Nonprofit Accelerator Internship

Job Summary

The Nonprofit Accelerator Internship offers a unique opportunity for motivated individuals to support the growth and effectiveness of nonprofit organizations. Interns will gain hands-on experience by working across multiple core functions essential to organizational success, with a focus on enhancing outcomes and impact. This paid internship is designed for those interested in nonprofit development, organizational management, and social impact, providing valuable insights into how effective organizations operate and grow.

Background

UI Charitable helps financial advisors and their clients give more impactfully. We work with ~1,300 families and ~400 financial advisors, and we manage $500+ million in charitable assets. More importantly, we have moved over $350 million out the door to nonprofits and impact investments working to improve the world's most pressing social and environmental issues.

Why We Think This Work Matters Now

Two forces are about to reshape philanthropy. The AI boom is creating a new generation of wealth, and the founders and employees holding that ownership are deciding how to structure their giving. Most of them will want to move money out faster than the sector can absorb it. Over the same period, as much as $124 trillion will change hands through 2048, with an anticipated $18 trillion of it going to charity. We are building the infrastructure to turn that money into real improvements in people's lives.

The Problem You Will Work on For This Internship

donors . Plenty of funded organizations will never solve the problem they exist to solve, and money alone will not fix that. Most attempts to address this try to change donor behavior, including several of our own. So we are working on the organizations instead.

What We Are Building

Eight years of building the infrastructure gives us a direct relationship with thousands of nonprofits our donors already fund. We want to help them become more effective. The closest analogy is a business accelerator for nonprofits, or a private equity operating team. We assess an organization across the core functions of a well-run business, run it through a cohort based program, and reassess later to see what moved. So far we have a literature review, a survey of 150 nonprofits, an analysis of our own data, and some first drafts of our curriculum and a way we will measure the success of the program. We will judge the program by whether those organizations actually improve, not by how many attend.

The Eight Functions

We want all organizations our donors give to, to have a sound understanding of their outcomes and impact. But in order to do that, you have to be running an effective/efficient organization. We are organizing the program around the functions that separate organizations that grow from organizations that stall. Each intern will own work across multiple of these functions.

• Fundraising and the growth engine. Treating donor development as a sales pipeline with stages, conversion rates, and follow-up. (Sales, Marketing, and Branding)
• AI adoption and operations. Where AI can take real work off a five-person staff.
• Marketing and branding. Making the case for support to people who have never heard of the organization.
• Board development and governance. What effective boards do, and how to get a board to do it.
• Program measurement and evaluation. Outputs, outcomes, and impact, and how small organizations can measure honestly without a research budget. (Public Health, Statistics, etc.)
• Finance, accounting, and internal controls. Who approves spending, who reconciles accounts, and what gets outsourced.
• Technology and data systems. CRM, donor records, and reporting that does not live in the executive director’s head.
• Talent and leadership capacity. Hiring, retention, and how a small team allocates the hours it has.

Position Overview

We are hiring two interns to help run a year-long pilot. You will work directly with Gary McHardy **(**a Rhodes Scholar based in South Africa) and Tanner Mills (Sr. Associate at UI Charitable). The team is small and the program is new, which means you will own real pieces of the work rather than support someone else’s. You will interview nonprofit CEOs, build the assessment instruments, write and deliver curriculum, and sit in on calls with the senior advisors guiding the program.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Design the curriculum. Build the workshop content, templates, and tools for your assigned functions, covering what the best organizations do and how a five-person staff can actually do it.
• Deliver it. Run webinars, cohort sessions, and office hours. You will be the one teaching, not just organizing.
• Drive results at the organizations. Work directly with participating nonprofits to implement what the curriculum covers. The goal is a CRM that exists, a pipeline that gets worked, a board that shows up.
• Interview nonprofit leaders. Run discovery calls, take structured notes, and turn what you hear into changes to the program.
• Analyze the data. Segment organizations by size, growth trend, and reported need using assessment results and public financials.
• Measure our own results and make adjustments. Track baseline and follow-up scores and report the delta honestly, including where we did not move the needle.

The above list is not exhaustive; additional tasks will for sure be assigned as necessary.

Required Skills/Abilities:

• Communication Skills: Strong written and verbal communication. You will be talking with nonprofit executives and delivering material they will read.
• Analytical Skills: Able to work with survey and financial data, draw conclusions, and present findings clearly and concisely.
• Project Management Skills: Able to handle several workstreams at once, prioritize, and hit deadlines without being chased.
• Comfort with Ambiguity: This program does not exist yet. You should be comfortable proposing an approach, testing it, and changing it when it fails.
• Team Coordination: Work very well with other people as a high output team. Deliver on what you’re responsible for
• AI Fluency: Regular use of AI tools for research, drafting, and analysis, with the judgment to check the output.
• Problem-Solving Skills: The ability to break a large, vague problem into pieces someone can actually work on.
• Humility and a Desire to Learn: A strong interest in understanding UI Charitable’s tools and programs and their role in achieving social impact.
• Integrity: Keep commitments, admit mistakes, maintain confidentiality where appropriate, and act in the organization’s best interests at all times.

Education and Experience:

• Currently pursuing or recently completed a bachelor’s degree. Business, economics, statistics, public health, public policy, marketing, computer science and communications backgrounds all fit.
• Coursework, work experience, or genuine interest in at least one of the eight functions listed above. Tell us which one or two in your application.
• Proficiency with spreadsheets, survey tools, and standard office applications.
• Prior nonprofit experience is welcome but not required.

Physical Requirements:

• Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer. The expectation is that candidates would be able to commit 20 hours per week, in person.

How to Apply

Email Tanner at [email protected] with your resume and a short note, under 250 words. Tell us which of the eight functions you would most want to own, why you want to work on this, and about anything you have produced, built, sold, raised, or automated.

Pay: $15.00 - $23.00 per hour

Expected hours: 20.0 per week

Work Location: In person