JOB DESCRIPTION FOR THE POST OF Unit Co-ordinator

AREA/UNIT: Fundraising, Marketing and Communications Directorate: covering support to the Area Director and to the Communications and Education Units

RESPONSIBLE TO:Fundraising, Marketing and Communications Director

RESPONSIBLE FOR:N/A

SPECIFIC JOB PURPOSE

  • To provide a comprehensive administrative support service to the Fundraising, Marketing and Communications Director and to the Heads of the Education and Communications Units
  • To develop and manage effective systems for ensuring the work of the Area is joined up with other departments to ensure effective working with our Area across the organization.
  • To promote new integrated ways of working, developing and managing new scheduling systems, and coordinating activities to achieve a high level of success
  • To develop high level reporting to analyseproject and campaign effectiveness, collating information provided by specialists in the units, synthesizing to high level reports and leading on understanding lessons learned in ways of working and recommending improvements.

SCOPE OF ROLE

The Fundraising, Marketing and Communications Area (Marketing Area) purpose is to ensure that Practical Action’s brand is known, trusted and respected and that external engagement activities are consistent with our brand and organisational values. We are responsible for over £13m per year in fundraised income and have ambitious growth plans. The Area has three units specializing in engaging specific target audience groups: Fundraising, Communications and Education.

This new role will be pivotal to a new way of working in our area with the ultimate goal of making Practical Action a better known, more successful communications organisation which will increase our success particularly in delivering higher numbers of audience engagements, more fundraised income and increased brand awareness.About 50% of your time will be providing administrative support and the other half will be focused on developing and managing systems to integrate working practices to ensure that the Marketing Area is delivering against its KPIs and growth plans.

LINE MANAGEMENT OR SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES

There is no specific line management in this role. However, to be successful in the management of projects, schedules and workflow, the post holder will have to be a skilled influencer, work closely with others to negotiate and agree timescales and deadlines, deal with issues and clashes and escalating concerns that cannot be solved through this process.

FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

The post holder is not accountable for a budget or for an income target. They will oversee day to day management of 2 Unit and 1 Directorate budgets and will support the Director in setting the Directorate budget. They will hold a Practical Action credit card to enable the planning and booking of travel and other incidentals and will be authorised to make expenditure against each budget of up to £2000. Responsible for reporting to funders for grants within the Education and Communications Units.

SPECIFIC JOB ACCOUNTABILITIES

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES

Administration to the Director and Units (approximately 50%)

Confidential Administration to the Director and Heads of Unit

  • Provide confidential high level support to the Director and to the Heads of Unit. Diary management, recordmeetings, prepare notes, reports and maintain files.
  • Manage the schedule of 1:1 performance meetings to deliver strong management
  • Administration of the Directorate, and Unit budgets, operating budget templates and submitting to finance, manage purchase orders, invoices and credit card reconciliations. This includes submitting and managing budgets and other reporting to external funders, eg the EU.
  • Manage the process of regular reports for Trustees, GMT and Directors by providing reminders/triggers for actions needed.

General administration:

  • Organise/manage travel and expenses for the Director and international travel for the team.
  • Develop and implement systems and procedures and administer contract checking and management, including supplier contracts and ensuring Due Diligence Process is completed.
  • Co-ordinate logistics for team external events.
  • Be an advocate of SharePoint best practice.Maintainkey sites on SharePoint– e.g. Directorate site
  • Ensure team compliance with organisational policies and procedures. Drive the schedule of review dates for policies owned by the Directorate
  • Coordinate HR needs: facilitating interviews, absence reporting, annual leave checks, co-ordination of Health and Safety and of performance reviews, pay awards,training needs.
  • Maintain subscriptions and manage team logins/passwords.

