Wild Animal Initiative is looking for a Philanthropy Officer to join our Development Team. The full job description is pasted below, or you can use this link to share it with someone you know. If you have any questions, please feel free to email our Operations Manager ([email protected]) or me ([email protected]) — I'll be the direct manager of the person in this role. You can also comment on this post with your questions.
Apply here
Basics
Job title: Philanthropy Officer
Department: Development
Application deadline: 9 am ET Monday, September 21, 2026
Hiring process and timeline:
Our hiring process is transparent, skills-based, and rigorous. We assess what you can actually do in the role through structured tasks, giving us both a clearer picture of your abilities and you a real sense of fit.
While we use AI enthusiastically at WAI, in this process we want to see your own thinking, demonstrating the reasoning skills you'll need when engaging with donors. So please do not use AI tools to assist you in your application materials.
Stage 1 — Application (open through 9 am ET Monday, September 21, 2026)
Please submit an application using this form.
The application form will ask you to provide answers to short-answer and multiple-choice questions regarding your qualifications. You are welcome to preview the questions before beginning. We estimate that completing the application will take 1-2 hours, but there is no time limit.
You will also be asked to provide a link to your LinkedIn profile. This helps us understand your professional background and experience in more context.
Stage 2 — Live Skills Assessment (October - November)
Qualified candidates will be invited to a 7-hour interactive working session where you'll work on realistic tasks related to the Philanthropy Officer role. This includes breaks and is designed to assess how you think, respond to feedback, and approach complex problems.
We recognize that this is a significant time commitment. We compensate candidates based on the average hourly rate for the role in this stage. If you move forward, you'll need to arrange your schedule (we offer weekday and weekend options and can discuss accommodations). This stage helps us understand whether you're a strong fit for the role and vice versa.
Stage 3 — Interview (November - December)
Terms of employment
Location:
- This is a remote-first, full-time, exempt position, open to applicants in the contiguous United States. We cannot sponsor visas and are only considering applicants who are eligible to work in the US.
- We expect the bulk of the required in-person work for this role to be centered around San Francisco and the Bay Area due to the concentration of relevant donors and community activity in that area. We are seeking candidates who are willing and able to meet the collaboration schedule and travel expectations below.
- You must be able to meet with colleagues in Eastern (GMT-4) and Mountain (GMT‑6) time zones most days, and with colleagues in European time zones (GMT+1–2) a few times per week. You may be expected to attend meetings or events outside of normal working hours, the extent of which we will determine in collaboration with you.
Expected start date:
Salary:
- $88,907–$102,243, depending on the approximate cost of living in the location where you will be based. Examples: San Francisco: $102,243 | Philadelphia: $95,130 | Salt Lake City: $88,907
- For a complete description of how we set and raise salaries, see our salary algorithm. If you'd like a more precise salary estimate for your location, please reach out to [email protected].
Benefits:
- Competitive, transparent salaries adjusted annually for cost of living. Employer retirement contributions, professional development support, comprehensive health insurance, generous paid time off, remote-first work, team retreats, and commitment to JEDI principles. For full details on benefits and working at WAI, see our staff experience page.
Reports to:
- Director of Development & Communications
Travel:
- The amount of travel required in this role will depend on the organization's needs and how this new role evolves to meet the needs of our Development Team. Any decisions will be made in collaboration with you. Still, we anticipate that you will spend 20–30% of your time traveling for in-person work — predominantly within the United States, occasionally to Europe, and possibly elsewhere.
- Travel will include WAI staff retreats (1–2 per year), relevant conferences like Effective Altruism Global (EAG) and other EA conferences (minimum attendance will be set with the team), and bundled donor trips (2–4 per year). You will be expected to book your own travel and associated reservations using the business credit card we will provide you with. You must also be able to obtain legal permission to travel as needed (e.g., by having a valid passport and obtaining any necessary visas). Depending on proximity to the San Francisco Bay Area, there may be additional networking opportunities available to you beyond formal donor meetings and conferences.
