Assistant Director, Stewardship - Scholarships and Student Success

The Stewardship team at the Oregon State University Foundation creates experiences, demonstrates impact, and builds communities that inspire alumni and friends to join OSU in making the world a better place. Reporting directly to the Senior Director of Stewardship, the Assistant Director works collaboratively across the Foundation and university to execute a comprehensive strategy for stewarding donors to scholarships and other student success programs at OSU. This includes managing the Student Success  Society, a recognition program honoring those who support students through cumulative gifts of $50,000 or more for scholarships, graduate fellowships or student programs; managing scholarship stewardship activities for donors supporting centrally managed scholarships; and working with colleges to ensure unit-based scholarship stewardship is coordinated across campus and aligned with best practices. Additionally, this position serves as the back-up point of contact for the Foundation’s gift agreement process. 

Major Duties

In consultation with the Senior Director of Stewardship, implement OSUF’s stewardship activities for the Student Success Society. Including but not limited to the following:

• Work with the Marketing and Communications team to develop and execute a communications plan for society donors
• Coordinate custom invitations to Foundation events
• Work with the Foundation central events team to design and execute in person and virtual events for the society
• Support the integration of student stories in regularly scheduled communications and events
• Manage the onboarding process for new members and build out additional touchpoints where appropriate

In collaboration with the Senior Director of Stewardship, develop and execute stewardship for centrally administered scholarships. Including but not limited to:

• Build a baseline of stewardship touches to all donors who support centrally administered scholarships that tells the holistic story of their impact.
• Gather information from students receiving high-level university-awarded scholarships (specifically Presidential, Financial Aid, and Finish in Four) to demonstrate scholarship impact.
• Create impact reports for scholarship stewardship including broader impact pieces as well as shorter communications to donors.
• Assist with Foundation-hosted scholarship stewardship events as well as university opportunities for engaging stewardship donors. 

In conjunction with the Senior Director of Stewardship, collaborate with colleges and units to ensure consistent, coordinated scholarship stewardship university-wide and adoption of best practices. Including but not limited to:

• Represent the OSU Foundation on the OSU campus scholarship administrators’ team and serve as the main liaison and point of contact to the Financial Aid office regarding scholarship stewardship.
• Assess scholarship stewardship practices across campus and provide additional resources and training where needed.
• Oversee donor information included in the university’s scholarship administration software while ensuring access to appropriate student information and permissions for communication to donors.
• Work with ITS to create automated processes and locations in CRM for retaining student scholarship awards, permissions, and communications to donors.
• Stay current on trends in scholarship stewardship and provide recommendations for improvement to our current practices.

Act as a back-up point person for the Foundation gift agreement process.

Provide exceptional and courteous customer service to key partners and colleagues, and internal / external customers of the Foundation, including donors, volunteers, campus partners etc.

 Perform other duties as assigned.

• Theories, principles and concepts for effective stewardship and donor relations
• Project management tools and strategies 
• Written and verbal communication for both internal and external audiences
• Exceptional organizational skills in planning and prioritizing multiple deadline driven projects
• Microsoft suite products, especially Excel, Word, PowerPoint
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) databases
• Effectively steward donors and demonstrate the impact of philanthropy in compelling and inspiring ways
• Meet deadlines and anticipate program needsAbility to work in a high-paced deadline-driven environment
• Strategic, hardworking, and able to work with many different partnersManage tasks and use good judgement to complete work with minimal oversight
• Stay current with industry trends and best practices
• Eagerly learn and master new software, databases and digital technologies
• Maintain the highest level of discretion