EARTH Digital Platform Coordinator

Center for Public Partnerships & Research; Topeka (KS); On-site; USD 52,000 - 68,000; Full time

Job summary

Center for Public Partnerships & Research is seeking an EARTH Community Forum Administrator to manage the external community platform and website content, serving a diverse set of academic and industry stakeholders in a complex, access-controlled environment.

The role requires independent judgment, policy-driven access control, and cross-functional communication with EARTH leadership, IT, communications, and partner institutions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in related field is required or equivalent experience with 1 year of related work.
• Demonstrated ability to manage user accounts, permissions, content areas, workflows, or platform configuration.
• Strong organizational skills and ability to maintain accurate records, calendars, and procedures.
• Ability to work independently within defined policies and escalate issues appropriately.

Responsibilities

• Administer the community forum platform, including user accounts, groups, permissions, categories, and notifications.
• Maintain public, member-restricted, and limited-access areas per access policies and memberships.
• Coordinate with vendors, IT staff, and EARTH leadership to resolve issues and implement enhancements.
• Support content operations, translation, tagging, and content lifecycle practices across forum and website.
• Manage access-control structures and onboarding/offboarding workflows for external users.
• Provide front-line user support, posting updates, and routine troubleshooting.
• Track forum metrics and prepare operational summaries for EARTH leadership.

Skills

Strong organizational skills

Strong written communication

Independent work

Stakeholder communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

1 year related experience

Job description

Position Overview

EARTH is developing a community-forward online platform to serve as the primary digital entry point for its public, industry-facing, and access-controlled stakeholder engagement. The EARTH Community Forum is envisioned as more than a document repository. It will combine public information, member-restricted resources, curated source materials, discussion spaces, announcements, event follow-up, and user support into a managed digital environment for industry members, academic partners, students, researchers, advisory groups, and approved external stakeholders. The platform is intended to support reliable access control, organized content stewardship, member onboarding, and ongoing interaction across EARTH’s research, workforce development, and technology translation activities.

To address this challenge, a new NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC): Environmentally Applied Refrigerant Technology Hub (EARTH) is creating a “sustainable refrigerant lifecycle” to address technical, environmental, and societal challenges facing the HVACR industry. EARTH is a multi-institution, multi-disciplinary team from the University of Kansas, University of Notre Dame, University of Hawai'i, University of Maryland, University of South Dakota, and Lehigh University.

This is a 100%, twelve-month, benefits-eligible, regular appointment that reports directly to the ERC EARTH Administrative Director. Currently, the position is designated as on-campus. Alternative and flexible work schedules will be evaluated as per ERC EARTH policy and center guidelines.

The EARTH Community Forum Administrator is responsible for administering and maintaining EARTH’s external community platform and associated website content operations. The role requires independent judgment, access-control discipline, stakeholder-facing communication, platform administration experience, content workflow management, and the ability to coordinate across academic, industry, public, and administrative functions. The position is operationally autonomous within defined policy boundaries and supports the growth of the platform into a broader community engagement asset.

Job Description

50% Community Platform Administration

• Administer the community forum platform, including user accounts, groups, permissions, discussion categories, content areas, notification settings, and platform configuration within delegated authority.
• Maintain public, member-restricted, and limited-access areas consistent with approved access policies, membership categories, and stakeholder needs.
• Configure and maintain discussion spaces, resource libraries, announcement areas, member-facing pages, working group spaces, and other approved platform areas.
• Coordinate with platform vendors, university information technology personnel, communications staff, and EARTH leadership to resolve operational issues and support platform enhancements.
• Maintain platform housekeeping practices, including archiving obsolete content, reviewing navigation structures, managing outdated pages or categories, and escalating issues requiring policy or leadership review.
• Support implementation of platform features such as member profiles, announcements, discussion boards, event follow-up spaces, curated content collections, and stakeholder resource areas.
• Maintain administrative documentation sufficient to support continuity of platform operations.

20% Website Administration and Content Operations

• Support and maintain approved EARTH website content as part of the broader community forum effort, including public pages, member-facing resources, announcements, events, staff information, industry-facing information, and other approved web content.
• Coordinate content intake, review, approval-routing, posting, revision, and retirement workflows for website and forum materials.
• Work with EARTH staff and subject matter experts to translate approved source materials into organized, accessible, and user-friendly website or forum content.
• Maintain basic content taxonomy, tagging, navigation consistency, version awareness, and content lifecycle practices across the forum and website.
• Support consistency between the EARTH website and community forum, including cross-linking, resource placement, event follow-up, announcements, and member-facing information.
• Coordinate with communications, web support, institutional branding, accessibility, or information technology personnel when website changes exceed the position’s delegated authority.
• Identify outdated, duplicative, incomplete, or hard-to-find website and forum content and recommend corrective action.
• Support basic web accessibility practices and coordinate with appropriate university personnel when content, documents, or platform features raise accessibility concerns.

