Pros
The work is fun and interesting. You get to work with and for some of the best nonprofits in the sector. The people you work beside are smart, dedicated, and a lot of fun - when not overworked. The pay is better than what you get if you come from the nonprofit sector. There's an annual bonus. Since people are leaving in droves, there's plenty of room for growth!
Cons
In recent years, Jackson River has been hemorrhaging longtime staff. The reason is: Togetherwork. Jackson River merged with Togetherwork in 2018 or so. The acquisition has not gone well. Togetherwork is attempting to fundamentally change Springboard, Jackson River's digital engagement platform, into a cookie cutter platform similar to what our competitors offer. They don't understand the value proposition that Jackson River once offered: customized support for your organization, based on building deep relationships with project managers who know your organization inside and out as well as your own team does (in some cases, even better). We've added tons of clients, which is great, but not the staff to support them. Even worse, as staff members have left, they haven't always been replaced. This means we all work several times harder for many more hours, but still fall behind on our work. Our cries for more staff are met with claims that we don't have the money. Not because we're not growing, but because we're not growing at the rate at which they had expected us to grow. We suffer and our clients suffer. The lack of engineers is particularly bad. We've been experiencing outages and delays in development that NEVER used to happen before. They are getting harder to explain to clients. Most of the senior management who were trusted by staff have left and been replaced by people who range from mediocre to incompetent. Togetherwork wants every company using all the same tools, but they can't decide what those tools should be. Rather than consulting the people who would have to use the actual tools, random middle-managers who have never even met our people make decisions about what we will use. The tools invariably don't work well and they decide to switch us to something else. Then someone new from Togetherwork comes along and criticizes us for being inefficient by using multiple tools for the same purpose. Business processes change in much the same manner. Rather than being the nimble team we used to be, we're hobbled in our ability to do our work. The fun and joy that used to be an integral part of the experience at Jackson River are all but gone. I'm confident that the last joyful pieces we've clung to will be removed soon.