IT Consultant

Common Impact

Boston, Massachusetts

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Common Impact, an innovative nonprofit organization committed to fostering cross-sector partnerships, has developed a leading model for employee engagement that produces measurable, lasting gains for both company and nonprofit participants. By connecting skilled professionals from global companies to high-potential local nonprofits, Common Impact channels critical, untapped resources into the nonprofit sector, while creating value for its corporate partners.

Common Impact has been widely recognized for its innovative model, including accolades from the Boston Business Journal, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Catalogue for Philanthropy, MITX (Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange), and the Social Innovation Forum.

Poised for continued growth and success, Common Impact seeks an IT Consultant to facilitate these strategic cross-sector partnerships, design technology solutions to meet their nonprofit clients’ needs, and further develop and expand their systems and operations to new geographies. Common Impact’s corporate partners include some of America's leading companies such as Analog Devices, Cisco, Genworth Financial, State Street Corporation, and Fidelity Investments.

Reporting to the Managing Director, this position offers an exceptional opportunity for an experienced architect to design technical solutions for nonprofits’ greatest challenges, to join Common Impact’s talented team, and to expand a proven model of social impact. The successful candidate will be a strategic thinker with significant knowledge about a diverse range of technologies. S/he will have a proven track-record successfully managing a wide range of simultaneous projects; will possess excellent verbal and written communication skills, which includes an ability to translate technology into layman’s terms; and will bring an interest and commitment to working with diverse communities in order to fulfill Common Impact’s mission:

Strengthen high-potential nonprofit organizations by helping companies deploy their human capital more strategically in the social sector.

HISTORY AND MISSION

Nonprofits are working harder than ever to solve homelessness, create new educational opportunities, and improve healthcare in communities across the country. Yet as they work to solve social problems, nonprofits also face growing competition in a sector that has almost doubled in size over the past decade. In this increasingly crowded marketplace, many organizations are looking for help to deliver services more efficiently, to demonstrate their effectiveness, and to build awareness for their cause.

Companies, meanwhile, are rethinking their role in the world: as the idea of corporate social responsibility moves to the mainstream, corporations are looking for strategic, highly leveraged ways to give back to the community. In many cases, the professional expertise that leading companies possess is exactly what smaller, community-based nonprofits need. Both companies and nonprofits stand to benefit by working together more effectively—what’s missing is a mechanism for connecting the two.

Common Impact provides that mechanism: we connect skilled professionals from global companies to high-potential local nonprofits. Our employee engagement programs match employee-volunteers with nonprofits that need help overcoming key business challenges. This innovative approach to corporate community service enables companies to realize a positive return on their social investment while building stronger teams and developing employee skills. At the same time, this access to private sector talent enables nonprofits to amplify their impact on the constituents they serve. Ultimately, our work helps to foster stronger communities wherever those companies operate.

OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FACING THE IT CONSULTANT

As our next IT Consultant, you will be responsible for helping our nonprofit clients craft solutions to address their most pressing technology challenges. You will work actively with our nonprofits clients to strengthen their technology infrastructures, automate their business processes, and manage their data more effectively. In addition, you will manage teams of talented employee-volunteers who will execute projects for our nonprofit clients, and will play an active role in helping to scale our organization.

Challenges for the IT Consultant
As the IT Consultant, you will be responsible for:

• Identifying high-performing nonprofits. You will field questions and read proposals from interested nonprofit applicants, select a subset of organizations from the initial applicant pool, conduct second round interviews, and make final selections to determine our client portfolio.

• Devising solutions to nonprofits’ technology challenges. You will be responsible for working with 10 to 15 nonprofit clients each year and developing technology strategies for those clients. You will understand each client’s business process, determine what projects would be of greatest benefit, and write requirements documents for your recommended solutions. Our assessments typically cover topics such as information systems, CRM, use of the web, and IT staffing.

• Facilitating successful relationships between nonprofits and employee-volunteer teams. Common Impact offers many different projects to corporate employee-volunteers: someone can join a day of service project, a six-month team project, or act as a coach or mentor to a nonprofit. You will be responsible for managing these teams as they build projects like databases or websites, and for overseeing the entire implementation to ensure that the project goes smoothly.

