Strategic Development Manager

Description

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is built on clarity, credibility, and trust: values shaped by more than a century of service.

For more than 100 years, local business leaders have come together through BBB to elevate ethical business practices, strengthen consumer trust, and help marketplaces thrive. Working with businesses across North America, BBB provides standards, education, dispute resolution, and credibility tools that support ethical growth, strengthen local economies, and help consumers make confident decisions.

Today, BBB provides marketplace intelligence on more than 6.3 million businesses including more than 380,000 BBB Accredited Businesses.

BBB.org is one of the most trusted sources of business information online, receiving more than 2.4 billion data requests each month from search engines, AI platforms, and consumers seeking reliable information about businesses and marketplace trust.

In 2025 alone, users accessed more than 226 million pages of BBB business insights. The platform maintains a Domain Authority score of 91 out of 100, placing it among the most authoritative and influential websites on the internet.

With unmatched local presence, international coordination, and more than a century of earned credibility, BBB is uniquely positioned to strengthen accountability across the modern marketplace. As trust becomes the defining currency of the digital economy, BBB is helping set the standard for how credibility is built, verified, and sustained in the AI era, and for the century ahead.

When you join the team at Better Business Bureau, you can expect a culture that is future focused, supportive, and highly collaborative. Our employees share in BBB’s vision and are passionate about the work we do. We encourage each other to embody BBB’s mission of building trust, integrity, and ethics. We value innovation, a continual learner mindset, and hard work. We make space for opportunities to recharge and cultivate deeper relationships among colleagues thanks to our Wellness Committee and Fun Patrol initiatives.

We are currently seeking a strategic, relationship-focused, and results-oriented Strategic Development Manager to join our Operations & Events team in our Burnsville, MN office. Reporting to the Vice President of Operations and Consumer Services, this role leads BBB's external relations strategy through strategic partnerships, sponsor ships, fundraising, educational programming, and community engagement initiatives that advance BBB's mission and expand organizational impact. The Strategic Development Manager cultivates relationships with stakeholders, donors, sponsors, grant funders, and community partners while developing systems, processes, and programs that strengthen BBB's visibility, influence, and long‑term financial sustainability.

• Identify, research, pursue, and manage grant opportunities, sponsor ships, donations, and other fundraising initiatives that support BBB and the BBB Institute for Marketplace Ethics
• Cultivate and strengthen relationships with donors, sponsors, funding partners, and community stakeholders to increase organizational support and revenue
• Develop, present, negotiate, and secure sponsorship, grant, partnership, and donor proposals
• Create and maintain evaluation frameworks and decision-making tools to assess sponsorship and partnership opportunities
• Develop and implement comprehensive strategies for identifying, cultivating, tracking, and managing strategic partnerships
• Build relationships with business leaders, nonprofit organizations, government entities, and community stakeholders to expand BBB's reach and impact
• Support regional outreach efforts, advisory councils, business engagement programs, and consumer education initiatives
• Represent BBB at networking events, community meetings, conferences, and stakeholder gatherings
• Collaborate across departments to maximize partnership opportunities, community visibility, and mission impact
• Develop and manage memorandums of understanding and other partnership agreements
• Lead project management for educational programming, workshops, webinars, conferences, and…