Vice President, Marketplace Growth

About DonorsChoose

DonorsChoose is an education nonprofit ensuring every US public school student has the classroom resources they need to learn, grow, and thrive.

Founded by a teacher in 2000, DonorsChoose connects educators with a nationwide community of supporters who believe investing in students today will transform tomorrow. Educators request the materials they know their students need, and donors can choose the classroom, community, or cause they want to support. Since our founding, donors have supported 90% of US public schools. Every request is vetted, resources are delivered to classrooms, and donors can see the impact of their support through transparent reporting and updates from students and teachers. Raising $1.9 billion for classrooms, DonorsChoose has earned top ratings from Charity Navigator, GuideStar, and CharityWatch for its transparency, trust, and impact. Our dedicated team works from across the United States to turn resources into opportunities for students and teachers. 

About the Marketing Team

The Marketing team helps more people discover, support, and return to DonorsChoose to ensure teachers across the country can access the resources their students need. By connecting donor generosity with teacher needs, Marketing strengthens the DonorsChoose Marketplace and advances the organization's mission of expanding educational opportunity for students in every community. 

Working closely with Product, Development, Analytics, and Executive Leadership, Marketing connects donor needs with organizational priorities to strengthen the DonorsChoose Marketplace and expand opportunities for teachers and classrooms nationwide.

About the Role

The Vice President, Marketplace Growth is responsible for the performance, health, and long-term evolution of the DonorsChoose Marketplace—the ecosystem that connects teachers seeking classroom resources with donors who want to support them. This executive leader defines the organization's Marketplace growth strategy, bringing together audience insight, product partnership, marketing strategy, and data-informed decision making to strengthen both sides of the Marketplace, deepen donor engagement, and expand equitable access to classroom resources for teachers and students.

Reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer, this role serves as Marketing's primary strategic partner to Product, shaping Marketplace investment priorities and ensuring product strategy is informed by donor needs, teacher insights, market opportunities, and measurable business outcomes. While Product defines what gets built and how it works, the Vice President, Marketplace Growth defines where the organization should invest to accelerate Marketplace growth and maximize long-term impact.

The Vice President leads an integrated Marketplace Growth organization—including Digital Growth & Marketing, Product Marketing, and Mid-Level Giving—aligning these functions around a shared growth strategy that attracts new donors, deepens engagement, increases donor lifetime value, and strengthens the overall health of the Marketplace.

As a key member of the Marketing leadership team, this role partners closely with leaders across Product, Development, Analytics, Finance, and Executive Leadership to align priorities, make strategic tradeoff decisions, and ensure Marketplace investments deliver meaningful results for both teachers and donors.

Success in this role requires balancing immediate fundraising opportunities with the long-term health of the Marketplace, building strong cross-functional partnerships, and fostering a culture of experimentation, learning, and continuous improvement. Success is measured not only by Marketplace growth, but by how effectively that growth expands educational opportunity for teachers and students across the country.

Primary Responsibilities

Define Marketplace Growth Strategy

• Define the long-term strategy that grows and strengthens the DonorsChoose Marketplace.
• Establish the vision, priorities, and operating strategy for Marketplace Growth.
• Identify the highest-value opportunities across Product, Marketing, and Fundraising to improve Marketplace performance and donor outcomes.
• Translate teacher and donor behavior, market trends, research, and organizational priorities into actionable growth strategies.
• Partner with the Chief Marketing Officer and cross-functional leaders to establish Marketplace investment priorities, annual objectives, and success metrics.
• Influence enterprise decision-making by aligning Marketplace strategy across Product, Marketing, Development, Finance, Analytics, and Executive Leadership.

Drive Marketplace Growth & Performance

• Lead sustainable Marketplace growth through customer insight, experimentation, and data-informed decision making.
• Develop strategies that increase donor acquisition, engagement, retention, recurring giving, reactivation, upgrades, and lifetime value.
• Champion a culture of experimentation, measurement, and continuous optimization.
• Partner with Analytics to establish performance metrics, evaluate results, and identify new growth opportunities. 
• Balance immediate fundraising opportunities with long-term health of the Marketplace, strengthening outcomes for both donors and teachers. 
• Define the organization's Marketplace growth strategy and translate it into clear priorities for functional leaders, ensuring teams are aligned around shared goals while empowering them to own execution.

Partner with Product & Drive Go-to-Market

• Ensure new product capabilities create measurable Marketplace value.
• Serve as Marketing primary strategic partner to Product throughout product planning and roadmap development.
• Represent the voice of multiple audiences including teachers, donors, partners, vendors when evaluating new product opportunities for the multi-sided marketplace..
• Identify Marketplace opportunities that influence product investment priorities.
• Partner with Product to evaluate new capabilities, define success measures, and assess business impact.
• Ensure new features and enhancements are successfully positioned, launched, adopted, and measured.

