From Bernie Sanders to Greenpeace UK, progressive organisations are using digital mobilisation to activate hundreds of thousands of campaigners and raise millions of pounds online. Forward Action believes that a digital mobilisation model - where organisations use digital channels to drive hundreds of thousands of supporters to take advocacy, fundraising and volunteering actions - can revolutionize campaigning and fundraising in the NGO sector. However, its potential is still largely untapped in the UK. We help progressive organisations build digital mobilisation programmes and, as our Marketing and Partnerships Officer, you will work to help grow the number of organisations using a digital mobilisation model to drive real-world change.

You will manage our online marketing programme, working to keep establishing Forward Action as a thought leader in digital mobilisation and finding ways to share learnings from our innovations for the rest of the sector to benefit from. You’ll run the day-to-day operations of our partnerships programme, acting as the primary point of contact for prospective partners and delivering the administrative and coordination work needed to move organisations smoothly through from first interaction to a productive partnership. And finally, you’ll have the opportunity to develop your skills in relationship building, supporting our Partnerships Director to build stakeholder buy-in on projects.

If you’re passionate about digital marketing, enjoy building relationships, are well organised and would be excited to help spread digital mobilisation across the charity sector, this job is for you.

This is a permanent role, with the freedom to work both in our London office and remotely from home, although during lockdown you will, of course, only work from home. Once lockdown is fully lifted, it’s likely you will need to be able to travel to meetings in London once or twice a week. You can work either four or five days a week. Applications close Sunday 2 August.

Who we are

Forward Action is a digital mobilisation agency for progressive causes. We help our partner organisations reach new supporters, then mobilise them to become activists and donors. We have been in the engine room of some of the most successful election and charity digital campaigns of the last few years, helping our partners add millions of new supporters to their email lists, raise more money online (from more donors) and create campaigns that have led to real-world change.

Our values are critical to us: we will only work with causes that make the world a better place. You will get to work with some of the most inspiring and impactful organisations in the sector - such as Greenpeace, Cancer Research UK, and Amnesty International - and spend your days helping win progress on everything from climate change to homelessness.

You will be working at the cutting edge of digital mobilisation. We trust in data rather than our gut instincts, so we are constantly testing and iterating in our work in order to challenge assumptions and drive better results. We are an agile, fast-moving team, and you will have the opportunity to rapidly develop and expand your skills and experience. 

One of our fundamental values is that all our work should drive real-world, measurable results. But we also believe that the greatest progressive impact we can have is to give our partner organisations the skills, knowledge and culture they need to do what we do themselves. We want to spread our skills and way of working across the progressive sector, not make our partners dependent on us. You will play a key role in this in your job.

What you’ll do as part of our team

• Manage our marketing and thought leadership work

  • Identify and apply for opportunities for Forward Action to speak at conferences and events, and occasionally speak at them yourself (if this is something you’d like to do)

  • Oversee our content calendar for our blogs and social media channels, and commission other team members to write content that shares our learnings and further establishes Forward Action as a thought leader in digital mobilisation

  • Launch and run our email programme to share results and learnings from our work

  • Organise occasional evening drinks, coffee meetings and other social events with partners (and attend them yourself)

• Run the day-to-day operation of our partnerships programme

  • Be the primary point of contact for prospective partners over email, from their first interaction with us through to the point we start work together

  • Identify and organise opportunities for our partnerships team to share advice and learnings with both current and prospective partners

  • Run our project setup process, ensuring we’re completing all the administrative setup work needed for each new project

  • Run our invoicing process, using our bookkeeping system to send out invoices for each completed project

  • Assist with quoting and, occasionally, proposal writing for smaller projects

• Develop your skills in building relationships with partners

  • Join calls with our Partnerships Director and new prospective partners to discuss how Forward Action can help them hit their goals

  • As a development opportunity in the role, you will act as the partnership owner on occasional projects, building relationships with partner stakeholders and helping our team break through process challenges or blockages during projects.

Benefits and working culture

Pro Rata Salary: £31,431 if you live inside London, £28,063 (plus £3,000 travel expense allowance) if you live outside London. We have a generous pay increase system, so every year your salary will increase in line with inflation, and if you hit your professional development goals you will also move up a pay grade. If you move up a pay grade your pay will increase by £1,123 - £1,258 pro rata depending on whether you live outside London or in London.

