Partnership Operations Associate

DonorsChoose makes it easy for anyone to help a teacher in need, moving us closer to a nation where students in every community have the tools and experiences they need for a great education.

Since 2000, more than 5 million people and partners have contributed $1 billion to support 2 million teacher requests for classroom resources and experiences. Projects range from art supplies to build the set for a school musical, to books and puzzles that affirm students’ identities, to bird seed for an at-home science project. We proudly serve all US public schools, public charter schools, and Head Start centers, and we combat systemic inequity by driving a majority of donations to schools that have been historically underfunded due to economic and racial inequity.

DonorsChoose has been recognized as a best place to work by GOOD Magazine and the Nonprofit Times, while Fast Company named DonorsChoose one of the 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World—the first time a charity has made this list. Our dedicated team works from across the United States to bring classroom dreams to life.

About the Team

Our Partnerships Teams will raise more than $54M for public school classrooms through creative, collaborative partnerships with our corporate and foundation partnerships this school year. The Partnership Operations Team sits on our Activation Team, and ensures a seamless experience for our internal and external stakeholders by bringing the standard elements of partnerships to life, building systems that scale and improve on our partner offerings, and advocating for partner needs.

About the Role 

In this role, you’ll gain a nuanced understanding of the processes and technical aspects of our partnership products that power our partnerships’ success. You’ll work closely with our highly collaborative Partnership Operations team, our full Activation team and our Partnerships colleagues to understand our partner’s business goals, lean into our standard processes to meet them, and leverage your understanding of those goals as you creatively center our colleagues’ and their partners’ continued experience in their work with our org. In this role, you get to be curious, make connections and develop high-impact solutions, navigate immediate challenges, and ideate on areas of improvement for the future scalability of our partnerships.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Activate our partnerships:

  • Set up and launch our partnership products (ex. match offers, promo codes, gift cards and project funding initiatives) and create impact reports for our partners. 
  • How this might look: Becoming cross-trained on our processes, relying on a standard handoff-process between the Partnership Managers and our team, to receive the details necessary to launch a partnership. These processes rely on a data-informed standard turnaround time that creates shared expectations with our Partnership colleagues, allowing us to consistently set-up, test, and launch our standard products, as well as creating the capacity to be flexible, nimble, and responsive to meet partnership goals when needed. 
  • Support and consult with internal stakeholders on partnership product/process related questions, challenges and requests.
  • Take the operational steps that will meet partnership commitments that may fall outside of our typical standard products (ex. special reports and metrics to share partner impact, special sponsorship benefit execution).

• Scale the implementation methods of our partnership operations and continue to deliver the best experience to internal and external stakeholders:

  • Improve our standard processes to reduce manual work, surface tension-points with our products, and provide a great user-experience
  • Outline Standard Work Instructions for the steps required to implement our products. Manage and update documentation as we continue to revise our processes.
  • How this might look: Creating or updating our core documentation as we gain new learnings and fresh perspectives, and improve the language of existing documents. Our core documents are effective training and reference tools that provide a blueprint for task success to allow for e