Responsibilities
Position mission statement:
As Wild Animal Initiative’s Philanthropy Officer, you will raise money from major donors by making it easy and enjoyable for them to understand and invest in our work.
Wild Animal Initiative is supported primarily by donors who are open to unconventional approaches and unusually willing to dive into technical detail and strategic analysis. Most of our donors are either effective altruists (EAs) or comparably methodical in their approach to philanthropic decision-making. The biggest constraint on our fundraising, therefore, is not our ability to pull on heartstrings, but our capacity to explain in detail what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we know whether it’s working. Therefore, while your ultimate goal as Philanthropy Officer is to raise more money, you will do so by providing real value to our donors in the form of information and analysis.
You will be responsible for a portfolio of ~50–100 major donors, most of whom give between $10,000 and $100,000 a year. You'll work with relative independence, using a donor-centric approach focused on building trust and securing gifts that enable long-term field-building and research infrastructure. You'll own most of our major donor relationships — partly by taking over those held by our Executive Director (ED) and partly by growing our overall portfolio. For relationships where the ED remains the primary owner, you'll own the behind-the-scenes project management: tracking pipeline stages, planning communications, and ensuring that the ED has the information they need ahead of meetings. Most of your relationship-building will happen remotely, but you’ll also be responsible for identifying and making the most of in-person opportunities (e.g., conferences, EA events, one-on-ones opportunistically tacked on to other travel plans).
You'll work alongside our ED, Development & Communications Director, and Development Specialist, building strategies with 2–3-year cultivation timelines and helping refine our major gifts systems.
Supervisory responsibilities:
None currently, but if you are interested and able, we are open to your duties evolving to include managing other staff as opportunities arise.
Core duties and responsibilities:
Knowledge
You will provide value to donors by giving them information to help inform their giving decisions.
- Wild Animal Initiative: Learn as much as you can about Wild Animal Initiative’s strategy and activities, and stay up to date on our progress and plans. Take initiative to stay in touch with colleagues and collaborators and make it easy for them to share useful updates with you.
- Related subjects: Stay updated enough about related topics (e.g., wild animal welfare science, animal ethics, effective altruism, farmed animal advocacy, AI advancements) to be able to speak knowledgeably about how they intersect with our work.
- Tailored resources: Respond to individual donors’ questions or interests by developing tailored resources to help them understand our work. That could take the form of an email with an annotated list of links, a document with a few paragraphs of explanation, a report summarizing our work in a particular area, or a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the cost-effectiveness of one of our activities. In addition to synthesizing, summarizing, and translating, you should be prepared to analyze, estimate, and speculate.
- General resources: Work with colleagues to generate resources that explain our thinking, report on our work, or assess our impact (e.g., EA Forum posts, blog posts, new pages for our website, or a user-friendly impact metrics dashboard).
Relationships
Even for the most analytical donors, learning and decision-making don’t happen in a vacuum. You will build relationships with donors to establish yourself as a resource, earn their trust, and keep Wild Animal Initiative salient for them.
- Meeting people: Find prospective donors and establish yourself as a resource by participating in the EA community: attending EAGs and other EA events, and engaging on the EA Forum.
- Engaging: Meet with prospective donors (in person or virtually) to help them learn more about WAI and to learn about them (e.g., personal background, giving habits, communication preferences).
- Staying in touch: Proactively look for ways to maintain the relationship by sharing updates on things they’re interested in or otherwise communicating in ways that are authentic to you and enjoyable for them. Most of this will be remote.
Strategy
The ultimate goal of this role is to raise more money so WAI can help more animals. Therefore, your success will depend not just on your ability to build authentic relationships and provide real value to donors, but also on doing those things at scale: to connect with more people, to spend your time wisely, and to set up conditions that make it easy for people to give.
