The Job

Shadowserver’s Alliance Director

What is Shadowserver

The Shadowserver Foundation is a unique public benefit, nonprofit security organization working altruistically behind the scenes globally to make the Internet more secure for everyone.

We collect vast amounts of threat data, send tens of thousands of free daily remediation reports, and cultivate strong reciprocal relationships with network providers, national governments, and law enforcement. We bring malicious activities and abusable vulnerabilities out of the shadows, expedite their remediation, and help to better secure the Internet. We give network owners and CSIRTs (Computer Security Incident Response Teams) the vantage point to understand the big picture of what’s happening on the networks they’re responsible for. We work with business and tech firms, financial institutions and academia, to improve network security, enhance product capability, and advanced threat research. We partner with law enforcement to help protect victims, take down global cybercrime infrastructures and prevent attacks before they occur.

Position Overview

The Shadowserver Foundation is seeking a new full-time employee team member who will focus on Shadowserver’s constituents and fundraising. These constituents leverage Shadowserver’s public benefit services to collaboratively protect their network, their customers, and the whole Internet. The Shadowserver Alliance Director will be very interactive with all of our constituents, providing them with briefings on the latest service updates, ensuring they are configured to maximize their benefits from Shadowserver, and exploring new ways they can support Shadowserver’s mission.

The Alliance model will be one of the foundations of Shadowserver’s future success and sustainability. The Alliance Director will be a core shaper and enabler of that activity from the beginning. This will be international, challenging, satisfying, and interesting work, reporting directly to the CEO.

What is the Shadowserver Alliance

Shadowserver’s public benefit services have always been funded by sponsorships, grants, and charitable donations from organizations that understand the benefit of an open, secure Internet for all. These range from philanthropists to big businesses, from government bodies to individual donors who appreciate our altruistic mission and want to be part of it.

To enable Shadowserver’s operations to continue to grow and successfully serve a global audience in a long term long-term sustainable way, we need to ensure an expansion and diversification of funding sources. To support this, Shadowserver is entering an exciting new phase during 2021/2022 and moving to a new Alliance-based funding model.

The goal is to achieve a much broader spectrum of consistent financial support and grow our fundraising efforts beyond our current benefactors and constituents, while still remaining stubbornly non-profit. While doing so, we will not compromise on our trusted, proven track record for free public benefit services. This transition will require moving beyond dealing directly with operational security practitioners and instead of engaging with a much wider range of potential funding sources – at different management levels within those organizations. Many of these may be new to Shadowserver and our services, rather than our traditional core constituents. This will require different approaches in our outreach, awareness, and fundraising activities.

Location: Remote working with organizations and individuals all over the world.

Roles & Responsibilities:

The successful applicant will develop and lead the Foundation’s new Alliance activity, including:

• Facilitating Shadowserver’s Constituent & new Alliance Support. The Alliance Director would facilitate the current constituent support model and clear the path for the new Alliance support model. The current constituent support model is a combination of donation and Voluntary Invoicing.
  • Helping to develop and evolve the Shadowserver Alliance
  • Producing and maintaining the materials needed to support successful fundraising outcomes and low friction membership processes
  • Interact positively with constituents to complete all Alliance on boarding processes, annual invoicing, and Shadowserver integration processes.
  • Effectively identifying and prioritizing potential fundraising prospects
  • Converting fundraising prospects into engaged, long term Alliance members
  • Ensuring Shadowserver’s Alliance funding needs are sustainably achieved year on year
  • Assist with grant writing efforts

• Constituent and community relations Working with the Shadowserver Team & Volunteers, this role would facilitate briefing sessions for the constituents. Shadowserver’s public benefit services require periodic reviews and updates to ensure all parties continue to see the benefit in receiving and supporting those services.
  • Establishing initial contacts and providing compelling briefings on Shadowserver’s public benefit mission and the benefits of supporting the Shadowserver Alliance
  • Developing and maintaining meaningful relationships with our expanding constituent support base, and provide an effective feedback channel
  • Scheduling regular constituent communications
  • Helping the wider team to engage, energize and coordinate Shadowserver’s community and PR activities and improve our constituent engagement
• Team Facilitator for Public Communications. Shadowserver’s work quietly but effectively pushes back against many online threats. The benefits of much of that work need to be communicated to constituents and the public.
  • Work with the Shadowserver Team to craft appropriate messaging that will be communicated to Shadowserver’s constituent, alliance members, and the public.
  • Document and communicate new services or share insights into new development
• Investing in Shadowserver’s Volunteer Community. Shadowserver’s security impact success is directly linked to volunteers who clear the path, assist, collaborate, code and do various functions that lead to fulfilling the “protecting the Internet” mission. Facilitate regular team updates and host periodic calls between the volunteers and the Shadowserver team
  • Encourage volunteers to blog/social media post Shadowserver activities
  • Tap into the experience, talent, and connections offered by the Shadowserver volunteers.
  • Arranging community events, which may require international travel (post COVID).

Key Traits:

• Successful Fundraiser – A proven track record in fundraising, preferably in the non-profit sector. A history of finding the right contact and pitching to them as well as working parts of larger teams in developing bids for international projects.

• Maintain Confidentiality – Much of Shadowserver’s work is confidential. All Shadowerver’s staff are required to carefully and mindfully maintain the mixed confidentiality requirements needed by different governments, industry partners, and law enforcement organizations. 

• Proactive Communicator – It is expected that the successful applicant for this role will get up in the morning and start communicating. They’ll need the ability to communicate complex issues to broad audiences.

• Communicating with a Global and Empowering Mindset. English is the primary language used in Shadowserver. Shadowserver’s constituents and Alliance members are all over the world, in many time zones, in many different fields, with many different flavors of communication, and many different biases. Success in this role requires someone who can be mindful of all these communications hurdles, seeking empathy and skills to engage with the many with humility and dignity.

We require someone extraordinary – someone who wants to ensure that Shadowserver’s established public benefit mission continues in the way we believe is right for the Foundation and through that, the Internet and all of its users.

The Alliance Director needs to be a self-starter able to set goals and achieve them, but also work closely with the broader team. Shadowserver has a core team of full-time employees internationally, as well as a broad and experienced volunteer community who work with the Shadowserver team. Working, investing, and interacting with these Shadowserver volunteers would be one of the “force-multiplying” success paths.

Ultimately the successful candidate will need to be personally invested in the Shadowserver Alliance and keen to do something more than simply make a profit for corporate shareholders (whilst we do not object to profit-making, that is simply not what motivates us as a successful NPO).

How to Apply

Send email to hiring@shadowserver.org