Director, Strategic Communications & Media (EEI)

The Equitable Evaluation Initiative; United States; Hybrid; USD 125,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

The Equitable Evaluation Initiative (EEI) seeks a Director of Strategic Communications & Media to advance EEI's voice and the Equitable Evaluation Framework™. This is a full-time, remote role reporting to the Initiative Director, coordinating across EEI staff to deepen reach, reputation, and impact.

The Director will lead communications, digital and multimedia engagement, catalyze conversations with ecosystem actors, and translate insights into resources for leadership and partners.

Responsibilities

• Elevate EEI’s voice and framework in public discourse across channels.
• Coordinate content with EEI Team and partners for consistency and impact.
• Translate insights into actionable guidance for EEI leadership.
• Identify and elevate new voices to participate in conversations.
• Support multi-stakeholder campaigns with ambitious, hands-on execution.

Job description

Director, Strategic Communications & Media (EEI)

The Equitable Evaluation Initiative (EEI), seeks an exceptional communicator and strategist to generate maximum attention and thought engagement for the growing work of the Initiative and its partners. Publicly launched in fall 2018, EEI is aimed at shifting the evaluation paradigm so that it becomes a tool for and of equity.

The Director, Strategic Communications & Media will ensure that EEI’s voice, perspective and the Equitable Evaluation Framework™ become essential to the greater discourse of research, evaluation and learning. This includes catalyzing important conversations across relevant communications channels, promoting direct engagement with ecosystem actors and ensuring that actionable content/insights reaches priority audiences. The Director will report directly to the Initiative Director but will work closely with other EEI staff (all of whom work together remotely) and members of the broader EEI ecosystem. In this new role, the Director will direct EEI’s communications, digital, and multimedia engagement to deepen its growing reach, reputation, and impact across the philanthropic ecosystem.

The nucleus of the Director’s work will be to elevate EEI’s field-building focus and benchmarks. The Director will support this by coordinating content with the EEI Team and partners, developing compelling materials across multiple communication channels, tracking and understanding what’s happening and translating it into actionable insights for EEI leadership, developing resources for partners/participants/investors, and identifying and lifting up new voices to be part of the conversation.

Now two years into its original vision of a five-year effort, EEI is now international, with new interest and partners in Brazil and the UK. The imperative to shift the paradigm of evaluation and learning in the philanthropic space, coupled with this new scope of work, means that EEI communications must be a leading driver of engagement. The Director will have a deep understanding of the ways philanthropy works (and does not work) and the emergent conversations pushing its practices.

The successful candidate will be an enthusiastic and adaptable communications professional, with a high metabolism for rapid thought and a deep commitment to EEI’s mission, an advocacy orientation, and a successful record of aggressively and creatively positioning multi-stakeholder initiatives, collaborations, and campaigns. The candidate must be comfortable with and adept at moving work forward, especially in highly complex environments. This will require a combination of ambitious creativity and hands‑on execution.

The ideal candidate will have senior‑level experience, preferably as a consultant, managing communications for a complex organization or campaign effort with deep knowledge about the emerging and rapidly changing media and social media landscapes, the understanding of the right formation of omnichannel engagement strategies to maintain a leading position within those spaces, and the proven ability to leverage brand strategy and reputation management to drive an organization’s visibility and impact.

Location, Time Commitment, and Salary

The EEI is a virtual initiative and EEI team and consultants are located throughout the United States. Candidates can be based anywhere in the U.S. and will work from a home office. The Director, Communications & Media Relations is a full‑time role. This is a contractual position with annual compensation set at $125-150K. EEI is a fiscally sponsored project of the Seattle Foundation.

Interview Process

Our interview process involves both phone and video interviews, and reference calls. EEI Investment Partner Talent Citizen, an executive search and talent strategy consulting firm focused on the pursuit of positive social impact with equity at its center, is leading outreach efforts and initial vetting for this position. Candidates who advance will have further video interviews with EEI leadership, with reference calls being conducted for finalists. Working in a virtual environment is about fit as much as it is about skills. The multiple iteration points provide us both to get to know each other. If there is a delay at any point, we will do our best to keep you posted and ask that you stay in touch too.

Talent Citizen President Tracy D. Welsh and Senior Associate Connor D. Daley are EEI’s partners for the search.