Online Communities Support Officer

Summary

We are the public body that looks after England’s historic environment. We champion historic places, helping people understand, value and care for them.

Historic England have a fantastic opportunity for you to join us as our Online Communities Support Officer where you will support the heritage sector workforce by providing online communities, forums and learning groups, and related online resources.

The location of this role is National where we offer hybrid working, you will be based in one of our following offices and from home - Newcastle, York, Manchester, Birmingham, Swindon, Bristol, Portsmouth and Cambridge. This is a fixed-term contract until March 2026.

What you will be doing

The Sector Resilience and Skills Department exists to build greater resilience in the heritage sector. We aim for a sector that can withstand both existing and new threats, and which can grow and stay relevant.

Working with colleagues in the Sector Resilience and Skills Department, across Historic England, and with some external partners you will promote the use of existing online communities of practice and learning communities. Principally these are on the Heritage Workspace¹ network, open to all working in the heritage sector, but you may also work with other platforms such as LinkedIn or Facebook. You will help the sector to work better together, to identify good and consistent practice, to adopt new practices and to build partnerships between sector practitioners across many heritage specialist subject areas. As part of this duty, you will:

• Plan activities such as topical discussions to engage community members and encourage use of the community tools and options, integrating with Historic England’s training offer, aligning the purpose of the community with corporate and sector priorities.
• Advise other community managers in the sector on good practice, particularly through the existing Heritage Workspace Facilitators Community.
• Take part in and lead discussion on relevant online communities.
• Monitor and report on what is working and what needs to change.
• Where needed, moderate discussion or escalate complaints or flagged content appropriately.

A particular focus for these activities in the current planning period is:

• A new project to develop an online learning community for local authority heritage staff. This will complement training courses about climate change and about planning applications that need to be considered by local authority and Historic England staff to adopt heritage sites and buildings to a changing climate. We want the decisions about these applications to be made consistently and in line with new guidance we will publish shortly. You will be working with a contracted community manager on this project in the first few months.
• Maintaining and growing engagement in an existing open community for all heritage practitioners, ‘Heritage Connects’, currently with c.320 members.

You will be one of a team of Heritage Workspace ‘Network Managers’. You will support the setup of new groups on Heritage Workspace as requested, ensuring that the purpose of new groups is documented and that they have a plan for development in line with our procedures, so that resources are focussed on genuinely useful groups.

You will contribute to communication plans and activities to raise awareness of Historic England’s sector support options, including training courses, guidance etc so that sector practitioners are directed to the most useful and relevant sources of help and advice.

You will maintain, add to and promote the Online Heritage Communities Directory² as a resource for the sector, so that practitioners can easily find relevant online communities.

As directed, organise and undertake reviews of existing online communities in the heritage sector, using the Online Communities Review Toolkit³. Contribute to action plans for future development of particular online communities arising from the recommendations of these reviews.

You will contribute to the development and promotion of other online resources to help develop the resilience of the heritage sector.

In the current planning period these include:

• An online wiki good practice guide for the managers of Historic Environment Record databases in local authorities called ‘Informing the Future of the Past’.
• Online databases of useful resources (e.g. guidance publications, templates for writing reports or other documents, case studies of what has worked in the past). This will contribute to the work of the Skills Forum, and Heritage Sector Resilience Plan priority actions which call for the setup of resource hubs.
• Blogs aimed at professionals within the sector (currently from Historic England library).

Travel

This role is suitable for remote or hybrid working. However, some travel will be required to attend team and corporate events within England.

Who we are looking for

• Experience of managing or participating in an online community in a professional or personal capacity
• Ability to communicate clearly in writing, adapting the message in order to address the particular audience appropriately.
• Able to influence, encourage and support others to contribute to projects and activities.
• Familiarity with the heritage of England and the organisations that look after it

We are an equal opportunity employer which values diversity and inclusion. If you have a disability or neurodiversity, we would be happy to discuss reasonable adjustments to the job with you. Having just won the Gold Award from MIND, we also recognise the importance of a healthy work-life balance.

We are an inclusive employer and believe that flexible working options are for everyone. We want to make sure our working arrangements don’t prevent anyone from joining us because of their personal circumstances. We also want to provide you with the best balance in your home and work life that we can.

We are open to considering options including job sharing, part-time working, compressed hours working and different working locations, including hybrid working. Please visit our jobs pages or contact us to find out more.

Why work for Historic England

We offer a wide benefits package including a competitive pension scheme starting at 26% contributions, a generous 28 days holiday, corporate discounts, free entry into English Heritage sites across the country and development opportunities to ensure you achieve your goals.

We are committed to promoting equality of opportunity for everyone. Diversity helps us to perform better and attract more people to support our work. We welcome and encourage job applications from people of all backgrounds.

We particularly encourage applications from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic candidates and candidates with disabilities as they are underrepresented within Historic England at this level.

Historic England want all of our candidates to shine in the recruitment process. Please tell us what we can do to make sure you can show us your very best self. You can contact us by email at recruitmentTeam@Historicengland.org.uk if you have any recruitment queries.

To ensure a fair and inclusive recruitment process for everyone the use of AI or automated tools is not permitted.

Interview dates: week commencing 12th May 2025

Please follow the link for a full copy of the Job Description –

https://cms.historicengland.org.uk/media/ixtnhwd2/online-communities-support-officer-jd.odt