The Opportunity
At
YouthTruth, we equip education leaders and funders to integrate on-the-ground insights into planning, professional development, and improvement processes. For over 15 years, YouthTruth has led the movement to use research-backed survey instruments to learn from the student experience to improve by listening to student voice. As Director of Partnerships, you will have the opportunity to foster new and existing partnerships that advance our mission of centering student voice and experiences to improve education. Your work will make a difference through growing our reach and connecting more schools and systems to YouthTruth’s services and offerings to improve education and the lives of young people.
Position Overview
The Director of Partnerships is a key member of the YouthTruth leadership team, leading all business development, client partnerships, and advisory services to achieve our mission of empowering students, families and staff as critical drivers of school improvement. Reporting to YouthTruth’s Vice President, the Director is responsible for developing and executing earned revenue plans that drive impact and support and financial health and sustainability. The Director is also a member of YouthTruth’s leadership team, which oversees all of YouthTruth’s goals and strategies, ensuring that our people, culture, research and communications, and products and services all lead to impact. This role is based in our San Francisco office.
Key Responsibilities
Managing Earned Revenue Pipeline
- Works with the Vice President, leadership team, and partnership staff to manage and grow YouthTruth’s earned revenue pipeline
- Creates and executes annual business development plans to lead a team to success with clear goals, targets, and accountabilities
- Applies excellent business development tactics to create new relationships, engage prospects and clients throughout the full sales cycle, win new contracts, and renew existing contracts
- Uses Salesforce tools to maintain data systems and structures that enable regular accurate revenue forecasting and effective analysis, learning, and improvement
- Converts leads to sales by fielding inquiries, ushering prospects through the sales and registration process, preparing proposals and pricing quotes for prospective clients, and presenting to groups in person and virtually
- Oversees a team to maintain strategic partnerships to engage districts/networks, schools, regional funders, and states while also maintaining a portfolio of clients
- Cultivates, builds, and manages strong relationships with clients based on trust, clear and proactive communication, and a commitment to excellent service
- Identifies where sales opportunities exist (i.e. demographics, education trends, funding, other key external influences). Maintains an understanding of industry trends, current events, product and technology developments.
- Works with the Vice President to regularly review and adjust pricing models to ensure YouthTruth’s products and services are appropriately competitive in the marketplace
- Manages YouthTruth’s conference strategy to ensure that YouthTruth is represented well in the K-12 education marketplace, including thorough researching and vetting conference engagement opportunities, creating presentations and conference talks, and reviewing results of our efforts
Partnerships and Advisory Services
- Delivers high-quality advisory services and professional development workshops to clients, including school and district administrators, education funders, teachers, students, families, and other school community partners
- Participates in the development of high value advisory services for a changing market
- Deeply engages clients to understand their needs and uses client feedback data to improve and innovate YouthTruth’s products and services
- Builds relationships with policymakers, education funders, consultants, and others to create referrals and distribution channels
People Leadership and Management
- Manages the partnerships team through facilitation of regular team and 1-on-1 meetings, providing coaching and mentorship, and helping our people grow and learn
- Regularly contribute to YouthTruth’s cross-functional external relations team, to connect insights and lessons from business development to our marketing, communications, and public voice efforts
- Represents YouthTruth and Center for Effective philanthropy externally through client work, presentations, workshops, professional development and other engagements
- Actively contributes to YouthTruth and CEP culture through leadership presence, engagement in team and culture-building activities, and identifying solutions for continuous improvement
Travel is required up to 40% of the year, though some months are heavier than others.
