. Spanish fluency would help you understand our work more deeply.