VP, Strategy & Insights (Evergreen)

Interested in joining Blue State's Strategy team? Submit your application here to ensure you're first in line for future opportunities. Please note: this is an "evergreen" job post (i.e. not an active job post), but your expression of interest matters to us. While interviews aren't ongoing, we're excited to connect with talented individuals who share our commitment to Blue State's mission. 

If you came across this job via LinkedIn, please note that it is an evergreen role; Linked In does not differentiate, but we prefer to.

What to know

We’re looking for a seasoned leader with a record of success in developing the strategy that underpins brand engagement programs, supporter experience, and creative development. You’ll uncover rich audience insights, develop frameworks, and craft strategies that help solve the world’s biggest challenges and drive positive progress in society, working across a diverse range of clients and topics. From leading the research and strategy development for a new climate change campaign, to getting involved in rapid ideation about how to respond to a humanitarian emergency, to helping brands formulate strategies and bring insights to their efforts to be more purpose-led, the work of a strategy lead at Blue State is diverse, stimulating and impactful. 

You’ll be a critical leadership voice on a team of multi-disciplinary colleagues including creative directors, communications strategists, analysts, technologists, and account directors.

We’re looking for an analytical and collaborative individual who can inspire, mentor, and train people across the agency and evolve our Strategy practice. You’ll work closely with senior business leads to grow our client portfolio and strengthen our existing partnerships. 

To see some of our work in practice, check out our work with Amnesty International, ONE.org, Ford, Oxfam International, and ProsperUS.

The company

Blue State is a purpose-driven agency. We partner with leading causes, brands, and campaigns and create real change. From Google and UNICEF to Amnesty International and Oxfam, we transform how brands and causes raise money, influence policy, build platforms, and grow communities of supporters. Led by the most creative and analytical minds from the political, nonprofit, and brand worlds, Blue State is a part of WPP Digital and has 150+ employees in the US and London.

A day in the life

Our briefs are always different and that makes the work interesting and exciting. But you can expect the role to involve a mix of the following:

• Leading research, discovery, and insight development processes that drive decisions around creative, messaging, and campaign design.
• Partnering with business development, account, and creative teams to determine the right research methodology and strategic approach to a given client challenge and working collaboratively with other internal or external teams to make sure together we produce strategies and recommendations informed by data and research.
• Conducting or supporting the team with primary research (interviews, surveys, focus groups, creative testing) as well as secondary (desk research, landscape and trend analysis, using audience intelligence tools, social listening).
• Translating the findings into insights that are both inspiring and actionable, including a core strategic proposition, audience definition and prioritization, and clearly articulated objectives and KPIs. 
• Overseeing or delivering traditional business and marketing frameworks like SWOTs, personas, user journeys, gap analyses, landscape research, creative briefs, etc. 
• Identifying trends and opportunities to innovate our research methodologies to meet emerging needs, experimenting with new approaches or tools to push our insights practice forward, and training other team members.
• Facilitating and participating in brainstorming sessions, client presentations, workshops and overall project delivery.
• Growing and managing client portfolio through regular account planning activities, and creating client roadmaps over months and years where appropriate.
• Crafting and pitching new business as well as representing Blue State via event participation and other thought le