Lead the Marketplace Growth Organization

• Build a high-performing team capable of delivering sustained Marketplace growth.
• Lead the leaders responsible for Digital Growth & Marketing, Product Marketing, and Mid-Level Giving.
• Align teams around shared Marketplace objectives and organizational priorities.
• Develop high-performing managers through coaching, clear expectations, and thoughtful prioritization.
• Foster a collaborative, data-informed culture that encourages experimentation, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Build organizational capability that enables the Marketplace Growth function to scale alongside the organization.

Qualifications

• Have 10+ years of related work experience in growth, lifecycle marketing, product marketing, digital marketing, Marketplace strategy, or revenue growth in a high-growth technology company, digital Marketplace, or mission-driven organization.
• Understand how to grow multi-sided marketplaces by balancing customer acquisition, engagement, retention, and lifetime value.
• Have significant experience partnering closely with Product organizations to influence roadmaps, launch new capabilities, and improve customer experiences.
• Have successfully balanced customer experience, product strategy, and business performance to drive sustainable growth.
• Enjoys using data, experimentation, and customer insights to solve complex business challenges.
• Have successfully led managers and built high-performing, cross-functional teams.
• Are comfortable operating at both strategic and operational levels, moving seamlessly between long-term vision and execution.
• Build trust through collaboration, curiosity, and sound judgment while influencing without relying solely on formal authority.

Level Expectations

Vice Presidents are enterprise leaders responsible for defining strategy, leading significant organizational functions, and driving outcomes that advance DonorsChoose's long-term mission and organizational priorities. They establish a clear vision for their function, build and develop high-performing leaders and teams, and influence decisions across the organization through strong executive partnership, strategic judgment, and cross-functional leadership.

Compensation & Benefits

Our compensation philosophy ensures that we are both externally competitive with tech-forward nonprofits of a similar size and internally fair in our pay practices. The following ranges represent the target offer range given the scope and experience expectations for this role.

• The hiring salary range for this role is $134,930 - $148,320 
• We have a hiring salary range of $146,000 - $165,000 for specific higher cost of labor locations, which include New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and Washington, D.C.

Once employees are hired, everyone at DonorsChoose is eligible to receive annual performance-based raises as they grow in their role. We are open to a variety of experiences, and recognize that the person we hire may be less experienced or more senior than this job description as posted. If you don’t check every box listed here, or you know you’d bring additional experience to the table, we hope you’ll submit your application. 

In addition, we offer full-time staff 25 paid vacation days per year and 11 paid holidays, a rich employer-paid individual and family health plan, a matching 401(k) plan (up to 5% of base salary), annual professional development stipend, and casual and flexible work environment. To learn more about what it is like to work for DonorsChoose, visit our careers page.

Hybrid Workplace and Other Details

In this role, you’ll have the option to work a flexible hybrid schedule in our NYC office, or to work fully remotely from CA, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, IL, IN, MA, MD, MI, MN, NC, NJ, NY, OR, PA, TN, TX, VA, WA, or WI.

Candidates who are not in the NYC area should expect to travel to our NYC office on an as-needed basis, about 4-6 times per year. All work-related travel expenses will be covered by the organization.

DonorsChoose participates in E-Verify. We will provide the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) and, if necessary, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with information from each new employee’s Form I-9 to confirm work authorization. 

An important note on communications: All messages from our hiring team will come from an official @donorschoose.org email address. If you ever receive a message about a role with us from a different domain, it’s not from us, and you should not reply or click on any links. We care deeply about your time, your privacy, and your experience—thank you for your interest in joining the DonorsChoose mission!

DonorsChoose Core Values

EQUITY
Combating systemic inequity is crucial to a brighter future for all. This reality fuels our ambitions and drives us to persevere.

INGENUITY
Complex problems require innovative solutions. We dream big, get creative, roll up our sleeves, and take action. We believe the best products can change the world.

HUMANITY 
People are the heart of our team and the communities we serve. Our compassion informs our goals and how we work together to achieve them. 

INTEGRITY
We strive to do right. We’re up-front about the facts. We boldly learn and grow from mistakes.

LEARNING
Education is the beating heart of our organization, inside and out. We’re curious. We listen. We know we don’t know everything. 

GRATITUDE
We begin and end with thanks. We take joy in our mission, our communities, and each other.

To Apply

Please submit your resume and answer the application questions online. Since we’re trying to get to know you through our hiring process, we ask that you please refrain from using AI writing tools to craft your response to our application questions. A cover letter is optional and may be addressed to Monique Canada, CMO.

 

A Final Note

The DonorsChoose team works toward a nation where students in every community have the resources needed for an excellent education. To do this we hire and support a diverse team of the best and the brightest talent available because it makes us more effective, high-performing, creative and resilient.

If you are passionate about our mission, highly skilled in your field, and looking for a place where you can bring all of yourself to work, we want you.