Senior Manager Of Landowner Engagement, Product Implementation

About us:

The American Forest Foundation (AFF) unlocks the power of family forests as a climate solution while helping thousands of Landowners care for their land and improve forest health. Through its Family Forest Carbon Program, AFF expands access to the voluntary carbon market for family forest owners from all walks of life while producing high-quality forest carbon credits to help companies reach their net zero goals. The organization’s strategic direction seeks to enable family forests to capture and store one billion tonnes of carbon by 2050.

We do not do this alone. AFF works across a broad coalition of conservation partners, corporations, and policymakers to equip family forest owners with financial and technical support to implement sustainable forest management practices on their lands and activate their forests as a critical tool in the fight against climate change.

AFF is in a mode of complex problem-solving and rapid iteration. All teams at AFF are working to discover solutions to the planet’s most pressing climate issues through developing and iterating viable and scalable models for impact. AFF is driven by values of our shared purpose, measurable and verifiable results, and learning for continuous improvement to tackle big conservation challenges.

About the Role:

Led by the Product Implementation team, AFF is piloting new program opportunities for landowners to engage in the carbon markets. The Landowner EngagementSenior Manager is an important pillar in pilot program development and successful execution, alongside their teammates: the Program Manager and Technical Operations Manager. The Landowner Engagement Manager functions as the pilot program lead for Landowner Engagement strategy and processing improvements. In this role, the Landowner EngagementSenior Manager acts as a key liaison between AFF and new landowner audiences to develop high-trust relationships, provide responsive and thorough customer service, and contribute to meeting aggressive individual and team acreage enrollment goals.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement engagement strategies that acquire interested and eligible landowners for pilot program offer(s) at a cadence that meets target acreage needs and program processing capacity.
• Onboard and manage contracted local coordinators, ensuring that these representatives provide superior customer service to landowners and assist the pilot program(s) in achieving enrollment targets.
• Ensure smooth, consistent, and timely landowner stewardship across landowner journey stages, from initial acquisition through post-project engagement. This includes leading the landowner enrollment process – which involves ensuring parcel data is received and accurate; presenting estimates and providing guidance on FFCP contract and practice terms; compiling required material for contracts; and responding to ongoing questions and concerns in a timely manner.
• Lead pilot program design strategies that improve access and enrollment for underserved landowners.
• Establish and steward trusting relationships with external partner organizations.
• Identify opportunities to lower costs per VCU (e.g., lowering outreach costs and/or increasing enrollment conversion rates) as part of the team’s continuous push to iterate and improve upon the pilot program design and the organizational business model.
• Liaise regularly with the Business Intelligence, FFCP Account Management, and MarComms teams, to analyze, share, and capture learnings across divisions that continue to improve Landowner Engagement processes and strategies.
• Coordinate closely with the Climate Finance and Policy teams to co-develop externally shareable content for key stakeholders.

Candidate Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in sales, marketing, or natural resources management from an accredited college or university, business, or related field preferred. Three to five years of experience.
• Experience managing a portfolio of customers or clients, responding to their needs and stewarding their journey towards closing a deal
• Experience developing and successfully executing strategies and associated workplans for multi-stakeholder, multi-year projects.
• Excellent organizational skills with attention to detail and the ability to plan and problem solve effectively
• Strong initiative; a self-starter with tenacity, resilience, competitiveness, consistency, and high energy
• Comfortable with and open to learning, change, and ambiguity in a fast-paced and growing team, program, and business market
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to interact with a wide variety of constituencies, and act both independently and as part of a team
• Time management skills, with the ability to prioritize, coordinate, and manage multiple priorities
• Experience and knowledge of forest conservation, forest management, and natural resources (preferred).

Core Competencies:

• Agility – Thriving in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments by anticipating and responding to changes with swift, focused and flexible actions.
• Collaborating with Others – Working together with others in a cooperative and supportive manner to achieve shared goals.
• Ensuring Accountability – Holding yourself and others to high standards of accountability, creating an infrastructure and transparent organization culture that supports and measures personal and organizational responsibility and accountability.
• Problem Solving – Identifying problems and the solutions to them. Your contributions and leadership will be appreciated. Our staff is passionate, dedicated and good at what they do, and will be deeply grateful for your efforts to create and preserve an environment that is both fun and fair.

Leadership Competencies:

• Thinking Strategically – Seeing and synthesizing different sides of an issue, examining the full range of options and outcomes, and building intellectual frameworks to guide analysis and action.
• Leading Change – Recognizing the need for change, being open to new ideas and methods, and championing transformational change with the organization and beyond.
• Decision Making – Using critical thinking, good business sense and organizational values to make decisions involving varying levels or risk and ambiguity.
• Diversity and Inclusion – Working effectively with individuals of diverse backgrounds in a variety of work contexts.

Job Function Competencies:

• Fostering Learning and Development - Supporting others to develop and learn, recognizing their achievements, and building an organizational culture where knowledge and growth are valued and rewarded.
• Marketing Strategy - Establishing the marketing goals and objectives of the organization and identifying the strategy for achieving them.
• Customer Relationship Management - Analyzing, coordinating and supporting integrated sales, marketing and customer support functions, internal audit, internal controls, risk management, regulatory compliance and reporting.
• Marketing Research & Consumer Behavior - Collecting and analyzing relevant market and consumer data to inform and reshape the organization’s marketing strategy. Market data includes customer, company, competitor, industry and stakeholder analyses. Consumer data includes consumer behavior, attitudes, preferences, usage and perceptions.

What’s attractive to the right candidate:

• You have the unique and exciting opportunity to work with amazing colleagues, partners and landowners to help connect forest landowners with technical and financial assistance to better steward their land and achieve vital landscape-scale conservation impacts.
• Your contributions and leadership will be appreciated. Our staff is passionate, dedicated and good at what they do, and will be deeply grateful for your efforts to create and preserve an environment that is both fun and fair.
• We offer a flexible work environment that respects your life outside of work.
• Salary is commensurate with experience.
• AFF offers a comprehensive and competitive benefits package.

Contact us to apply:

We know there are great candidates who may not check all these boxes, and we also know you might bring important skills that we haven’t considered. If that applies to you, don’t hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself.

We are committed to creating a diverse work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status or any other basis protected by law.