Fractional Chief Technology Officer

You can access a pdf of our RFP here.

OVERVIEW

The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) seeks a Fractional Chief Technology Officer to help the organization create a longer-term vision and plan for our client-facing technology in service of our mission and to provide thought leadership and guidance for our technology-focused staff.

SUMMARY

We are seeking a consultant to work with us in a Fractional Chief Technology Officer role of up to an average of two days per week for one year with the potential to continue. The engagement will include:

• Working with CEP’s leadership to have strategic and forward-looking discussions about how we can best use technology across our organization to further our mission and enhance efficiency
• Guiding development of a strongly articulated vision and longer-term implementation plan for our existing:
  
  • Survey creation and response-rate monitoring
  • Survey (and other) data extraction, transformation
  • Loading process that populates our proprietary client-facing Online Reporting System (ORS)
• Defining tech improvements aligned with process and product enhancements and new products
• Providing thought leadership, managerial support, and cross-team coordination for those who work directly with data process and visualization through the ORS, including forecasting team resources required and budget planning and allocation
• Helping us consider how closed system machine learning AI tools could be used to enhance our work
• Advising on adoption and integration of systems to support client experience, e.g., Learning Management System (LMS)

We are interested in testing the concept of a fractional CTO to consider whether CEP has a longer-term need for a CTO role and if so, what the appropriate FTE might be. We invite qualified individuals and firms to submit a proposal for consideration. We are open to candidates based anywhere in the United States, but travel to our Cambridge and San Francisco offices is required.

OUR DATA TRANSFORMATION AND ONLINE REPORTING SYSTEM (ORS)

CEP’s ORS allows users of our Assessment and Advisory Services and YouthTruth surveys to interact with their survey results and put them in a comparative context. The system allows users to interact with their data, see cuts of their results by different subgroups of their choosing, and benchmark their results against cohorts selected from our ever-growing dataset.

The system is populated with data from extensive online surveys after extraction from off-the-shelf online survey technology (Qualtrics) and transformation into quantitative summaries by Python (and other) scripts developed in-house and human processes.

Sample Reports Include:

• MacArthur Foundation’s Grantee Perception Report results
• William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Grantee Demographics Report
• Sample District Report
• Sample Elementary School Report
• Sample High School Report
• Sample Family Report
• Sample Staff Report
• Sample Synthesis Report

APPLICATION

We invite you or your firm to submit a proposal to us by February 14, 2024. Send your proposals to Alyse d’Amico at alysed@cep.org.

LOI Stage

Interested parties should prepare a brief proposal that describes:

• Your qualifications and experience, specifically, if applicable, with:
  
  • Nonprofits or mission-minded and/or similarly sized organizations
  • Working with homegrown solutions (as much of our current system was built “in-house”)
  • Survey-related solutions
  • Data warehousing
  • Automation, job scheduling, and distributed processing
  • Integrations among SAAS applications and API management
  • Machine learning, including but not limited to:
  • Anolmaly Detection
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Sentiment Analysis
  • Emphasizing diversity, equity, and inclusion in your approach
  • Software and coding languages including
  • Python
  • Data Build Tool
  • Apache Airflow
  • Ruby
  • SQLServer
  • PostgreSQL
  • Salesforce
  • Qualtrics
  • Amazon Web Services
• Examples or summaries of similar work conducted by the firm and references from similar projects.
• Your approach to working with a leadership team, managers, and data systems engineers

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

In an effort to better understand the diversity of our vendors, we ask that you fill out the following optional questions. This demographic information will be collected separate from application materials and identifying information and will be kept confidential. This information will not be used to make a decision about selection. If you do not have an existing process for collecting this data, please do not feel the need to create one.

SELECTION PROCESS

We will select a small group of finalists that we will invite for interviews, which would conclude in April. We will make a final selection shortly thereafter.

If you have any questions or seek additional information, please contact Alyse d’Amico at alysed@cep.org.

ORGANIZATION BACKGROUND

The Center for Effective Philanthropy is a 501(c)3 organization. CEP’s mission is to provide data, feedback, programs, and insights to help individual and institutional donors improve their effectiveness. We do this work because we believe effective donors, working collaboratively and thoughtfully, can profoundly contribute to creating a better and more just world. This mission is based on a vision of a world in which pressing social needs are more effectively addressed. It stems from a belief that improved effectiveness of philanthropic funders can have a profoundly positive impact on nonprofit organizations and the people and communities they serve.

YouthTruth, an initiative of CEP, harnesses student perceptions to help educators and education funders accelerate improvements. Through our validated survey instruments and tailored advisory services, we partner with schools, districts, states, and education funders to enhance learning for all students.

Our work is designed to help improve philanthropic impact, including research and gathering feedback from a range of constituents such as the nonprofits and people funders seek to support. That work includes: conducting rigorous research on key questions facing donors and foundation leaders; conducting surveys for foundations that help them get comparative feedback and learn from the experience of nonprofits and other stakeholders; hosting workshops and learning communities to help funders put learnings into action; bringing funders together through online and in-person programs; and our YouthTruth initiative helps funders as well as school and district leaders hear from students.

CEP has approximately 60 employees located primarily in Massachusetts and California.