NextGEN Greenville
Director of Engagement
Greenville, SC
·
Full time
Company website
Fair warning: you will get wet on this ride! We believe community building is a contact sport. It happens over lunch, in coffee shops, and backstage after the panel, not in the comment section of a LinkedIn post. Got something to say? Bring it up over coffee. That's kind of the whole job. Think events are someone else's job? Here, they're how our mission shows up in the real world. You don't need to be an event planner, but you do need to be ready to jump in and help lead the effort. Still with us? Good. So, if you'd rather shake hands than talk about it, if you get fired up when one coffee meeting turns into three connection requests, and if you're not afraid to zig when everyone else zags, keep reading.
About NextGEN Greenville
What's NextGEN?
We get this question a lot. NextGEN is a Greenville-based nonprofit that helps high-growth founders start, scale and stick in the Upstate. We run mentor programs, Growth Labs, Founders Forum, Innovation Exchange and the NEXT Venture Summit, and we help steward #StartupGVL alongside the two dozen organizations that make this ecosystem work.
Our vision: A robust ecosystem that provides entrepreneurs with the resources they need to launch and scale a business in a place they love to live.
Our mission: To grow the entrepreneur community.
Our values: We believe in knowledge—that learning opens doors to opportunity.
We believe in connection—that nobody succeeds alone.
We believe in innovation—that entrepreneurship fosters prosperity.
Learn more at nextgengvl.org and startupgvl.com.
Description
What you'll own
Ecosystem engagement (about 80%)
● Know the founders. Get to know the ones who are out there doing the work, especially the ones too busy to show up to everything. Listen first. Learn where they're stuck and what they actually need, then get them in front of the right people, whether that's a program, a mentor or a partner down the street.
● Watch the water. Be the lifeguard on the pool deck, eyes on the water and quick to spot who's struggling. Know what's working and what's not, what's needed and what's in excess, where the gaps and overlaps are, where founders get stuck and where they thrive, and at what stage they enter the ecosystem or drop out. Then bring it back to the team so it shapes what we do next.
● Fill the right seats. Fill our programs with the right founders, not just the available ones. Help shape what we offer around what founders actually need.
● Connect the nodes. Be NextGEN's day-to-day connection to the nodes that make up StartupGVL. Help run our monthly convening of entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs), spot gaps and duplication, and make our partners look good.
● Own the Summit. Lead NEXT Venture Summit, our signature event, with the Executive Director as your coach. Keep it the best-run event in the state. Then go further: be the person who says, "that part is getting stale; we should try this instead."
Marketing (about 20%)
● Lead the execution. How do we show up to the rest of the world? That looks like digital (social media and websites) as well as traditional media and word of mouth. Our impact report is also your baby and helps put into narrative and numerical form what we did during the past 365 days. P.S. You’ll have a direct report to help you!
● Find the stories. Turn what you hear in the field into founder wins, ecosystem moments and the reasons NextGEN matters.
● Bring the spark. Take a half-formed idea, often from our own team, and turn it into a concept worth executing. Be the editor, too. When a draft lands in front of you, know what's working, what isn't and how to fix it.
● Keep the record. Capture what you learn in our CRM. Relationships only scale when they're written down, and our impact report depends on it.
● Guard the voice. Keep everything sounding/looking like us.
Other duties as assigned (yes, really)
We're a small nonprofit, so we all flow to the work. Whether that's moving tables, ordering lunch or covering a panel when someone's out sick. We all pitch in: everyone is a fundraiser, everyone posts on social media and everyone is an ambassador of the NextGEN brand.
Qualifications
What we can’t teach
● Curiosity about people, and about what makes a founder tick
● Style, meaning you know good from fine and can explain the difference
● Initiative, the habit of fixing things nobody asked you to fix
● Comfort out in the world, at lunch, over coffee or across the room at an event
● Coachability, plus enough backbone to push back when an idea isn't landing
The résumé stuff
● 5+ years in marketing, communications, community building or another relationship-driven role
● Experience around startups or an entrepreneur ecosystem is a plus, not a requirement
● Comfortable with a CRM (HubSpot or similar) and Google Workspace
● Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience; book smarts and street smarts both count
How we'll know it's working
A year in, here's what we hope to see:
● More of the right founders are engaged. It’s not just filling seats. A growing share of the founders we work with are generating revenue, hiring talent or raising capital and our program cohorts need to look like the founders those programs were built for.
● Founders come back and bring friends. Repeat engagement and referrals from founders themselves.
● Our peers want to work with us. ESOs continue to see NextGEN as a convener, not a competitor.
● Next Venture Summit stays on top. Still the best-run event in the state, with at least one fresh idea that came from you.
● Our marketing sounds unmistakably like us, and our coordinator is better at the job than a year ago.
● The record is solid. The CRM is complete enough that our impact report almost writes itself.