"Development Assistant for School and Center Annual Giving Support"

Job Description Summary

The Development Assistant reports to the Senior Executive Director, School and Center Annual Giving (SACAG) and provides essential operational, administrative, and program support to advance annual giving activity across Penn's schools and centers. This role is a key partner in the Student Engagement Center, managing critical daily and monthly data workflows (including file retrieval, quality control, CRM updates, and pledge/gift tracking) to ensure accurate calling segments and strong data integrity.

The position also supports SACAG's Annual Giving Partnership model by coordinating monthly unit meetings and annual planning sessions for 20+ units, executing the AGN weekly webinar series, and supporting a high volume of unit solicitations, pledge reminders, and digital outreach (email and texting). In addition, the role serves as a primary point of contact for donor inquiries and provides administrative and financial support for SACAG operations, including budgeting, purchasing, reporting, and office management.

In collaboration with the team, this position will need to exercise judgment, initiative, discretion and analysis in carrying out administrative and clerical duties. This position will handle complex and confidential materials. Must have the ability to meet deadlines in a fast-paced goal-oriented environment.

This position will also serve as part of the centralized administrative team for Annual Giving and will receive guidance from the Director of Penn Fund Strategy, Donor Participation and Stewardship under a dotted line for these responsibilities.

Job Responsibilities

Student Engagement Center

• In collaboration with team, manage the data delivery and employ necessary quality controls between UPenn and Engagement Center data services units. This is an essential business function necessary for creating accurate calling segments for our students to call from.
• This position will retrieve the daily files from the Engagement Center SFTP site before 10:00AM Monday - Friday and comments distributed accordingly to the appropriate unit for action/follow-up.
• Perform basic research on prospect giving/prospect manager/CRM System actions when forwarding to the unit for follow-up
• Attend weekly conference call meetings with staff to coordinate and plan for student engagement center activity. Send weekly data files to Engagement Center Monday/Wednesday/Friday
• Retrieve the monthly files from the SFTP site to review, audit and prepare for CRM upload at the end of each month ensuring system data integrity.
• Deceased record research using Alumni Finder or other internet resources and updating CRM System accordingly.
• Manage and track the pledges/gifts: i.e. delayed; recurring; one-time etc. Retrieve monthly downloads from secure server and bring anomalies to the Assistant Director of Data Analytics attention.
• Actions, contact exclusions with end dates are added to CRM System accordingly.
• This position will be in regular communication with our Gifts Accounting staff to ensure timely and accurate processing of gifts.

Annual Giving Partnership

• Provide coordination and lead administrative support for the monthly annual giving meetings and the annual planning meetings (15-20 units). This includes the timely distribution of the comprehensive meeting notes and slides post-meeting.
• Maintain accurate accounting of meeting attendance.
• Create fiscal year action list based on action items agreed upon during the meeting
• Oversee and execute all components of the professional development AGN weekly webinar series. This includes marketing the webinars and collaborating with DAR Professional Development to promote the series. In addition, managing RSVP list, staffing the webinar, managing the technical aspects day of the webinar and distributing the slides after the webinar.
• This position will also track staff attendance on the SACAG shared drive and in Workday Learning.
• Interact and provide direction to individual units in the absence of the Senior Executive Director or other SACAG staff.
• In collaboration with team, manage and execute in-house unit solicitation and pledge reminders at any given time, often on short notice and with high degrees of importance/urgency.
• Support the infrastructure for broadcast email using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud email tool for annual giving units to support annual giving direct response activity. This is a weekly activity during the academic year.
• In collaboration with the team, this position leads and supports the deployment of texting for unit annual giving programs and supports unit requests for SACAG's deployed digital tools.
• Assist as a copy writer and proofreader for direct marketing solicitations and stewardship correspondence.
• Read and respond to all inquiries that come in through the penncalling@lists.upenn.edu email account. To ensure strong donor stewardship, all inquiries should be responded to within 24 hours during the business week.
• Add CRM System actions, contact exclusions, adjustments as needed
• Generate online reports routinely and on an as needed basis. Prepare and distribute management reports.
• Demonstrates a high level of comfort with technology usage and willingness to learn the functionality of new platforms.
• Communicate and support communication between all DAR Partner offices. Advancement Prospect Analytics (APA), Gifts/Records, Alumni Relations, Gift Planning.
• Run parameter reports and analyze data for units on an adhoc basis

Administrative

Financial

• Manage budget responsibilities by utilizing the University's Ben Financials system to create and maintain financial transactions and reports.
• Submit financial reimbursement forms through Concur, reconcile travel expenses. Maintain financial records/pay bills/track budget.

Office Management/Clerical

• Receive visitors, interact with suppliers/repair workers/messengers
• Order office supplies and materials
• Maintain SACAG shared calendar
• Word processing/correspondence/memos/lists/labels/mail merges
• Maintain and organize office files; create new systems as needed
• Compose routine correspondence and memos and proofread documents
• Handle and distribute office mail and intramural mail to campus
• Coordinate travel arrangements
• Incorporate a donor-centered approach to day-to-day activity: answer phones; respond to email and consistently respond in a timely and professional manner.
• Ability to generate mail merges and archive files in an organized manner
• Update biographical records on CRM system on a regular and timely basis.
• Handle gift transmittals and credit card processing
• In collaboration with team, manage and delegate work to student or temporary employees.
• Occasional weekend and evening hours are required

Please provide a resume and cover letter in order to be considered for this role. Please upload all documents in the "Resume/CV" section of the application prior to submitting.

Qualifications

• High School Grad/GE Degree and 3 to 5 years of experience or equivalent combination of education and experience is required. Bachelor's degree preferred. Excellent organizational, communication/writing, interpersonal and technical skills. Ability to make sound judgments and meet deadlines. Demonstrated ability to manage multiple projects and presentations simultaneously under tight deadlines required. Must have the ability to work as a team player and help provide support during events and/or activities when necessary. Comprehensive knowledge of office procedures, practices and methods. Demonstrated knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite (especially Excel) and project management systems. Salesforce knowledge is also desired.

Job Location - City, State

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Department / School

Development and Alumni Relations

Pay Range

$18.99 - $25.63 Hourly Rate