Overview
The Business Development Manager is responsible for identifying funding opportunities, cultivating relationships with donors and partners, and coordinating the proposal development process to secure resources for the organization.
Key Responsibilities
- Identify, research, and disseminate information on new funding opportunities.
- Cultivate business relationships with external stakeholders and potential partners.
- Explore and test potential private sector partnerships.
- Seek donor intelligence on prospective new opportunities or partnerships.
- Prepare materials for engagement with donors, partners, and stakeholders.
- Support country office capabilities on long-term capture planning.
- Analyse information about the organization, donors, and competitors.
- Coordinate the proposal development process independently.
- Produce proposal development schedules and track timelines.
- Broker technical assistance, compliance information, and resources.
- Support the development of proposal budgets.
- Draft critical sections of proposals.
- Ensure internal processes and annexes are in place for award handover.
- Represent the organization in proposal development meetings.
- Ensure donor and organizational resources, templates, and tools are available.
- Maintain knowledge management systems.
- Save and circulate proposals and related documents.
- Support strategic resource mobilization for emergency response proposals.
- Keep abreast of overall operations, challenges, achievements, adaptability, and good practices.
Required Experience
- Demonstrated experience in coordinating and facilitating the development of major proposals to institutional donors, multilateral agencies, corporate donors, and/or foundations.
- Demonstrated ability to solve complex issues through critical thinking, analysis, the definition of an exact way forward, and ensuring buy-in.
- High degree of attention to detail and ability to lead key tasks to on-time completion under significant pressure.
- Highly developed networking skills and ability to form productive working relationships with a wide range of internal colleagues and stakeholders.
- Good personal, organizational skills, including time management and ability to meet deadlines and work under pressure.
- Well-developed interpersonal and communication skills, including communicating with impact, influencing negotiation, and coaching.
- High degree of flexibility and adaptability to respond to changing needs.
- Ability and willingness to change work practices and hours in major emergencies, including traveling at short notice and extended periods.
- Experience in project and change management related to organizational development projects and international, cross-functional teams with a proven history of delivering results.
- INGО, NGO, or nonprofit experience and an excellent grasp of operational issues (desirable).
- Experience in developing project or proposal budgets (desirable).
- Familiarity with local context and funding landscape (desirable).
- Proven ability to write persuasive, competitive, and compliant narrative proposals for institutional donors (desirable).
- A detailed understanding of funding mechanisms for development work (desirable).
Qualifications
- University degree (minimum Bachelor’s level) preferably in programme, resource and entrepreneurship development, project management or in any other field of relevance to development and humanitarian response.
- Background in donor and relationship management, proposal development and coordination required.