Contract Term: This is a permanent contract. The role can be either full time or four days a week.

Location: At home during lockdown; post-lockdown, in our Hoxton office, with the option to work remotely. Ensuring our team is open to people who live outside London and enabling staff to work flexibly are important values to us, so you’ll have the freedom to work from home regularly. Many of our meetings are held via video conferencing, but post-lockdown you will need to attend meetings with clients in London fairly regularly - once or twice a week on average.

Holiday: 25 days/year (pro rata), plus bank holidays and the week between Christmas and New Year.

Extra holiday for travelling sustainably: We’re a member of the Climate Perks scheme, so you’ll have an extra two days of holiday a year if you use them to travel by land or sea instead of taking a flight.

Maternity and Paternity/Long-term partner parental leave: For a small organisation, we’re proud to have a generous and progressive parental leave policy. Maternity leave is 12 weeks at full pay, 14 weeks at 50% pay. Paternity/Long-term partner parental leave is 6 weeks at full pay.

Working culture and hours: Our team is open, inclusive, friendly, respectful and kind. People from communities that traditionally experience discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity or immigration status; women; new parents; people with disabilities; and LGBTQ+ people are especially encouraged to apply.

We work eight hour days (including a 30 minute lunch break), with core hours of 9:30am-4:30pm. We put a lot of importance on ensuring everyone finishes on time: while there are some times when you’ll need to stay a little later to finish work, people in the team rarely work more than 45-60 minutes late. No one ever works on weekends or their holidays.

We have an exciting opportunity for a creative, strategic and enthusiastic individual who is passionate about refugees being welcomed by their local church, to join the growing Welcome Churches team. This role would be suitable for a self-motivated leader with knowledge and experience of implementing effective communications strategies in organisations.

Context of the role

Refugees and asylum seekers in the UK are a very transient people group. Often through no choice of their own, they can be required to move to a new part of the UK at very short notice. This can be very unsettling for individuals who find themselves in an unfamiliar environment with no support around them. By being connected to a local church, they are able to make local friends more quickly and find a place to belong. This is often in the church community itself and many refugees and asylum seekers enjoy strong friendships with Christians in UK churches, with many coming to faith in Jesus too.

Over the last year we have established a national Welcome Network which enables newly-arrived refugees and asylum seekers to be referred to a local church who will welcome them to the community. The Welcome Network is a key component of our charitable activities, enabling refugees to be easily connected with their local church. The Communications Officer will be responsible for raising the national profile of the Welcome Network, and also the wider work of Welcome Churches. This will mean that more churches will participate and more referrals can be made to ensure that more refugees and asylum seekers can be welcomed by their local church into community.

Applicants are required to have an active Christian faith and be passionate about the UK Church welcoming refugees into the church community.

The Communications Officer is likely to be based in Derby, but remote working will also be considered. This is a fixed-term contract for one year with the possibility of becoming permanent depending on funding.

You  will be the primary link between five local Healthwatch and the Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West Integrated Care System (BOB ICS). The postholder will promote Healthwatch activity to inform and influence the BOB ICS and contribute to the development of stakeholder engagement within the BOB ICS. 

Key responsibilities

• Represent the voice/s of Healthwatch at BOB ICS meetings.
• Act as an effective two-way channel of information between Healthwatch and BOB ICS
• Promote Healthwatch activity and reports that inform and influence the setting of and delivery of priorities of the BOB ICS.
• Contribute to the development of stakeholder engagement in BOB ICS.
• Support Healthwatch to contribute to the patient and public involvement in development and design of BOB ICS strategies and services.

The person we are looking for will have good analytical skills and the ability to produce accurate and well written reports using Microsoft Office. You will have good interpersonal skills and be willing to travel across the three counties. This is a one year fixed term contract and the role is open to negotiation including employed / secondee. The role will be mainly home based with office facilities at the Healthwatch Oxfordshire offices in Witney.

About the role 

Working to the Head of Business Development and closely with the wider Senior Management Team and the Partnerships Manager, our new Programmes Manager will support activity to take new projects and programmes from design phase into operational delivery, and to  ensure projects and programmes remain effective throughout. 

The Programmes Manager will lead on developing monitoring and reporting processes, and collating and reporting on externally funded projects and programmes in accordance with funders’ and client requirements. 

