Chief Experience Officer (CXO) — Volunteer

About Mentor A Promise

Mentor A Promise (MAP) is a New York City–based nonprofit supporting children and youth ages 5–18 experiencing housing instability through mentorship, education, literacy, social-emotional learning, creative expression, career development, storytelling, and community-centered opportunity. As MAP grows, we believe excellence must be measured not only by what we deliver, but by how people experience the organization.

About the role

Mentor A Promise is seeking a strategic, empathetic, and systems-minded Chief Experience Officer (CXO) to join the Executive Team and lead MAP’s organization-wide experience strategy. The CXO will help ensure that MAP creates thoughtful, consistent, accessible, and dignity-centered experiences for the people who interact with our organization—especially students, families, volunteers, partners, community members, and prospective volunteers and applicants.

The CXO examines the complete journey people have with MAP—from their first interaction through onboarding, participation, communication, support, engagement, and continued connection. This executive works across functions—Programs, HR, Operations, Communications, Technology, and others—identifying where experiences connect, where they break down, and how MAP can make them better.

The core question the CXO continuously asks is: What is it actually like to experience Mentor A Promise? Not what our policies say should happen. Not what our systems were designed to do. But what people actually see, hear, feel, understand, and experience when they interact with us. The CXO helps close the distance between organizational intention and lived experience.

Responsibilities

• Organization-Wide Experience Strategy
  • Develop MAP’s organization-wide experience philosophy, standards, and priorities.
  • Define what an exceptional MAP experience should look and feel like across key stakeholder groups.
  • Identify moments that disproportionately influence trust, belonging, engagement, and retention.
  • Establish measurable experience objectives.
  • Bring an experience-centered perspective into organizational strategy and major initiatives.
  • Help ensure growth does not come at the expense of humanity, accessibility, or quality.
• Student & Family Experience
  • Partner with PromisePrograms and other teams to strengthen the experience of children and families.
  • Examine areas such as welcoming and orientation, communication, program accessibility, consistency, belonging, feedback, transitions, family engagement, and youth voice.
  • Help program leaders understand and continuously improve the end-to-end participant experience.
• Volunteer Experience
  • Work with PromisePeople, Operations, and division leaders to strengthen the volunteer journey from interest to application, selection, onboarding, integration, contribution, development, recognition, and transition.
  • Identify unnecessary friction, unclear expectations, communication gaps, disengagement risks, and opportunities to strengthen belonging and retention.
  • Help ensure volunteers understand why their work matters, what is expected, who supports them, how their work connects to the mission, how they can grow, and how their contributions are recognized.
• Partner & Community Experience
  • Collaborate with PromiseBridge and other teams to strengthen how external organizations experience working with MAP.
  • Help develop expectations for responsiveness, professionalism, communication, relationship management, follow-through, problem resolution, partnership onboarding, and long-term engagement.
• Journey Mapping & Experience Design
  • Map major stakeholder journeys across MAP.
  • Identify critical touchpoints, friction points, gaps, handoffs, and moments of opportunity.
  • Examine where organizational silos create confusing experiences.
  • Develop recommendations for improving processes and interactions.
  • Collaborate with functional leaders to redesign experiences rather than simply documenting problems.
  • Help establish consistent standards while allowing appropriate flexibility across programs and divisions.
• Listening & Voice-of-Experience Systems
  • Build meaningful systems for understanding what people experience, including surveys, listening sessions, interviews, focus groups, youth feedback, family feedback, volunteer feedback, partner feedback, journey reviews, and exit feedback.
  • Work with PromiseMeasure and other teams to distinguish anecdotes from patterns and translate feedback into actionable organizational learning.
  • Help MAP close the feedback loop by communicating what we heard, what we learned, and what we are changing.
• Experience, Technology & Accessibility
  • Collaborate with PromiseStack, Operations, Communications, and other teams to improve digital and administrative experiences.
  • Evaluate experiences involving websites, forms, applications, onboarding, email communications, digital platforms, program registration, information accessibility, internal workflows, and support processes.
  • Advocate for systems that are intuitive, inclusive, accessible, and designed around people rather than organizational convenience alone.
• Service Recovery
  • Help MAP develop a thoughtful approach to service recovery—how we respond when someone encounters confusion, frustration, delay, poor communication, or another negative organizational experience.
  • Help leaders establish practices that emphasize listen → understand → respond → resolve → learn → improve.
• Executive Leadership Expectations
  • Attend weekly Chiefs meetings prepared to contribute.
  • Meet regularly with the CEO to discuss priorities, challenges, progress, and opportunities.
  • Take ownership of the experience function by setting direction, solving problems, and driving measurable improvement.
  • Communicate regularly with directors and direct reports.
  • Follow through on commitments and model accountability, collaboration, sound judgment, and integrity.
  • Help recruit, develop, and retain volunteers while building a healthy, mission-driven team.
  • Collaborate across divisions rather than creating another organizational silo.
  • Keep MAP’s mission at the center of decisions, remembering that our work ultimately serves children and families experiencing housing instability.
• Build the Experience Function
  • Help design and recruit an experience team that could eventually include roles such as Director of Student & Family Experience, Director of Volunteer Experience, Experience Design Manager, Journey Mapping & Service Design Specialist, Voice of Community / Experience Research Specialist, Experience Analytics Coordinator, and Accessibility & Inclusive Experience Specialist.
  • The structure should evolve based on demonstrated organizational need rather than adding positions simply for scale.

Ideal Candidate

Strong candidates may bring senior experience in customer experience, employee or volunteer experience, service design, user experience, organizational development, hospitality, program leadership, community engagement, human-centered design, customer success, experience research, operations, or nonprofit leadership.

The strongest candidates will demonstrate:

• Exceptional empathy combined with strong operational judgment.
• Experience designing or improving complex stakeholder journeys.
• Systems thinking and the ability to translate feedback into organizational improvements.
• Strong cross-functional leadership.
• Experience building service or experience standards.
• Strong analytical and qualitative research instincts.
• Ability to influence leaders without unnecessarily assuming their authority.
• Excellent communication and facilitation skills.
• Comfort identifying organizational weaknesses constructively.
• Ability to balance consistency with individual needs.
• Commitment to accessibility, dignity, inclusion, and ethical practice.
• Strong executive judgment and accountability.

What Success Looks Like

Success means people do not need to understand MAP’s organizational chart to have a good experience with MAP. Students feel welcomed. Families understand what is happening. Volunteers know what is expected and feel connected. Partners receive timely follow-through. Applications are understandable. Onboarding prepares people to succeed. Technology reduces friction instead of creating it. Feedback reaches decision-makers. Problems become opportunities for organizational learning. And as MAP grows, the organization becomes more human—not less.

Why This Role Matters

People may forget the name of a process. They may never see our organizational chart. They may not know which division owns a particular system. But they will remember whether someone responded. Whether expectations were clear. Whether they felt welcomed. Whether we listened. Whether we respected their time. Whether we followed through. And whether our actions reflected the mission we speak about. The Chief Experience Officer helps ensure that the values MAP communicates publicly are also the values people experience personally.