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PR & Marketing Manager

Last updated: November 2023

The Role:

Shape History is looking for candidates with at least 4-5+ years of experience across PR & marketing marketing  at either an agency or purpose-led brand. We’re looking for someone with commercial acumen & a track record of delivering high value marketing and media  marketing and media  coverage, a passion for building relationships, and an innate understanding of the social impact/sustainability space.  If you’re ready for a new challenge in London, let’s talk.

Hello! We’re Shape History, the social impact communications agency. We work with our partners (not clients!) –  businesses, charities, multilaterals, and philanthropic organisations – on the biggest issues facing humanity today, from Climate Change to Gender Equality, Public Health to Human Rights. We maximise the power of communications to shape the history of tomorrow, today . 

We’re a full service agency, so our expertise ranges from strategically advising major institutions, to placing stories in the news, creating global campaigns, and crafting pioneering brand identities. The successful candidate will join our Growth team, reporting to our Co-MDs and will be responsible for:

  • Scaling our impact through storytelling: Strategise and execute PR/marketing activities that places our expertise, thought leadership, and quality work in front of new audiences, and amplifies our pioneering internal culture. 
  • Driving new partnership acquisition: implement strategies to raise awareness of the agency with key target audiences that leads to the acquisition of new partner organisations across different markets –  the UK, North America, Europe and Africa.
  • Building brand trust and credibility: Grow the Shape History brand within key target audiences demonstrating evidence of our impact – philanthropy, multilateral institutions, purpose-driven companies, and civil society. 

How you’ll be shaping history everyday:

Shape History is a storyteller’s dream. You will have the space and autonomy to decide how you deliver on the above goals with efficiency and results, although we’ve mapped out key priorities below  – if you have a different take  with these, we’d love to hear your thoughts and be challenged:

PRIORITY 1 | PRESS & COVERAGE – delivered autonomously, with support from the Growth team as and when required.

Raise the agency’s profile within trade and sector press

  • Build relationships with journalists within the creative industries and our key areas of sustainability and social impact including climate, human rights, public health.
  • Identify and secure written press opportunities including press releases, features and OpEds in trade, national and sector press for our team and our work. 

Maximise events & conferences

  • Plan out a calendar of external events & conferences for the team to attend and secure speaking/panel opportunities across sustainability, social impact focus areas, and creative industries. 
  • Attend events acting as a key spokesperson for Shape History, aiming to secure new partnerships. 
  • Work with team members attending events to coordinate valuable on-the-day and follow-up content

Drive impact-focused storytelling

  • Work: Lead the rapid creation of case studies (for the website, proposal decks and award entries)  with project teams, guiding them to create concise summaries of projects that showcase both the expertise of the team and the impact of the work.
  • Culture: Lead on external storytelling/promotion of all internal initiatives including the Environmental, Race Equity and Neurodiversity Steering Groups, as well as the History Shaper Programme to position Shape History as a cultural leader.

PRIORITY 2  | THOUGHT LEADERSHIP – delivered with focused support from Growth team

  • Identify awards & manage submissions: Identify strategic selection of awards, create and oversee application submissions across both creative industries and social issue specific competitions
  • Cultivate existing partner network: Identify, organise and deliver activations (eg. virtual/physical roundtable events) that strengthen partnerships relations, and create new opportunities for referrals/introductions with prospective partners. 
  • Curate thought leadership & content: Work with our team to plan, create, proof and place/post pieces of thought-leadership that spark engagement, as well as produce your own original content that champions the agency’s expertise. 

PRIORITY 3 | DAY-TO-DAY – delivered in collaboration with Growth team

  • Manage & evolve website: Primarily focused on production, upload and promotion of all case studies including visual and verbal content, as well as Hub pieces. Also contributing ideas to evolve new/existing sections of the website. 
  • Manage social channels & newsletter: Support management of content and community across our social channels, primarily Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Mailchimp to grow social following, deepen engagement and build reputation in new sectors.
  • Proposal identification & creation: Support with identifying new proposal/partnership opportunities through routes not already specified, and create high quality proposals, with support from the Growth Team.

ALONGSIDE THESE PRIORITIES, THERE’S A FEW EXTRA FUNCTIONS THAT ARE PRETTY CRUCIAL:

  • Proactive organisation: Manage and organise your own tasks, taking ownership of your responsibilities, ensuring you update relevant stakeholders  on your deadlines. 
  • Champion quality: Ensure work you produce and deliver is of the highest quality prior, with minimal changes needed prior to be signed off. 
  • Manage budgets: Manage and plan out the yearly budget for all marketing activities, making sure resources are being spent in the most efficient way and activities throughout the year stay within budget. 
  • Engage internal team: Engage and excite the wider Shape History team with weekly updates and presentations of marketing priorities.

You’re good at… (role requirements)

  • Agency-specific experience:  Have more than 4 years experience working within an agency or an in-house role in a similar services business. 
  • Strategic mindset: You understand how to move from outcomes, to strategy, to tactics – always making sure everything services a purpose and is working to create impact. 
  • Empathy and compassion: You are confident at having difficult conversations, and supporting our internal team to overcome challenges they are facing. 
  • Communication & Public speaking:  You possess excellent written and verbal communication skills. You are a strong presenter, are adept at speaking to different audiences, with the confidence to convince them to take action. 
  • Design skills: Confident in using online tools such as Canva to create content. Even better, full design experience using software such as Adobe Creative Cloud or InDesign. 
  • Project and time management: You are responsive and comprehensive in your project management approach, feeling comfortable speaking with our partners. 
  • Collaboration: Working collaboratively in a team, as well as independently, and willing to roll up your sleeves during short intensive sprints.
  • Open-minded: Willing to step outside your comfort zone, and work on a variety of new and different outputs to evolve your skill sets. 
  • Stress Management and Adaptability: You feel comfortable adapting your planned course of action when unexpected issues arise, and are able to effectively manage and surpass stressful situations. This involves managing a complex and reactive workload. 
  • Clarity and simplification: With your experience as a strategist, you can comfortably present ideas to the internal team or our partners in an engaging way that resonates and creates clarity and alignment. 
  • Proactivity: Taking ownership and autonomy over your work, solving problems that others may not have noticed, and going out of your way to continue learning and growing.
  • Eye for detail: You can be trusted to look over pieces of work and give clear and critical feedback that helps improve the overall quality of outputs. You are confident in signing off on pieces of work before they go live.
  • Leadership skills: You have managed individuals or a team and understand how to inspire and get the most out of them.

Race Equity:

We are committed to having an inclusive culture in which everyone feels safe and supported to achieve their potential. We recognise that there is a long way to go in implementing race equity in the sector and we have a robust strategy in place for delivering this at Shape History. We actively encourage applications from underrepresented and minority groups, including those with lived experience of social issues we are working to address. As part of this strategy, we use blind recruitment in our first round of applications. When applying for this role, you will be taken to a Typeform link where you’ll be asked a series of questions.

Remuneration: 

Base salary of £40,000 – £49,000 plus company and personal bonus (between 3-5% base salary)

Recruitment process:

We may review applications on a rolling basis but to give you a general sense of timings:

  • The deadline for applying for this role is Monday 4th December.
  • Longlisted candidates will have their CV requested on Wednesday 6th December. 
  • 3-4 shortlisted candidates may be given a short exercise before proceeding to an interview. 
  • Interviews will be held during w/c 11th December.
Apply here