Senior Director, Marketing & Communications

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 Sr. Director leads the Uncommon Schools marketing and communications function spanning the network and home office. To enable our mission, this leader sets the vision and strategy to build a unified Uncommon brand, in close collaboration with the Chief External Officer (CExO), and owns critical cross-functional efforts, including marketing execution for student enrollment and staff recruitment, external and internal communications, and impact work. This high-visibility position leads a team of marketing and communications experts and requires a meaningful degree of collaboration across a wide range of internal and external collaborators. The role requires a seasoned marketing professional with expertise in performance marketing, branding and communications, and reports to the CExO on Uncommon’s Executive Team.

Responsibilities

Development of Brand Strategy

• Lead development and implementation of organization-wide brand strategy, in close partnership with the CExO, to build the brand among target audiences.
• Elevate the Uncommon brand, as well as the marketing function, through thought leadership, both internally and externally.
• Increase brand awareness, relevance and loyalty and ensure cohesion across the central office, regions and schools through strategic brand framework and compelling storytelling.

Core Functional Work

• Strong data and analytics focus to understand target audience insights, drivers of choice, and effectiveness and efficiency of marketing activities, in order to provide ongoing updates on brand health for key partners.
• Harness the power of Uncommon Schools brand and enable consistency across owned, paid, earned, influence and social media channels:
• Deploy strategy for owned media – website/intranet, social media, schools’ physical environments (e.g., signage, environments).
• Collaborate with Chief Media Officer and External Affairs on earned, influence and social media, and empower regional teams to build brand through organic social media.
• Lead all aspects of content and deployment of communications hierarchy on Uncommon’s websites and on internal employee communications platform.

Support Organizational Growth/Priorities

• Get results through multi-channel, performance marketing strategy and support connectivity across broader organization-wide initiatives:
• Improve the enrollment journey through deployment of impactful marketing campaigns, messaging and materials.
• Partner with Talent teams to develop and communicate an Employee Value Proposition to current employees and via recruitment marketing for prospective candidates.
• Support engagement initiatives with donor development and boards of trustees.
• Demonstrate ownership mentality by collaborating across organization on strategic priorities and recommending Marketing & Communications solutions based on a combination of data and standard methodologies.

Leadership and Team Management

• Champion network priorities, initiatives, and culture and serve as Home Office Lead for the Marketing function.
• Lead and mentor marketing team to drive team’s value, impact and support of mission across home office teams and regions.
• Nurture partner engagement and collaboration to understand the role of brand and marketing, and the value of marketing investment.
• Transparently communicate strategic plan and regular updates on marketing investments to broad collaborators, provide ongoing data dashboard with ability to change directions as needed.
• Develop/resolve appropriate metrics to guide marketing investment decisions and alignment with internal partners
• Lead Marketing’s data and decision-making ecosystem to ensure strong enterprise-level tracking, performance and reporting metrics.
• Steward marketing’s financial resources across the home office, regional enrollment and relevant initiative-based budgets.
• Lead and model a strong project management me