Executive Vice President, Growth & Membership

Executive Vice President, Growth & Membership

Reports To: Chief Executive Officer

For 70 years, our client has been a leader in the conservative movement and one of the most trusted media institutions in America. They are seeking a highly experienced, creative, and strategic Executive Vice President, Growth & Membership to lead their efforts to acquire and retain donors, strengthen brand position, improve marketing performance across channels, and build systems that connect mission to measurable results. The right candidate will bring deep market understanding, first-rate direct response experience, strong content and channel instincts, and a systems-oriented mindset. This leader must be comfortable working across disciplines – audience data, growth metrics, brand stewardship, editorial, products, and technology – and marshal these disciplines toward meeting and exceeding goals. We are looking for someone who has led diverse teams, partnered effectively with engineers and product leaders, and is excited by the responsible use of emerging tools, including agentic AI, to improve marketing execution, workflow, testing, analysis, and scale.

What You Will Do:

• Lead strategy across audience growth, donor acquisition, donor retention, engagement, content distribution, and brand development.
• Build and own a modern direct response digital fundraising operation, including campaign strategy, donor journeys, landing pages, email and SMS programs, paid media, conversion optimization, and reactivation.
• Define and execute a membership journey that strengthens donor and customer engagement, informed by audience behavior, donor motivations, and the dynamics of the conservative media landscape, which includes experimenting with new strategies that promote conversion, retention, and acquisition.
• Lead multi-channel content marketing on-platform and using off-platform channels so that our content and campaigns reinforce one another and drive measurable outcomes.
• Set clear goals, KPIs, and reporting structures for marketing, fundraising, audience development, and content performance.
• Oversee content planning and campaign coordination through a disciplined content calendar aligned with editorial priorities, fundraising moments, major news cycles, seasonal opportunities, and institutional goals.
• Partner closely with product and technology teams to ensure that growth and retention strategy is integrated with the organization's mission, vision, organizational strategy, and operations.
• Help build the tools, systems, dashboards, automations, and workflows needed to improve targeting, attribution, testing, and organizational learning.
• Evaluate and responsibly implement AI-enabled tools for workflows and customer journeys, including agentic AI, where they can improve execution without compromising editorial integrity, organizational trust, or brand standards.
• Build, lead, and develop a high-performing multidisciplinary team spanning functions such as growth-oriented digital fundraising, lifecycle marketing, creative, analytics, content marketing, audience development, and external partners.
• Present strategy, performance, and investment priorities clearly to executive leadership.

What We Are Looking For:

• Significant senior marketing leadership experience, ideally at the CMO, VP, or equivalent level.
• Strong understanding of media, journalism, or other mission-driven audience businesses.
• Expert-level experience in direct response digital fundraising, with a record of growing donor acquisition, improving conversion, increasing retention, and driving revenue.
• Meaningful experience in multi-channel content marketing, including channel planning, campaign execution, goal-setting, editorial coordination, and calendar management.
• Demonstrated ability to establish performance metrics and use data to manage toward clear business outcomes.
• Strong systems-thinking ability: you understand how audience, brand, mission, fundraising, product, technology, and content fit together.
• Experience leading and aligning multidisciplinary teams with different skill sets and operating styles.
• Experience working with engineers, product managers, or data teams to solve marketing and fundraising challenges through better tools and systems.
• Comfort with analytics, attribution, segmentation, CRM strategy, lifecycle design, and testing frameworks.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, with the judgment to operate well in a fast-changing environment.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Commitment to the principles of America's founding and conservatism: limited government, individual liberty, economic freedom, traditional values, patriotism, and a strong American posture at home and abroad
• Extensive or senior experience in nonprofit fundraising or commercial customer acquisition, public-interest media, advocacy-oriented media, or a similarly mission-driven organization
• Familiarity with modern marketing technology and fundraising infrastructure, including CRM systems, donor platforms, automation tools, analytics, experimentation platforms, and content operations systems
• Experience managing multidisciplinary digital-first fundraising or customer acquisition teams
• Experience managing paid acquisition and lifecycle programs within a donor-supported organization
• Deep understanding of donor and subscriber engagement and retention, across programming, communications, and related strategies
• Strong interest in practical applications of AI tools, including systems that support research, reporting, workflow automation, campaign QA, creative iteration, and operational scale
• Sound judgment about when technology creates meaningful leverage versus unnecessary complexity
• Understanding of the conservative media and donor landscape, including how to effectively communicate and persuade across diverse audiences

The Leadership Profile

• The strongest candidates for this role will be: mission-driven but performance-oriented, strategic but operational, analytically rigorous but creatively strong, technologically curious but sober-minded, comfortable with ambiguity but disciplined in execution, capable of building a marketing function that is more integrated, more measurable, and more effective over time.

Why This Role Matters:

A journalism nonprofit cannot rely on institutional inertia. It must earn attention, trust, support, and loyalty every day. That requires a marketing leader who understands both persuasion and systems, both message and mechanism, both human judgment and technological leverage. The Executive Vice President, Growth and Marketing will play a central role in helping this organization grow its audience, expand its donor base, sharpen its market position, and build the capabilities needed for long-term strength.

Status: Full-time. Hybrid (4 days in office)

Location: Washington, DC

Compensation: $200k/year