Purpose of the Role
The Fractional VP, Product & Technology is responsible for turning LVPM’s strategic vision into a unified, customer-facing digital platform that serves as the foundation of a trusted community hub—bringing together content, audience engagement, and membership into a cohesive experience. The platform will be supported by the systems needed to power content, audience data, and fundraising.
This role owns both the audience experience and the systems behind it, with a focus on creating clear pathways from first interaction to ongoing engagement and membership. In addition to leading design and implementation, this role partners closely with leadership to bring product, technology, and audience engagement together into a cohesive operating model for how LVPM creates, distributes, and grows its content and audience. This platform is not just a distribution system—it is the infrastructure through which LVPM informs, connects, and engages the community.
Engagement Team
This is a fractional role with an initial engagement period of twelve months, focused on platform design and early implementation. The role may be extended based on progress, organizational needs, and future-state roadmap priorities.
Scope of Responsibility
A. Customer-Facing Platform
Design, build, and launch a digital platform that serves multiple audience types, including casual visitors, registered users/subscribers, and contributing members, with clear pathways for engagement and conversion.
- Experience audio, video, and written content
- Access PBS Passport as part of a seamless membership experience
- Register users (capturing first-party audience data)
- Enter structured email journeys (newsletter-first model)
- Donate and become contributing members
- Move through clear, intuitive customer journeys
- Enable community engagement and participation, creating pathways for audiences not just to consume content, but to connect, contribute, and engage with the organization
The platform should reflect LVPM’s role as a trusted community hub, balancing high-quality content with meaningful opportunities for audience interaction and connection.
Includes:
- UX design
- Registration and identity flows
- Content display and discoverability
- Integration with backend systems
Product & Marketing Partnership:
This role works closely with Marketing, Audience Engagement, and Development to align on audience journeys, email strategy, segmentation, and conversion.
Together, Product/Technology, Marketing, and Development define and continuously refine the end-to-end audience journey—ensuring the platform functions as a cohesive community hub experience, from first interaction through ongoing engagement and membership.
- Product/Technology: platform, systems, data flows, and measurement infrastructure
- Marketing: messaging, campaigns, and audience growth, and engagement
B. Backend Systems
Backend systems should support a seamless, integrated experience that enables LVPM to operate as a trusted community hub, with connected data, content, and engagement pathways.
Ensure that the platform is supported by integrated, scalable, and maintainable systems. Where platforms have already been identified (e.g., Ghost and Outpost), this role will focus on optimizing and integrating the current direction, while maintaining flexibility to introduce additional tools or enhancements that strengthen integration, data flow, and analytics over the long-term.
1. Donation/Commerce System
- Member donations
- Recurring contributions
- Payment processing
- CRM integration
2. CRM/First-Party Data
- Audience data capture
- Segmentation
- Donor tracking
- Email list integration
3. Email Marketing Platform
- Newsletter management
- Automated journeys
- Registration flows
- Reporting and engagement metrics
4. Content Management & Publishing Workflow
- CMS selection or refinement
- Content review and publishing workflows
- Role-based permissions
- Multimedia publishing workflows
C. Execution Responsibilities
1. Requirements & Design
- Collect business requirements across teams
- Translate vision into clear, practical requirements
- Design a lean, scalable system approach
- Avoid unnecessary complexity
- Ensure all product and technology decisions support the goal of building a cohesive, user-centered community hub experience
2. Technical Delivery Plan
- Create a phased implementation plan
- Define MVP vs. future-state capabilities
- Scope required resources
- Develop cost estimates aligned with a nonprofit’s reality
3. Vendor & Tool Strategy
- Recommend platforms and contractors
- Prioritize off-the-shelf solutions
- Build around an initial set of tools while allowing flexibility to add others as needed
- Evaluate total cost of ownership
4. Build & Implementation Oversight
- Lead implementation process
- Coordinate vendors and contractors
- Ensure integrations function correctly
- Monitor timeline and budget
- Manage risks
5. Internal Collaboration & Ways of Working
- Partner with Content, Marketing, Development, and PMO to align priorities, workflows, and audience engagement efforts
- Align systems with day-to-day workflows
- Establish a regular cross-functional cadence (prioritization, updates, coordination)
- Support launch communications
6. Testing & Launch
- Lead user acceptance testing (UAT)
- Resolve issues prior to launch
- Train stakeholders
- Launch on time and within budget
D. Team Structure & Role Alignment
- Fractional VP, Product & Technology: Strategy, system design, and overall direction
- Marketing/Audience Engagement (including fractional Marketing Lead): Campaign, messaging, and audience growth
- Audience Engagement Specialist: Day-to-day execution and ongoing optimization
- Technical Support (e.g., contractors): Implementation and platform support
Clear alignment across these roles is critical to ensure efficient execution and avoid overlap.
E. Operating Principles
- Avoid unnecessary platform sprawl
- Avoid overly complex solutions
- Prioritize cost-efficient, maintainable systems
- Leverage existing tools where possible
- Design systems the organization can sustain long-term
- Collaborate effectively across teams
- Provide clear updates to leadership and board stakeholders
- Design for community engagement and trust, not just content delivery
Working Approach:
Maintain a consistent on-site presence (recommended ~2 days/week during key phases) to support alignment and speed of decision-making.
Architecture should be:
- Lean
- Integrated
- Affordable
- Maintainable
- Expandable over time
The goal is cohesion and sustainability - not complexity.
F. 90-Day Focus
- Finalize platform requirements
- Design system architecture
- Recommend system stack
- Define MVP scope
- Establish a clear roadmap, timeline, and cost estimates
- Align teams on roles and responsibilities
- Establish cross-functional workflows and ways of working
- Ensure coordination across Product, Content, Marketing, and PMO to support an integrated, audience-first operating model
G. Success Metrics
This role is responsible for defining and operationalizing key performance indicators (KPIs) across the full audience journey, in partnership with Marketing and Development, to ensure audience growth, engagement, and conversion can be consistently measured and improved over time.
- Live, functioning customer-facing digital platform
- Working registration and data capture flows
- Clear and effective donation/member journeys
- Integrated backend systems
- Reduced system fragmentation
- Delivery on time and within budget
- Growth in registered users and newsletters subscribers
- Increased newsletter engagement (open rates, click-through, retention)
- Improved conversion from audience to members and donors
- Growth in meaningful audience engagement that reflects the platform’s role as a community hub (repeat usage, cross-platform interaction, participation behaviors)
4. Decision Ownership
This role owns platform and system design decisions, working in close partnership with Content, Marketing, and leadership to ensure alignment across audience experience, content, and business goals—while reinforcing LVPM’s position as a trusted community hub.