Responding to enquiries, proactive and reactive information management:

  • Support the team in planning, preparing materials for and coordinating external events including representing Practical Action at several events and conferences annually
  • Be well informed, confident and persuasive when representing Practical Action with external audiences and stakeholders in person, online and via written communications.
  • Maintain information about Practical Action on key external websites as required by the Units.
  • Manage enquiries fielding and responding to requests for resources and information.
  • Maintain mailing lists, databases of contacts and prospects, and have responsibility for delivering small scale mass communications in a range of media

Developing and managing systems and developing reporting. (Approximately 50%)

Driving schedules and efficient ways of working

  • Responsibility for devising and developing planning and scheduling systems and reports that ensure integrated marketing campaigns across multiple teams and units are delivered effectively.
  • Manage complex independencies on project timelines between roles within the department, across the organisation (including with international teams) and externally with suppliers, influencing and negotiating where required in order to get the desired result.
  • Work with the Heads of Unit to developand maintain an Area wide induction programme for all Practical Action Staff on the role of brand, fundraising and communications that enables everyone to understand their roles and responsibilities. Work with UK and International teams to ensure this is used and is useful as part of all staff induction.
  • Act as key coordinator and communication point for funding bids affecting the Education and Communications units – eg, a multi-agency EU proposal under the DEAR funding programme - during bid process, and through the lifecycle of any externally funded projects.
  • Maintain list of core marketing collateral; ensure review dates and schedules for updates are met.

Reporting and presentations

  • Synthesise Unit reports for GMT, SLT, the Director and Trustees.
  • Research and develop management information reports – e.g. competitor analysis based on a reading of industry data and information provided on third party websites and publications.
  • Develop high level reporting tools to enable campaigns and activities to be effectively monitored: producing a synthesis of individual reports and drawing conclusions and recommendations for process improvements to ensure ongoing learning and improvement in working practices.
  • Improve our reporting formats ensuring they are clear, simple, graphical and insightful.
  • Manage the media monitoring process and account, reporting to the Communications team.
  • Create highly professional presentations for the Director and Heads of Unit on a range of topics.

WORKING RELATIONSHIPS

The role report to the Fundraising, Marketing and Communications Director and is matrix managed by the Heads of Education and Communications.

Key internal working relationships are:

  • Line management and matrix management: Director and Heads of Unit
  • Members of the Education and Communications units, Members of the Fundraising Unit
  • Fundraising and other Coordinators, CEO’s PA and the Company & Committee Secretary
  • Finance, HR and Facilities
  • Communications staff and Directors and their PAs in our Regional and Country Offices

Key external working relationships are:Suppliers and agencies including consultants, Teachers, Media

KEY KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Level of educational achievement required

The post holder must be educated to a good level (A level or equivalent) and have excellent written and verbal English, must be high numerate and IT literate and a fast learner of new software packages.

Level of experience required

  • Proven experience, ideally in a project management and high level confidential administrative function.

Specific skills required

  • Excellent project management skills
  • Excellent organisational skills
  • High level of proficiency with MS programmes: Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Sharepoint, Outlook
  • Management of mailing lists and data
  • Ability to research, analyse and interpret data to draw conclusions and recommendations
  • Patience, tenacity, strong negotiation and influencing skills

Specific experience required

Essential

  • Dealing with confidential information
  • Working within a busy office environment in a coordination role for multiple stakeholders
  • Day to day management of financial information and reports at a non-specialist level
  • Producing highly professional and good looking reports and presentations using excel, PowerPoint and other tools
  • Maintaining and updating information on in house and third party websites using web forms and content management systems
  • Experience of monitoring and reporting of projects and budgets is required – experience of reporting on grants to external funders is desirable.
  • Experience of researching and generating management information, synthesizing and producing reports for senior management is required
  • Significant experience of developing and managing complex schedules with multiple stakeholders and of traffic managing those schedules through projects is required.

Desirable

  • An understanding of the processes that go into the production of print materials and marketing campaigns
  • Management/reporting on Media Monitoring website e.g.Cision, Meltwater etc.
  • Developing bulk email for dispatch, monitoring performance and managing mailing list
  • Experience working with digital analytics, and social media scheduling tools
  • Experience of working in a charitable and/or marketing or education environment is desired

BEHAVIOURAL COMPETENCIES

All Practical Action staff work towards demonstrating excellence and with our core behavioural values. We seek to:

  • Be inspired and inspiring about our work.
  • Demonstrate dynamism in what we do.
  • Be good at connecting and collaborating.
  • Learn and share knowledge.
  • Demonstrate creativity in doing their job.
  • Be focused on getting the job done.