Senior Manager, Media and External Affairs

Company Description

Uncommon Schools is a nonprofit network of high-performing, public charter schools providing an outstanding K-12 education in historically under-resourced communities. We have proudly built schools that reflect our student population, with more than 60% of our teachers and staff across our network identifying as a person of color. Uncommon currently manages 53 schools serving more than 20,000 students in five cities: Boston, Camden, New York City, Newark and Rochester. We are proud that Uncommon graduates persist in and graduate from college at five times the rate of their peers nationally. We achieve this by offering strong academic, co-curricular, and social-emotional learning that prepares students for success in college and beyond.

Job Description

The Senior Manager of External Affairs and Media will focus on amplifying and creating greater awareness of Uncommon Schools’ mission of educational equity nationwide. The Senior Manager supports and drives Uncommon’s cross-regional media and external affairs strategy. The Senior Manager will also support the execution of all regional social media strategies, the Uncommon Sense blog, media initiatives, family communication, and collaboration with external regional teams on impactful content. This role will have an opportunity for managerial responsibility and the ability to collaborate and learn from leaders across external functions, from marketing to advocacy. The role reports to the Senior Director of Media and Public Relations.

Media

• Manage, with oversight from the Senior Director of Media and Public Relations, the system for maintaining an editorial calendar for all external teams and a positive media tracker for every region.
• Lead the Bi-Monthly Social Media calls in NYC, Camden, Rochester, and Newark External Affairs Team members to support in creating impactful high-quality regional social media posts and story mine for news media ideas to support student enrollment and staff recruitment goals. 
• Collaborate with marketing/recruitment team on regional digital marketing campaigns. 
• Communicate weekly media updates to all key internal stakeholders.
• Coordinate and maintain story bank and track all media coverage. 
• Coordinate content development and data collection for news stories, opinion pieces, and the Uncommon Sense blog.
• Support in the coordination of news story production in schools.

Cross-Regional External Affairs and Operations 

• Manage the scope and sequence of content for cross-regional projects.
• Redesign and support the execution of monthly family newsletters to all regions.
• Manage centralized systems for family communication, including newsletters and family-facing website updates.

Advocacy Strategy & Systems Building 

• Lead project management of special initiatives like Get Out the Vote effort both internally (staff) and externally (families and communities).
• Coordinate and support the amplification of external impact work by Uncommon’s instructional teams with districts and stakeholders.

Qualifications

• BA required
• 5-6 years of directly related experience
• Experience managing at least one staff member
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills (both verbal and written)
• Excellent project management skills
• Experience with media/journalism work
• Strong prioritization skills
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Ability to quickly pivot when needed
• Microsoft Excel/PowerPoint-- ability to present basic summary data in a polished and organized presentation
• Social media strategy and analytics experience (Social media strategy and analytics experience (Sprout, Facebook/IG/LinkedIn, Google analytics)

Preferred:

• Experience implementing and handling a CRM (Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.)
• Video editing skills

Additional Information

Travel Expectations

• Up to 2 days per month between NYC, Rochester, Camden, Newark, and Boston

Compensation Philosophy

Our people are what make us uncommon. It’s important to us that our compensation practices align with our values and enhance our ability to attract and retain talent.  Our compensation philosophy is focused on equity and fairness, retaining our talented staff and valuing their expertise, and transparency and clarity.

Compensation for this position: The starting compensation for this role based in NYC is between $95,200 to $112,000 and generally, we expect that qualified candidates in this location will be made an offer between $95,200 and $100,800. The starting pay will depend on a variety of fa