- Donor: Qualify each prospect’s capacity to give, tailor your engagement to their interests, decide when to ask for a donation and how much to ask for, thank them for their gift, and plan your approach to stewarding them toward their next gift.
- Portfolio: Manage and grow your portfolio of 50–100+ prospects and donors. This will include planning how you’ll distribute your time, forecasting how much funding you expect to raise, tracking your communications in Salesforce, and developing systems to make sure you follow up with donors who don’t reach out to you. Do the same for the ED’s portfolio, and support them in following your plan.
- Team: Lead the development and advancement of our major gifts strategy in and around the EA community — planning donor relationships over 2–3-year cultivation arcs rather than annual campaigns, tracking pipelines, refining our data systems, and making strategic recommendations to leadership. Evaluate and iterate on that strategy over time.
Other duties: Our organization's needs are always evolving as we gain new information, necessitating flexibility and openness to new duties that may be assigned on short notice. We're seeking someone adaptable and responsive to changing requirements.
Qualifications
We do not require any specific academic credentials or prior work experience for you to be considered for this position.
This role will require you to have the following qualifications:
- Genuine enthusiasm for WAI's mission: You're excited about wild animal welfare science, understand the philosophical core of the work, and can communicate that enthusiasm to donors in an engaging way.
- Fluency in the communication norms of effective altruism: You can speak and write in ways that demonstrate you’re thinking critically (asking hard questions, considering counterfactuals, quantifying what you can), seeking and sharing the truth (making calibrated claims, sharing your confidence estimates, changing your mind), and building on EA discourse (referring to foundational concepts, using common jargon, having opinions on areas of common debate).
- Familiarity with the effective altruism funding landscape: You understand how EAs tend to make giving decisions. You’re familiar with concepts like room for more funding, marginal impact, donation funging, and true counterfactual matching opportunities. You have a basic familiarity with funders and thought leaders in the movement.
- Demonstrated ability to build donor relationships remotely: You convey warmth, credibility, and passion through email and video — you don't need in-person meetings to build trust.
- Strong writing and communication skills: You write clear, compelling correspondence (e.g., emails, proposals, presentations). You can tailor your message for different audiences and anticipate what people need to hear.
- Scientific literacy and intellectual curiosity: You're genuinely curious about research. You can read and understand scientific papers, ask informed questions, and find reliable answers independently. You don't need to be an expert on our field on day one, but you're motivated to learn deeply.
- Critical thinking and strategic judgment: You evaluate opportunities thoughtfully, ask hard questions about donor fit and organizational priorities, and navigate complex solicitations with nuance.
- Independence and self-direction: You thrive in a remote environment and make smart decisions without constant supervision. You manage your own time and priorities well.
- Integrity in donor relationships: You're transparent about what we can deliver. You don't overpromise on organizational direction or capabilities. Donors trust you because you're honest.
- Ability to coordinate effectively with colleagues: You can bring other people into donor relationships without creating extra work for anyone.
- JEDI: Motivated to understand and counteract the ways that personal biases, cultural differences, and systemic inequities can hinder our decision-making, work culture, and programmatic effectiveness. You apply this understanding strategically, making intentional choices about how to engage with others while maintaining your integrity and advancing WAI's mission.
This role might also benefit from you having some of the following qualifications. You should still apply even if you don’t have any of these qualifications.
- Experience raising funds for research-focused organizations (like university labs, research institutions, or science organizations) where donors are motivated by long-term scientific impact rather than immediate, tangible outcomes.
- Strategic sourcing skills that enable you to identify which donor communities are most likely to support wild animal welfare research across multiple philanthropic spaces (like animal advocacy, conservation, scientific research, or field-building).
- Ability to learn new donor communities quickly: You can explore non-EA communities (e.g., tech research, moonshot science) as we identify promising niches.
- Collaborative approach with researchers: You enjoy working alongside people with deep expertise and can bridge the gap between technical science and donor communication.
- Familiarity with CRM systems like Salesforce.
