Senior Development Officer, Major Gifts

The Canadian Opera Company is now accepting applications for the position of Senior Development Officer, Major Gifts
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Are you the fundraiser donors call before they’ve made their first gift? Someone who can walk into a room of strangers and leave with a relationship?

The COC is looking for a Senior Development Officer, Major Gifts: a fundraiser whose core skill is finding and closing donors who don’t yet exist in our database. This is not a portfolio management role. It is a role for a natural relationship‑starter, someone who builds a pipeline from zero, brings new believers to the opera, and turns first conversations into transformational commitments.

Reporting to the Director, Major Gifts, this new role will be one of the most senior individual contributor roles on the frontline fundraising team. The primary mandate is new donor acquisition: identifying, cultivating, and closing high‑capacity individuals who are entirely new to the COC, expanding our donor base rather than simply deepening it. Alongside this acquisition focus, the role carries a smaller portfolio of existing high‑capacity major gift donors and provides day to day management and mentorship to a Major Gift Officer, making it a hybrid of senior new business fundraiser and emerging people leader.

This is the right role for a fundraiser with deep enough industry experience and network fluency to open doors entirely on their own, no warm introduction required, and enough leadership maturity to develop another gift officer’s craft while building their own new donor pipeline.

You will join a team that is building something: a more financially resilient, audience‑engaged Canadian Opera Company, ambitious about its artistic future and serious about the culture we build along the way. Our values call for a workplace where diverse voices flourish, and this role sits at the center of that growth, expanding who calls the COC home.

The accountabilities include, but are not limited to:

• Identify, cultivate, and solicit prospective donors who are new to the COC, drawing on independent networks, sector relationships, and prospect research to build a pipeline beyond the organization’s existing base.
• Design cultivation strategies suited to donors unfamiliar with the COC, introducing them to the organization’s artistic mission through site visits, performances, and meaningful early touchpoints.
• Represent the COC in philanthropic, corporate, and social circles to build the organization’s visibility among prospective new major donors.
• Partner with the Discovery function to convert qualified prospects into active, personally managed relationships.
• Manage a portfolio of major gift donors and prospects capable of significant contributions, leading the full donor cycle from cultivation through stewardship.
• Develop individualized cultivation and solicitation strategies for complex, multistage major gift relationships.
• Facilitate donor engagement through site visits, artistic introductions, and hosting at performances, connecting donors to the organization as a whole rather than to a single relationship holder.
• Prepare compelling proposals, briefing materials, and stewardship communications tailored to donor interests and giving capacity.
• Introduce blended giving conversations, combining cash with a bequest or other planned gift component, where appropriate within the portfolio, partnering with the Director, Major Gifts, who leads the Encore Legacy Society and owns the planned giving program.

• Provide day to day management, coaching, and portfolio guidance to the Development Officer, supporting their growth as a frontline fundraiser.
• Demon…