• Supporting the growth of Common Impact’s services. Common Impact currently runs a full-service site in Boston and is building sites in New York and Richmond. As we continue to grow our new sites into full-service operations, you will work closely with our Managing Director to build systems that facilitate this growth. This includes:

  • Designing Common Impact’s IT strategy. You will oversee our internal IT systems including the development of our project management and CRM platform, facilitating connectivity between remote offices, and managing our IT support vendors. (Specific technologies are listed below.)

  • Modeling growth and expansion opportunities. You will work cross-functionally with other Common Impact staff to understand current sales opportunities in our pipeline, analyze current staff workloads, and ensure that staff members are allocated on an optimal number of projects. You will also model our work in new cities to determine when we should hire staff in these geographies.

  • Helping to expand our services. The IT Consultant will play a critical thought leadership role as we develop, refine, and grow our services to scale.

• Enhancing the organizational culture at Common Impact. At Common Impact, we strongly believe that the spirit in which we do our work is as important as the work itself. We pride ourselves on excellence, innovation, fostering collaboration between groups that might not otherwise interact, and a willingness to have fun with our work. A successful candidate for this position will also hold these values.

Core Skills Required for this Position
The IT Consultant is a unique, exciting position that will allow you to use and develop a number of different skill-sets. That said, we require that every candidate be:

• An excellent problem solver and critical thinker who can synthesize information, ask insightful questions, and spot trends quickly. You should feel comfortable in situations where you are simultaneously interviewing a client, taking notes, summarizing information back to the client, anticipating the next question you’ll ask, and reflecting on how you’ll use the information once you return to the office.

• A self-starting, energetic leader who elicits the respect and trust of staff and external partners. In this position, you’ll get to work with everyone from a director of a two-person nonprofit to a C-level executive of a Fortune 500 company. We are looking for someone with a strong sense of good consulting practices, who knows how to lead client meetings to successful outcomes, and who has at least three years of direct experience doing comparable work. (In your first year, this position will likely not require you to travel or supervise other employees, although as you grow, such opportunities may arise.)

• An independent worker who can juggle a wide range of simultaneous projects. Each Consultant works with 10 to 15 nonprofit clients over the course of a year, each of which may be at a different point in our consulting process. We’re looking for a successful project manager who is organized, who is able to keep track of many small details, and who can handle projects with competing priorities.

• An excellent verbal and written communicator who is able to translate technology into layman’s terms. Some of our nonprofit clients do not have anyone on staff who is formally trained in technology. Thus, clear and simple verbal communication is critical for this position.

• Knowledgeable about a diverse range of technologies. Common Impact and its clients use a wide range of technologies including: Salesforce.com, open source web content management systems, HTML, Java, ASP.NET, Microsoft Office (including Access), and a Windows Server 2003 environment. While we do not expect the IT Consultant to have experience with all of these technologies, knowledge in these areas is a plus.

• Committed to working with diverse communities.

• Enthusiastic for the mission of Common Impact.

HOW TO APPLY:

Common Impact is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse community. Common Impact strongly encourages people of color and women to apply.

To apply for this position, please submit your resume, cover letter, and salary requirements to commonimpact-it@nonprofitprofessionals.com, with “Last Name, First Name” in the subject line.

Your cover letter should address the following questions (this is no time to be modest!):

1. Please describe your background in information technology, particularly your experience analyzing business needs and translating them into IT solutions, your experience working with data systems, and your experience with web technologies.
    

2. In this role, you will be consulting to nonprofits to design technology solutions, and working with corporate employee-volunteers to build these solutions for the nonprofit clients. Please describe what effective consulting means to you and how you consult to other organizations, including at least one specific example that illustrates this.
    

3. A cornerstone of the Common Impact model is that we deliberately seek collaboration between groups that might not otherwise interact; we accomplish this by joining skilled volunteers from leading companies with staff members from nonprofit organizations to implement a discrete project. We recognize that no one person is an expert with the answer to every question, but we believe that powerful change can occur when people with differing skill sets work together.
   
   Nevertheless, bringing these groups together is not always a simple task, as individual participants often come from vastly different backgrounds. Please describe one specific experience you have had facilitating a relationship between people whose backgrounds were dissimilar from your own. How was this experience challenging for you? What role did you play to mitigate differences? What did you learn from this experience about interacting with others and developing successful relationships?
    

4. What are the skills that you hope to develop in this position?