Background
Oxfam is a global movement of people working together to end the injustice of poverty. Critical to achieving our goal is inspiring, igniting, empowering and engaging people to be part of that. People living in poverty themselves, supporters, active citizens, donors, activists, volunteers and the wider public have a critical role in ending poverty. People engage with us in many and varied ways and we can’t achieve our goals without their generosity and power. Public engagement creates and offers opportunities to be a part of and support the worldwide movement toward a more equal world.
Geopolitical and economic powers are shifting. Fast. Poverty is shifting too, and so is our capacity to fight it. Today, most poor people live in middle-income countries. However the gap between the rich at the top and the billion at the bottom is growing. Inequality is about access to political power, jobs, justice, security, food, land and resources, health and education. Aid, too, is no longer about North-to-South giving.
At Oxfam we cherish our 70 years of history. We bring a lot of knowledge and experience to the table – and we’ll continue to. However, we are changing. We have decided to concentrate on one over-riding priority: to strengthen our ability to influence the political and corporate dynamics that keep people poor. By influencing the systems of power and decision-making, Oxfam can help more poor people than we could simply by providing them with more services.
This realization changes how we organize our organization. We are going to have more Oxfam affiliates in southern countries. We will transform into a genuinely international organization that is accountable to poor communities because we’re closer to them in all our programs, humanitarian work and campaigns. Critical also to achieving our goal is to inspire and empower people to take part; people living in poverty themselves, supporters and the wider public have a critical role in ending poverty. And finally, it also means that Oxfam International itself must be truly global, based in multiple locations, with headquarters in the global South.
Purpose of the role
Oxfam has had great successes with campaigns on specific issues including inequality, the broken food system, conflict and humanitarian issues and ending violence against women and girls. These campaigns are a source of significant strength and lie at the heart of the organization. Through our campaigns, Oxfam has the potential to engage millions more supporters to campaign alongside us. This is why we are working to further integrate campaign mobilization, public fundraising and communications strategies, to achieve stronger campaigning and influence, more supporters taking many more actions, more income and a stronger brand.
Working in close collaboration with our worldwide campaign teams, the Public Engagement Manager leads the creation and implementation of plans to engage millions of people to campaign alongside us, to deepen supporter engagement and generate income for Oxfam’s vision. She or he provides marketing, fundraising and communications leadership into worldwide, regional and national campaign plans, supported by relevant audience insights. The Public Engagement Manager will achieve this primarily by influencing the design of campaigns and supporting the launch of ambitious mobilization plans by working closely with campaign and mobilization teams at worldwide, regional and national level.
Primary responsibilities
1. Ensure that the role of the public is well understood and articulated, resulting in campaigns that resonate with defined publics (20%)
• Ensure that through our campaigns the public has a proactive role in helping make a positive impact for people living in poverty. This includes ensuring that much larger audience segments understand who we are trying to influence, why and how their contribution helps. It also includes that the campaign fits well with Oxfam’s brand, connects with Oxfam’s programmatic work and encourages the public to act and donate to Oxfam.
• Ensure that public facing campaign activities are based on audience insight. Ensure that relevant audience insight is shared and acted upon across fundraising, communications and the campaign groups.
2. Co-lead the development and implementation of engagement strategies for worldwide campaigns (30%)
• Co-lead with worldwide campaign leads the development and implementation of worldwide objectives, plans and creative approaches to engage people to campaign alongside us, to deepen supporter engagement and to generate income for Oxfam’s vision.
• Ensure that fundraising and communications experts and groups get access and visibility to campaign plans, are able to provide timely, useful input and contribute to implementation.
• Ensure that fundraising and communication communities commit resources to develop and implement campaigns globally and in priority affiliates and countries.
• Foster the integration of communications, campaign mobilization and public fundraising /growth objectives into joint engagement goals, at a global and national level.
• Ensure that relevant content and stories are gathered from Oxfam’s programmatic work and that these reflect the ambitions and aspirations of communications and fundraising teams and can be used effectively within compelling supporter communications and campaigns in various market.
• Ensure that public engagement impact is measured and that thorough evaluations are run post campaign spikes to share and learn across the confederation to help prepare for the next spike.
3. Support the development and implementation of national engagement plans (40%)
• Support the development of ambitious engagement strategies and targets in priority affiliate and program countries to inspire, enable, connect and expand our supporter engagement.
• Monitor the delivery and progress of these engagement plans against worldwide campaign mobilization plans in order to encourage and share innovative approaches and to overcome challenges to implementation.
• Coordinate capacity support and trouble-shooting through the global Public Engagement Department and the public engagement expert communities to support national engagement teams in overcoming challenges to implementation.
4. Promote best practice and knowledge management (10%)
• Ensure that Oxfam teams have access to global best practices and expertise required to deliver their public engagement strategies: i.e. to recruit new financial givers, increase engagement with Oxfam on campaign agendas amongst new and future supporters and increase conversion of people engaged with the campaign into other forms of support for Oxfam’s work.
• Drive collaboration between fundraising, digital, content gathering and communications teams for campaigns, encouraging cross-fertilization of skills, content, knowledge and materials to execute an effective campaign which recruits and engages new and existing supporters.
• Spot innovation and new engagement approaches, for sharing and implementing across the confederation.
• Identify gaps in knowledge or capacity within priority countries and coordinate specialist support as required.
Profile
Technical Skills, Experience & Knowledge
• Significant (7 years +) senior leadership experience in leading engagement programs, of which a minimum of 4 years should be at senior manager or equivalent level.
• A track record of delivering ambitious public / supporter engagement strategies, and a deep understanding of multiple engagement techniques.
• Significant experience with developing successful marketing approaches and supporter journeys that generate more support (actions and donations) for a particular issue but also acquire, maintain and upgrade longer term supporters for the organization.
• Experience with and in depth understanding of audience research and acting on it in diverse markets across the globe.
• Experience in working with multi-cultural senior staff and teams and across borders.
• Experience of budgeting and performance management of public engagement programs.
• Highly developed analytical skills and a strong understanding of organizational development and business planning.
• Innovative and creative, able to work under high pressure to deliver new engagement methods.
• Experience of providing tools and training on public fundraising.
• Exceptional influencing skills – the ability to achieve agreed goals and to drive change without direct authority.
• Demonstrable organizational and project management skills.
HOW TO APPLY:
To apply for the post, please send a letter of application stating the skills and approach that you would bring to the role along with your CV/resume (no photos) in English in strict confidence BY EMAIL ONLY to Zoe Oldham zoeoldham@darylupsall.com .
Ensure that they are sent as Word documents with the titles “your name cover letter” and “your name CV”. Please put “Oxfam – Public Engagement Manager” in the email subject line. Deadline for applications: Sunday June 11th 2017, 18.00 GMT