Director, Advancement Data & Systems

How You’ll Contribute

The Advancement team identifies, cultivates, solicits, and stewards individuals, as well as foundation, government and corporate partners who invest in the Society to drive impact through science, technology, education, exploration, and storytelling. The team collaborates across the Society to build transformative and impact-driven strategic partnerships. The team also produces global events that deepen connections and leverage the Society’s power to convene, and directs robust annual, major and planned giving programs empowering the Society with a broad base of public support.


Reporting to the Vice President, Advancement Operations and working with a dynamic, interdependent, and collaborative team, the Director, Advancement Data & Systems is responsible for leading management and optimization of all Advancement systems for the department and managing key operations functions for the Advancement department handling all donor, partner and prospect data, data integration, and associated processes and documentation.

Advancement uses a robust ecosystem of technical solutions to house, process, and analyze constituent data, communicate with prospects, donors, and partners, track activity, and comply with legal standards around data processing and constituent consent. The Director, Advancement Data & Systems is responsible for donor database management, data strategy and data architecture. This role is a key partner for the Technology team and solutions vendors to ensure that systems are scoped, configured, managed, and monitored to fully support the needs of the department and the organization. This position will also be responsible for understanding system roadmaps, integrations, and releases and optimizing their use, as well as managing issue resolution and feature requests identified by Nat Geo.

Your Impact

Responsibilities Include

Advancement Data (50%)

• Manage a team to support the department in donor data management, tracking, and all associated processes.  Oversee data hygiene, required data processes as part of enterprise data integration and nonprofit mail permit compliance, and best practices of the institution’s donor database of record and all Advancement systems. 

• Work closely as a member of the Advancement team to craft vision and oversee execution of data strategy and support for all fundraising and donor programs including annual giving, planned giving, leadership giving, foundations and corporate partnerships, and campaign strategy. 

• Ensure best practices in data integrity and usability of data for frontline professionals so that philanthropic opportunities at all levels are maximized.

• Oversee all ongoing data syncing between key Advancement systems, including Raiser’s Edge and Engaging Networks and other targeted data systems.  Ensure data syncs are scoped and implemented to effectively meet fundraising program needs, maintain data integrity and hygiene, and comply with data privacy, protection, and consent requirements.

• Partner with the Advancement Insights team to help inform and streamline reports, analyses, modeling, and benchmarking. Assess the relationships between output requirements and data elements and recommend best practices to map data accordingly to facilitate effective and efficient reporting.

• Ensure compliance with all data-related NGS Data Privacy and Consent Compliance policies.  Facilitate communications and training to support fundraising across Advancement and internal National Geographic Society staff teams. Ensure that data protocols, procedures and policies are up to date and meet industry best practices.

Advancement Systems (35%)

• Evaluate capabilities against Advancement needs regularly to ensure systems are effectively configured to support current and future needs and industry best practices

• Work with NGS Technology team to manage system and support vendors, including contracts, scoping, costs, and resourcing structure as well as serving as the primary contact with vendor technical support teams to submit, support, triage, track, and resolve systems issues and requests.

• Work closely with solutions vendors to understand and influence product roadmaps, releases, and integrations. Use this knowledge, together with an understanding of fundraising and donor experience, department and staff goals, and in collaboration with department colleagues, to optimize systems within the Advancement and Society ecosystem.  In collaboration with NGS Technology, identify and manage feature requests and capability development with