Senior Program (Business) Development Advisor

AWARDS MANAGEMENT UNIT

Established in 2015, the Awards Management Unit (AMU) is a global unit spanning New York, Washington DC, London, Berlin, Bonn, Geneva, Nairobi and Amman. It has responsibility for identifying, securing and managing all funding from statutory donors, and was designed as an end-to-end business process owner and support structure for IRC’s grant lifecycle. The Unit is organized into five teams, called ‘pillars’: Strategic Partnerships & Analytics; Program & Grants Support; Compliance & Policy; Business/Program Development; and Training & Curriculum Development.

The Global AMU is a bridge between donors and country programs: providing expert technical advice to country programs, while maintaining portfolio-level visibility to ensure consistency and compliance, and manage risk. This unit ensures that donor compliance policies and procedures are implemented consistently, and supports all staff working across the grants management cycle for all restricted funding from global government sources. The unit operates within a matrix management system across the teams in the US, Germany, the UK and based in our global programs, driving functional integration between all relevant units and staff.

The Purpose of the Role

The Senior Business Development Advisor will lead IRC’s new business development efforts by engaging with global, regional, country, and technical staff throughout the business development cycle from opportunity tracking and capture planning to proposal development, and submission. The SBDA will primarily serve as proposal manager, s/he will also offer technical assistance and mentor staff working on proposals on relevant business development topics. The ideal candidate will have a successful track record of leading large-scale and complex new business efforts in international development with particular emphasis on USG (USAID, CDC, and MCC) and/or FCDO and European donors.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Manage proposals from solicitation release to submission ensuring compliance with donor rules and IRC’s business development processes and practices.

• Lead proposal development in response to requests for proposals, including those for field-based projects and large global opportunities. This will involve management of proposal teams, calendars, and deadlines; strategy development with technical staff; partner identification and negotiations; recruiting; writing; production; and after-action reviews

• Manage relationships with proposal partners and liaises with IRC’s Recruitment department to secure key personnel.

• Collaborates with IRC’s pricing team, ensuring technical vs. budget consistency.

• Manage capture from opportunity identification to solicitation release including developing capture plan and coordinating the capture team to complete milestones.

• Lead on advising other IRC departments when required on donor (e.g. USG, FCDO, EU, etc.) contract terms and implication for structuring proposal budgets, targets, and deliverables.

• Build and strengthen relationships with internal stakeholders (HQ-based regional and technical units, as well as IRC country offices) as well as with donor representatives, partners and other relevant stakeholders.

• Contribute to, and model the use of standardized business development processes, tools, templates and information.