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# Manager, Donor Acquisition
5–8 Years Experience | Fundraising / Institutional Sales / Business Development / Partnerships | Goa (In-office, relocation required)
## About Make A Difference (MAD)
Make A Difference builds child protection and education systems across India. We work with children in need of care and protection, and we do it differently from most: we enrol children at age 10 to 12 and walk the full journey with them, roughly eighteen years, into stable adulthood.
That long horizon is the whole thesis. Sustained mentoring relationships compound over time. Multiple mentors become anchors in a child's life. Short interventions do not produce the same outcomes, and we have the data to show it.
Today we reach around 10,000 children. By the end of 2026 we intend to reach 24,000. By 2030, 3.5 lakh. That growth is not a marketing number. It is a funding problem, and this role exists to solve a significant part of it.
## Role Overview
**The role in one line**
Bring new money into MAD. Own the acquisition of new CSR partners, foundations, and high-net-worth individuals, from first contact to signed agreement to money received.
## Key Responsibilities
**New donor acquisition, end to end.** You will build and work a pipeline of new funders across three channels: corporate CSR, private and family foundations, and HNI donors. You own prospecting, qualification, the first meeting, the proposal, the negotiation, and the close. You are not handing off to someone else halfway through.
**Proposals that win.** You will write and build the proposals, decks, and concept notes that go to funders. Not templated documents with a logo swapped out, but arguments built specifically for what that funder is trying to achieve. You will need to understand MAD's model well enough to explain it to a CSR head in eight minutes and to a foundation's programme team over ninety.
**The pipeline as a discipline.** You will keep the pipeline accurate and current in our systems. Stage, amount, probability, next action, by when. Not because we like admin, but because a fundraising forecast built on optimism is worse than no forecast at all.
**Closing, not just conversations.** A meeting is not progress. A warm response is not progress. A signed agreement with money scheduled is progress. You will be measured on what closes.
**Handover into stewardship.** Once a funder is signed, you will hand them over cleanly to the relationships side of the team with full context, commitments made, and reporting obligations documented. What you promise in a proposal becomes someone's delivery problem, so you promise carefully.
## How This Role Will Be Measured
We are being explicit about this because vagueness here serves nobody.
| **Outcome** | **What it means** |
| ---------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| New money closed | Annual value of new partnerships signed, against an agreed target |
| Conversion rate | Qualified prospect to closed partnership |
| Pipeline health | Coverage against target, accuracy of stage and probability, no stale records |
| Cycle time | Days from first meaningful conversation to signature |
| Clean handovers | Every closed partner transitions with documented commitments and no surprises downstream |
You will set quarterly targets with the Senior Director and report against them in writing. Activity counts are not outcomes. Number of meetings taken, emails sent, and events attended are inputs we will discuss, but they are not how performance is judged.
## What We Are Looking For
### Required
- Five to eight years in fundraising, institutional sales, business development, or partnerships, with a demonstrable record of closing new business. If you have carried a target and hit it, tell us the number.
- Experience selling or fundraising through a full cycle: prospecting, qualification, proposal, negotiation, close. Not just relationship maintenance on an inherited book.
- Strong written English. You will write proposals that go to CSR heads, foundation programme officers, and family offices. Writing is most of this job.
- Comfort with numbers. You will build budgets, cost-per-child figures, and utilisation projections, and you will be questioned on them. Quoting a figure you have not verified is the fastest way to lose a funder's trust.
- Comfort working in a CRM and keeping it honest.
### Strongly Preferred
- Exposure to Indian CSR: the Companies Act Section 135 landscape, how CSR committees actually decide, what a corporate needs from a partner to justify a renewal internally.
- Existing relationships in corporate CSR, family foundations, or HNI philanthropy in India.
- Experience in the development sector, or a genuine reason for wanting to move into it.