10% Access Control and User Administration

• Manage named-user access for approved EARTH industry members, academic partners, staff, students, advisors, and invited stakeholders.
• Maintain role-based access control structures aligned with membership status, committee participation, working group assignments, content sensitivity, and approved public/private segmentation.
• Coordinate user onboarding and offboarding workflows for external users, including new member representatives, departing users, changed company contacts, and time-limited stakeholder access.
• Maintain user-access records, membership contact lists, group assignments, access lists, and operational documentation.
• Support accurate implementation of membership-tier access, committee access, advisory access, working group access, and other approved access categories.
• Monitor access issues and route ambiguous cases to the appropriate EARTH leader, Industry Liaison Officer, Innovation Officer, university office, or designated decision-maker.
• Escalate access requests involving confidential materials, unpublished research, intellectual property, export-control concerns, membership agreements, or other restricted information.

10% Community Operations and Member Support

• Provide front-line operational support to forum users, including account access, navigation assistance, content location support, notification settings, posting questions, and routine troubleshooting.
• Support forum activity by posting approved prompts, announcements, event follow-up materials, discussion starters, resources, and member-facing updates.
• Assist with routine moderation workflows, including monitoring posts, flagging inappropriate or misplaced content, routing technical questions, and escalating sensitive issues.
• Support member onboarding and orientation to the forum, including preparation of user guides, frequently asked questions, short instructions, and platform-use materials.
• Help ensure that the forum remains organized, current, accessible, and useful to industry members, academic partners, students, staff, advisory members, and approved stakeholders.
• Identify recurring user needs, content gaps, platform friction points, and operational issues that may require process improvement or leadership attention.
• Support the transition from a static content repository model toward a more active community platform model.

5% Reporting, Analytics, and Continuous Improvement

• Track and report routine forum and website metrics, such as user registrations, active users, discussion activity, content views, member engagement, resource use, support requests, and content updates.
• Prepare periodic operational summaries for EARTH leadership and other relevant staff, including program reporting requirements.
• Recommend improvements to navigation, access-control workflows, content organization, member onboarding, website usability, and platform operations.
• Maintain standard operating procedures, administrative documentation, content calendars, access-control procedures, and platform-management records.
• Support future evolution of the forum operating model as EARTH’s member community, public-facing resources, and stakeholder engagement needs mature.
• Assist in evaluating whether additional platform features, integrations, workflows, or administrative practices are needed.

5% Coordination and Stakeholder Interface

• Coordinate with the Industry Liaison Officer, Innovation Officer, Research Project Manager, Education and Workforce Development Director, communications staff, program management staff, researchers, students, and other EARTH personnel as needed.
• Work with industry member representatives and approved stakeholders in a professional, service-oriented manner.
• Support cross-functional workflows involving public information, member-restricted information, event follow-up, committee support, working group activity, and curated resource collections.
• Maintain appropriate confidentiality and discretion when handling member lists, restricted materials, unpublished information, access rights, and operational issues.
• Participate in planning discussions related to forum operations, website needs, content governance, platform improvement, and member support.
• Recognize that final strategy and policy decisions rest with designated EARTH leadership, while providing effective platform implementation and administration of the community forum and related website functions.

Required Qualifications

• High School diploma or GED + 5 years related experience OR Bachelors degree in related field + 1 year of related experience
• Two or more years of professional experience administering or substantially supporting a digital platform, website, online community, member portal, learning platform, content management system, customer support portal, association platform, or comparable system.
• Demonstrated ability to manage user accounts, permissions, content areas, workflows, or platform configuration in a structured digital environment, as evidenced by application materials.
• Strong organizational skills and ability to maintain accurate records, lists, documentation, calendars, and operating procedures, as evidenced by application materials.
• Ability to work independently within defined policies and escalate issues appropriately.
• Strong written communication skills and ability to prepare clear user-facing instructions, announcements, summaries, and support materials.
• Demonstrated judgment in handling restricted information, access-control issues, stakeholder communications, and operational ambiguity.
• Ability to work with technical, academic, industry, administrative, and external stakeholder audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Degree, coursework, or professional experience in a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics field, or demonstrated experience supporting technical, research-intensive, engineering, product development, or academic-industry collaboration environments.
• Three or more years of relevant experience in digital platform administration, website administration, community platform operations, member portal administration, or comparable stakeholder-facing digital operations.
• Experience with B2C or B2B community platforms, forum platforms, association platforms, or member engagement systems such as Higher Logic Vanilla, Higher Logic Thrive, Invision Community, Discourse, Member365, Hivebrite, or similar systems.
• Experience with website administration or content management systems such as Drupal, WordPress, SharePoint, or comparable platforms.
• Experience supporting public and restricted-access content environments.
• Experience with role-based access control, named-user account management, member onboarding, or external stakeholder access workflows.
• Experience in a university, research center, consortium, association, nonprofit, professional society, technology-transfer, or industry-engagement environment.
• Familiarity with accessibility, web governance, content lifecycle management, information architecture, metadata, tagging, or content taxonomy practices.
• Ability to interpret user feedback, platform analytics, and operational patterns to recommend practical improvements.
• Familiarity with research, innovation, technology commercialization, engineering, energy, refrigerants, cooling, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration, or academic-industry partnership environments.

Additional Candidate Instructions

• online application
• cover letter
• resume
• three professional references

Contact Information to Applicants

Emily Weiss, [e-mail]

Advertised Salary Range

$52,000 - $68,000

Application Review Begins

Saturday August 1, 2026

Anticipated Start Date

Monday September 7, 2026