Advancement Functional Consultant - United States Remote

About Ellucian

Ellucian powers innovation for higher education, partnering with approximately 3,000 customers across 50 countries, serving more than 21 million students. Ellucian's AI-powered platform, trained on the richest dataset available in higher education, drives efficiency, personalized experiences, and strengthened engagement for all students, faculty and staff. Fueled by decades of experience with a singular focus on the unique needs of learning institutions, the Ellucian platform features best-in-class SaaS capabilities and delivers insights needed now and into the future. These solutions and services span the entire student lifecycle, including data-rich tools for student recruitment, enrollment, and retention to workforce analytics, fundraising, and alumni engagement. Ellucian's innovative solutions, vast ecosystem of partners and user community of more than 45,000 provides best practices leading to greater institutional success and achieving better student outcomes.

About the Opportunity

Join Ellucian's Professional Services team as an Advancement Functional Consultant, partnering with higher education institutions to transform how they manage fundraising, constituent relationships, alumni engagement, and advancement operations. In this customer-facing role, you will guide institutions through discovery, solution design, configuration, testing, training, and deployment of Ellucian Advancement solutions, helping customers adopt effective practices and realize lasting value from their technology investment.

This is a consulting role for a professional who can independently lead functional conversations, translate complex advancement needs into practical solutions, and you will serve as a trusted functional advisor, guiding institutions through discovery. You will collaborate with project managers, technical consultants, product teams, and other cross-functional partners to deliver successful implementations and strengthen Ellucian's advancement consulting practices.

Where You Will Make an Impact

• Serve as a trusted functional advisor to higher education customers, helping them align advancement strategy, business processes, and technology across fundraising, philanthropy, alumni relations and engagement, constituent management, communications, and related operations.
• Lead discovery sessions and functional workshops to understand current-state processes, identify business requirements, uncover opportunities for improvement, and define future-state solutions.
• Translate customer requirements into effective Ellucian Advancement configurations and functional solution designs that reflect product capabilities, implementation scope, and recommended practices.
• Advise customers on process improvements that strengthen operational efficiency, data quality, user experience, reporting readiness, and solution adoption.
• Configure, validate, and demonstrate Ellucian Advancement functionality; guide customers through design decisions and clearly communicate options, tradeoffs, and recommendations.
• Deliver engaging instructor-led and virtual training for functional, administrative, and technical audiences, enabling customers to confidently use and administer their solution.
• Troubleshoot complex functional and integration-related issues by evaluating business processes, system configuration, data, and system behavior; identify root causes and recommend appropriate solutions.
• Lead or contribute to data mapping, conversion and migration validation, functional testing, user acceptance testing, deployment, go-live, and post-deployment stabilization activities.
• Manage assigned consulting deliverables, milestones, dependencies, risks, and status using Smartsheet or similar project management tools, proactively communicating issues that may affect scope, schedule, or customer outcomes.
• Collaborate with project managers, technical consultants, product teams, and other cross-functional partners to coordinate delivery and resolve implementation challenges.
• Document functional requirements, solution decisions, configurations, testing outcomes, and customer-facing recommendations in a clear and reusable manner.
• Contribute customer feedback, lessons learned, reusable assets, and recommended practices that improve Professional Services delivery, team capability, and the overall customer experience.
• Mentor or provide functional guidance to less-experienced team members when appropriate, sharing advancement domain knowledge and consulting practices across the team.

What You Will Bring

• Experience in advancement or related functions, with demonstrated expertise across multiple areas such as fundraising, alumni relations, advancement services, constituent management, gift and pledge processing, campaigns and appeals, prospect or moves management, alumni engagement, constituent data management, communications, or reporting.
• Strong understanding of advancement business processes and the ability to connect institutional goals with functional technology solutions.
• Ability to translate complex business requirements into functional configurations, workflows, recommendations, and clearly documented solution decisions.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including experience diagnosing functional issues across business processes, configuration, data, and integrations.
• Strong facilitation, presentation, and consultative communication skills, with the ability to guide discussions, manage differing perspectives, and explain complex concepts to functional, administrative, executive, and technical audiences.
• Experience delivering training, demonstrations, workshops, or knowledge-transfer sessions in instructor-led or virtual environments.
• Strong organizational and consulting delivery skills, including the ability to manage multiple workstreams and deliverables, prioritize competing deadlines, identify risks, and operate effectively with a high degree of autonomy.
• Ability to build credibility and strong customer relationships while balancing customer needs, product capabilities, implementation scope, and project objectives.
• Experience working collaboratively across functional and technical teams in a primarily remote environment.
• Willingness to travel up to 25% to support customer implementations, workshops, and training.

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience leading discovery, requirements-gathering, process-design, or solution-design discussions and translating outcomes into actionable recommendations.
• Experience with CRM Advance or other advancement products and solutions.
• Experience implementing, administering, or consulting on advancement CRM or constituent relationship management platforms.
• Experience with data conversion, migration validation, reconciliation, functional testing, and user acceptance testing.
• Experience with Smartsheet, Microsoft Excel, or comparable project tracking, analysis, and documentation tools.
• Experience mentoring colleagues, developing reusable consulting assets, or contributing to implementation methodology and delivery practice improvements.

What makes #Ellucianlife

• Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision  
• Flexible time off  
• Thrive Flex Lifestyle Account (LSA) that allows you to contribute towards your health, financial or learning interests
• 401k w/ match & BrightPlan - to help you save for the future
• Parental Leave
• 5 charitable days to support the community that supports us
• Telemedicine
• Wellness
  • Headspace Care (mental health)
  • Wellbeats (virtual fitness classes)
• RethinkCare & Wellthy– caregiver support
• Diversity and inclusion programs which provide access to internal employee resource groups  
• Employee referral bonuses to encourage the addition of great new people to the team
• We Foster a learning culture with:
  o Education Assistance Program
  o Professional development opportunities
  o LinkedIn Learning

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