## What Will Make You Good At This
**You think in systems, not tasks.** Given a ₹10 crore gap, you do not start by listing companies to email. You work out which segments of capital are actually available to an organisation like ours, which of them we have a genuine right to win, and where the shortest path to a signature runs. Then you build the plan backwards from the target. If you need the strategy handed to you before you can act, this role will frustrate both of us.
**You solve the problem in front of you without escalating it.** Funder goes quiet for three weeks. The CSR committee shifts its thematic focus mid-conversation. A proposal needs a cost-per-child model nobody has built yet. You are expected to work these out and come back with a resolution, not a status update. Bring problems up when they need a decision only you cannot make, and bring a recommendation with them.
**You operate alone and still deliver.** This is a single-owner role. There is no team beneath you, no pod to distribute work across, and nobody checking whether you started. Your week is yours to structure, and the only thing that will be examined is what closed. People who need external momentum to generate their own do not last here.
**You are relentless about the outcome, not the effort.** You will not confuse a warm meeting for progress or a busy calendar for productivity. When something is not converting, you kill it and move the effort elsewhere rather than nursing it because you have already invested in it. You measure yourself against the number before anyone else does.
**You go and get it.** You will find the path to a funder who has not published an email address. You will ask for the introduction that feels presumptuous. You will follow up the fourth time. You are comfortable being told no, and you go back anyway with a better argument.
**You hold your own view, and you update it.** You can disagree with a Senior Director in a room, make the case, and either win it or genuinely let it go. What does not work here is silent disagreement that resurfaces as slow execution.
## Be Clear About What This Is Not
**This is not account management.** You are not inheriting a portfolio of existing funders to keep warm. Renewals and stewardship sit elsewhere on the team. Your number comes entirely from money that does not exist yet.
**This is not grant writing to a brief.** Nobody will hand you a shortlist and a template. You decide which funders are worth pursuing, build the case, and write the proposal. The strategy is part of the job, not an input to it.
**This is not a role that arrives with a team.** No direct reports on day one, no analyst, no coordinator. You will build your own pipeline, write your own decks, model your own budgets, and chase your own follow-ups. Early leverage comes from working out what not to do, not from delegating.
That said, this is explicitly not a permanent solo seat. As the funding base grows, this role grows into leading it. Whoever holds this seat and delivers will be the person who hires, shapes, and leads the acquisition team built around them. We are looking for someone who can carry the number alone now and lead the function that carries it later.
**This is not a role that runs on process.** MAD is scaling from 10,000 children to 3.5 lakh. Much of what this role needs does not exist yet and will have to be invented by whoever holds it. If you need a defined playbook to be effective, this will be the wrong seat.
**This is not remote or hybrid.** The role is based in Goa and requires relocation.
## Working At MAD
This role is based in Goa and requires relocation. We are an in-office team. Fundraising in India runs on relationships, and relationships are built in rooms, including the ones inside your own organisation. If you are not willing to move, do not apply.
Travel to funder meetings across Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai is a regular part of the role.
We work Tuesday to Saturday. Our chapters run on weekends, when the children are available, so the team's week is shaped around theirs. Mondays are off.
Flexibility exists here, and it is earned through delivery rather than assumed at the start.
## Why This Role Is Worth Taking
MAD is at the point where the model is proven and the constraint is capital. Our outcomes stand up to scrutiny: children in our programme show a NEET rate of roughly 5 percent against a national benchmark near 25 percent. That is a defensible number, independently benchmarked, and it is the kind of number that makes a fundraising conversation straightforward.
What is not straightforward is the scale ambition. Going from 10,000 children to 3.5 lakh means the funding base has to change in kind, not just in size. Whoever takes this role will be building that base.
If you want a fundraising job where the product is hard to argue with and the target is genuinely difficult, this is that job.
## Compensation & Logistics
- **Organisation:** Make A Difference (MAD)
- **Team:** Partnerships & Fundraising
- **Reports to:** Senior Director, Partnerships & Fundraising
- **Location:** Goa (in-office, relocation required)
- **Type:** Full-time
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