Candidate Profile
The role requires the ability to be a team leader as well as drive implementation. The successful candidate will be passionate about centering student voice in the work of education improvement and will bridge a systems-change mindset with YouthTruth’s approach to partnering with schools. They will bring their experience working in schools and/or education systems to bear in achieving YouthTruth’s goals, particularly as it relates to engaging administrators as partner clients, delivering and evolving our advisory services, and using field experience to inform YouthTruth’s broader research and communications efforts. The successful candidate will possess many, though perhaps not all the following competencies, skills and characteristics:
- A minimum of 10 years of relevant work experience, including experience managing teams in a fast-paced and high-growth nonprofit or business start-up environment
- A Bachelor’s degree is required for this role. A Master’s degree in Education, Business, Public Policy or similar field is preferred
- A high level of comfort with and experience using quantitative data for continuous improvement in schools. Familiarity with school, state and district reporting systems
- Strong strategic acumen and understanding of organizational dynamics
- Outstanding and persuasive oral and written communication skills, with the ability to quickly build relationships with school district and charter management organization leaders, principals, leaders of state education agencies, education funders, and other education leaders
- Experience successfully leading and executing business development partnerships, preferably within K-12 education. Strong preference for at least two years of experience selling to and building effective relationships with K-12 school districts
- Experience managing multiple critical deadlines while adapting quickly and confidently in a fast-paced environment
- Experience drawing insights from data and coaching others to utilize data to make decisions
- A deep respect for young people, exhibited through direct experience working with youth and families. A strong preference first-hand experience in school systems
- High degree of comfort working with the full spectrum of diverse people in schools and systems, including administrators, teachers, and leaders, young people, families, and community partners
- Demonstrated expertise in using data in improvement cycles in education settings
Other desired professional qualities include:
- Exhibits sincere consideration for and appreciation of school leaders and teachers’ perspectives and needs in sales conversations, partnership discussions, and product development
- Possesses a work ethic consistent with CEP and YouthTruth’s culture, including sharp attention to detail; track record of being highly organized, responsive, and team-oriented; ability to accurately set and consistently meet commitments; proven success in a fast-paced environment
- Believes in the role that student perceptions and data can play in accelerating education improvement efforts
- Demonstrates the highest level of personal integrity and commitment to excellence
Compensation and Benefits
Our nonprofit model is central to our identity: our bottom line is impact, not profit. Yet even as a nonprofit, we successfully compete for top talent across both the public and private sectors and offer competitive compensation and benefits including:
- A commitment to pay parity and salary equity. The 2025 annual base salary for this position is $194,075. In addition, this role is eligible for competitive Performance Based Incentive Compensation.
- Comprehensive health, vision, and dental insurance plans.
- Generous paid time off plan, including three weeks of annually accrued vacation, up to 15 holidays, plus an end-of-year break.
- 401(k) plan with a 1:1 Employer Match up to 5% of total compensation.
- Generous annual personal professional development allowance.
- Flexible spending and dependent care tax free savings plans.
- Life insurance covered 100% by the organization.
We strive to balance in-person time with flexibility and the needs of each person, their team, and the larger organization. We believe culture, collaboration, communication, trust- and relationship-building, training, and certain kinds of creative work benefit from in-office interactions – and we believe that the flexibility of remote work also has many advantages. We expect staff to be in the office at least two days per week, and more frequently during new staff introduction periods to support a robust orientation. Everyone will enjoy the option to work fully remotely from anywhere four weeks per year.
Location
We have offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and San Francisco, California. The YouthTruth team resides alongside staff in other departments at
The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), YouthTruth’s parent nonprofit. This role is based in our San Francisco, CA office.
About YouthTruth
Since 2008, YouthTruth has been working side by side with leaders in K-12 education and philanthropy to deeply understand the experiences of young people in schools and use data to improve opportunities and outcomes. To date we've heard from over 3 million students and hundreds of thousands of family members and staff across 39 states. When you join YouthTruth, you become part of a team of passionate and experienced professionals committed to ensuring every young person finds a pathway to success.
About CEP
For over 20 years, CEP has led the movement to improve philanthropy through a powerful combination of dispassionate analysis and a passionate commitment to improving lives. Today, over 350 foundations around the world have used CEP’s assessment tools to gather honest feedback from their stakeholders in an effort to learn how to be even more effective. CEOs and trustees have come to rely on our research for insights into foundation effectiveness on a wide range of topics, from assessing performance to developing strategy to managing stakeholder relationships. Our highly regarded programming—including our biennial conference—gives foundation leaders an exclusive and unprecedented opportunity to connect with their peers. Through custom workshops and peer learning cohorts, our new Learning Institute supports funders in driving changes in their philanthropic practice. CEP is based in Cambridge Massachusetts, with a second office in San Francisco, California. Strengths of CEP’s work culture are entrepreneurialism, accountability, teamwork, collegiality, diversity, and mutual respect.