The role will work across a diverse portfolio of projects reflecting the breadth of activities delivered for and by NAVCA’s members.

Specifically, the role will be responsible for the effective delivery of a complex grant distribution programme as part of NAVCA’s work for the VCS Emergencies Partnership, as well as the management of reporting systems, monitoring and reporting for other projects and programmes related to our work as part of the Health & Wellbeing Alliance.

Projects and programmes recently delivered have included a focus on health and social care, cybersecurity, safeguarding and social investment. The post holder is not expected to be an expert in all fields of programme focus but must demonstrate the ability to grasp new ideas quickly in order to effectively support design and implementation. 

Salary:  £34,000 with 8% employer’s contribution to pension

Contracted hours:  Full time

Holiday:  25 days holiday pa pro rata (1st April to 31st March), plus Bank Holidays and three days close-down between Christmas and New Year

This role will initially be a fixed term contract to 31st March 2021, with the potential to become a permanent role in the future.

An immediate start is essential.

About you

The ideal candidate will have in-depth knowledge of project management techniques, and experience of working within a project environment to fulfil project tasks and to manage small projects. 

You will be an excellent communicator, and able to mix analytical skills and ability to work with data, with creativity and problem solving. 

You will enjoy ensuring effective delivery of complex programmes and projects through the development and management of robust systems, and you’ll be hands on with an acute attention to detail in ensuring those systems are appropriately applied.

In common with the rest of the NAVCA team, you’ll be deeply collaborative in your approach, with a flexible, agile focus on delivering meaningful outcomes for our members, our partners, our funders and ultimately the communities we serve.

We actively practice a flexible and supportive working culture; you will be contractually home based so you will need to be comfortable working remotely and without close supervision.  We will support you to work effectively in the non-office based environment of your choice, whether that be at home or in a hot desking environment.  

You should be outcomes-focused, and seeking to make the most effective use of your time and energies for the benefit of our members and the communities they serve.

You’ll need to be within easy access of our small office hub in Sheffield – probably within an hour’s travel time - with the ability to travel across the country if required.

About us

We are the only national membership body in England that specifically and solely supports place-based local VCSE infrastructure organisations across the country.  We have around 180 members who between them offer (at last estimate) around 160,000 local charities and voluntary organisations the support they need to thrive.

As the hub of this network of locally focused organisations we are heavily member focused – without our members we are nothing, and we are passionate advocates of the crucial role our members play in the ecosystem of the VCSE sector.

We are a small, highly collaborative, outcome focused and dynamic team.  Our culture is one of mutual support, and we are committed to ‘excellence, everywhere.’  We work at pace, responding to the needs of our members and to the opportunities that arise to act on their behalf – and that can mean that sometimes things can feel complex and challenging.  Sometimes we get things wrong! And we aim to learn from what doesn’t go well, and we share our learning openly and authentically.

We have a small office hub in Sheffield, but everyone on the team is contractually home based and primarily works remotely.  We gather regularly (when not in the midst of a global pandemic) to meet face to face, and we use technology to ensure high levels of communication and collaboration throughout the working week.

We are not currently a racially diverse organisation, but we are committed to making the necessary changes to ensure that Black, Asian and Minoritised Ethnic candidates and potential colleagues will feel welcomed and supported to succeed and thrive in our organisation. 

We are committed to the ‘Open to All’ campaign and do not currently require any specific qualifications for any of our roles.  We are currently reviewing all our policies through an actively anti-racist lens, and we have for the past eighteen months practised blind recruitment supported by active diversity monitoring.

How to apply

Please follow the application instructions carefully to support our blind recruitment process:

To apply for this role, we would like you to send us your CV and a short covering letter – no more than two sides of A4. 

You should remove any references to your name, email address, home address, date of birth or dates of education, but please ensure both documents are headed with  your phone number – this will be your unique identifier throughout the process (and means that we can contact you!)

Your covering letter should evidence, with examples, how you meet the core competencies described in the role profile.

You should also confirm your immediate availability for the role and your location (town or city).

When you apply you will be asked to complete an anonymised diversity monitoring survey.  We would appreciate your support in enabling us to track the diversity of our applicants as part of our commitment to improving the diversity of our organisation.

Key dates

Deadline for applications: Sunday 19th July 2020.

Shortlisting:  Monday 20th/Tuesday 21st July 2020

Interviews: Thursday 30th July 2020