GiveDirectly is the first - and largest - nonprofit that lets donors like you send money directly to the world’s poorest. We believe people living in poverty deserve the dignity to choose for themselves how best to improve their lives - cash enables that choice.
The Targeting Analyst, Emergency Cash will be responsible for providing critical data analysis and insights to guide the deployment of emergency cash programs, ensuring that aid is delivered effectively and efficiently to crisis-affected populations.
What You’ll Do
Analyze Humanitarian Needs for Program Targeting
- Implement approaches for systematically assessing needs in crisis-affected populations.
- Incorporate humanitarian data sources (e.g., needs assessments, poverty statistics, vulnerability indices, displacement monitoring, etc) into GD’s targeting systems.
- Surface, test, and use novel data sources, such as from geospatial imagery, call detail records, social media, crowd-sourcing, etc.
- Provide clear targeting analysis with relevant subpopulations for emergency cash programs as a service to other teams, visualizing data on maps and dashboards.
- Based on determined targeting criteria, generate recipient lists of individuals to be enrolled in GD EC programs.
- Provide targeting analysis services for both GD’s preparedness and response states – scoping and prioritizing relevant subpopulations based on pre-existing risks and delivering on-demand analysis during response deployments (remote).
Monitor and Analyze Crisis Events
- Monitor global risks and crises, providing analysis for GD teams to make activation decisions.
- Communicate with humanitarian agencies, data providers, and crisis monitoring organizations to integrate reliable event and needs assessment data into GD’s workflow.
Systems
- Participate in product development from problem discovery and user requirements gathering to launch and iteration, working with engineering, data science, and operations.
- Conduct agile iterative experiments and pilots to validate assumptions about crisis detection and targeting, using results to refine strategy.
- Define and track success metrics for targeting tools, ensuring outputs are timely, relevant, and usable in the field.
- Maintain internal data source documentation, including a qualitative assessment of accuracy, reliability, and limitations of sources and datasets.
Drive Efficiency and Document Learning
- Continuously evaluate and improve targeting approaches for speed, accuracy, and inclusivity, while maintaining humanitarian principles.
- Stay abreast of emerging technology and new data sources to ensure GD is leveraging cutting-edge approaches to targeting.
- Document learning to scale best practices across different contexts.
Qualifications and Experience
What You’ll Bring
- Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly values and active demonstration of our core competencies: emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and fostering inclusivity.
- Experience in Analysis: 3-5+ years experience conducting humanitarian needs analysis — assessing vulnerabilities, interpreting crisis data, and applying frameworks such as the IPC, MIRA, or sectoral needs assessments — to directly inform operational planning.
- Experience in Data Tools: 2+ years of experience producing data tools, with a track record of providing actionable, humanitarian information products to decision makers and operational teams.
- Demonstrated ability to design and implement reusable analysis approaches that scale across multiple contexts.
- High technical fluency across data analytics and data science – ability to ask the right questions, internalize technical tradeoffs between approaches, and shape complex data and technical challenges into operationally viable targeting strategies.
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences, including humanitarian agencies and data providers.
- Proven ability to thrive in fast-changing, high-stakes environments.
- Ability to adapt to change and navigate ambiguity and a curiosity-driven mindset.
- Ability to balance speed and rigor in high uncertainty.
