Director - Fundraising, Communications & Advocacy

Organisation: Avanti Fellows

Location: Remote (Delhi/NCR or Mumbai base preferred due to donor concentration); expect roughly two days a week on the road for donor meetings, partner visits and events.

Type: Full-time

Experience: 15+ years

Reporting to: Co-CEO

Level: Director, Fundraising, Communications & Advocacy - member of the senior leadership team

Compensation: Competitive, commensurate with your capacity and with your ability to grow and sustain the function.

What You'll Actually Do:

The Director of Fundraising, Communications & Advocacy is a senior leadership role and the single accountable owner of Avanti's revenue, narrative, and public voice. You will not be building a team from scratch; you will inherit and lead a high-performing function of 7 people - 4 Leads and 3 Managers across fundraising, communications and advocacy.

- End-to-End pipeline ownership: You own the pipeline end to end. The team will rely on you to support them in closing grants. This includes prioritising grants, crafting proposals that work, and support in building relationships. While the day to day will be managed by your team - you are where the buck stops.

- Manage and nurture key partner relationships: Our funders are equal partners in our mission. Your most important job is to ensure that our strategy, plans and challenges are clearly communicated to our partners and that they feel a sense of ownership of our collective mission. Our work is challenging and ambitious and it will not get done without partnerships based on trust, transparency and agility.

- Manage & coach a high-performing team: We want to create a culture of ownership and agency. Your team will need your support in developing strategy, navigating challenging conversations and developing themselves to manage a larger mandate over the years.

- Operational Excellence: You will be responsible to make sure that the donor management cycle runs like clockwork. Reports, updates, field visits and compliance need to run effectively. The team needs to know what to do when and will look to you to set the standard.

- Build a large Individual / Flexible Giving portfolio: Our goal is to ensure that at least 20% of our budget is flexible funding from Individuals. This is the fuel that allows us to invest in growth, undertake experiments and launch programs that may not have committed funding. This requires prioritizing long-term relationships over closing short term deals and living and breathing our mission. You need to be Avanti's #1 evangelist.

- Increase the attention to our mission and the visibility of our work: Avanti works with government, corporates and foundations. Our students are predominantly from the most disadvantaged and overlooked communities in India. In your role leading communications and advocacy, you will help define what we communicate, and how. Our current communications and advocacy work includes podcasts, online and on-the-ground campaigns, op-eds and visual media. While the team has the expertise to deliver, your role would be to help them converge on a coherent strategy and support the team in executing against it.

- Deepen Engagement within our donor partner organizations: A key aspect of the role is to ensure that our team works on engaging the leadership and organizations of our donor partners. This would include updates to senior management, organising program visits, creating engagement throughout the organization through mentorship and attendance of Avanti events.

- Representing Avanti externally: You will be one of the external faces of Avanti to the world. Your ownership of mission, understanding of our programs, knowledge of our student stories is critical for you to be able to talk about our work strategically in external forums. You need to be able to write about our work effectively and communicate it to audiences.

Who We're Looking For:

- Mission Alignment: You are driven by Avanti's mission to break systemic barriers and get low-income students into India's top colleges.

- Track Record of Scale: 15+ years of experience in building and nurturing high-value relationships - especially B2B. Candidates with prior experience in sales and customer success would have the skills needed for the job. You should be able to demonstrate that you've built and led a high performance team that has delivered on customer retention and revenue growth. You don't need to come from the non-profit sector.

- Operational Discipline: You thrive on pipeline visibility, fast response SLAs, clear team accountability, and clean CRM hygiene. You enjoy establishing systems and processes, following up and getting into detail.

- Commercial & Regulatory Sharpness: You can read and understand regulations and compliance. You will need to develop a deep understanding of CSR decision cycles, corporate governance (Section 135, Schedule VII), FCRA and board approval timelines. We do not expect you to arrive with this - we expect you to own it inside 90 days.

- Exceptional Management & Coaching Skills: You know how to set clear goals, support but not micro-manage and help your team members grow in their ownership and impact.