Director, Digital Engagement and Audience Retention

• Reports to: Vice President, Digital Strategy
• Staff reporting to this position: Associate Director, Email Marketing
• Department: Digital Strategy
• Position classification: Exempt, full time

Summary

American Progress seeks a highly motivated Director of Digital Engagement and Audience Retention to effectively engage strategic audiences—including policymakers, advocates, experts, and more—to support distribution, marketing, and fundraising in advancing the organization’s mission. The ideal Director would offer a combination of creative, technology, and marketing experience along with proven success leading projects within policy-oriented organizations.

The Director will also serve as chief subject matter expert on email marketing strategy and execution and will work ongoing with counterparts who offer expertise in social media, audience acquisition, digital fundraising, data strategy, and more. As part of the larger Digital Strategy team, this position will collaborate extensively with diverse communications, editorial, strategy, and policy teams to continually improve audience retention across digital channels including websites, email, and social media and contribute to digital strategy efforts across silos.

The ideal candidate for this position values the camaraderie that comes with being a part of a progressively minded and socially conscious organization such as American Progress.

American Progress is an independent, nonpartisan policy institute that is dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans through bold, progressive ideas as well as strong leadership and concerted action. The organization’s aim is to change not just the conversation but also the country. The Digital Strategy team at American Progress is responsible for developing and operationalizing strategies to reach and engage the organization’s target audiences through digital channels such as web, social media, and online marketing. The team works closely with an extensive roster of highly respected resident thought leaders, policy professionals, and various functional groups in the organization in order to formulate and implement effective digital content strategies to connect with our audiences.

Responsibilities

• Manage a busy cross-team email calendar of newsletters, event invitations, fundraising, advocacy emails, and more. This includes balancing the priorities of multiple stakeholders without oversaturating email lists; assigning and overseeing production work, as well as participating in production as needed; and overseeing content creation and editing work as needed.
• Coordinate email content distribution across CAP, from our weekly flagship newsletter to issue-specific newsletters and event invitations to fundraising appeals and action alerts. This includes supervising email producers on the digital team (including one or two direct reports) as well as training staff across the organization in creating content and maintaining high-quality audience segmentation and production processes.
• Work with teams and stakeholders to identify communications and strategic goals—including projections—and to measure progress against them to tune strategies and outputs.
• Work with content strategy team colleagues and other stakeholders to define, drive, and maintain digital content strategy across the organization and all channels, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and mission.
• Stay up to date on email marketing and digital engagement best practices and make changes to vehicles, practices, training, and processes accordingly.
• Consult ongoing with the Events team concerning best practices and opportunities in event marketing and distribution in concert with colleagues from adjacent areas of expertise (e.g., social media, content strategy, acquisition, advocacy) within the Digital Strategy team and across the organization.
• Regularly report out on digital engagement and audience retention stats, in collaboration with the analytics team and others, at the organizational level as well as at the policy and functional team level.
• Recruit, hire, onboard, and supervise the staff needed to support the team’s goals.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Requirements and qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience
• 8+ years of experience in digital/email marketing, including at least two years of supervisory experience
• Broad understanding of digital engagement strategies with specific expertise in email marketing principles
• Strong project management experience and proven ability to juggle multiple projects and priorities.
• Expert-level experience using marcom technology platforms such as Engaging Networks, Convio, or Salsa
• Expert-level experience with data hygiene practices, retention measurement, and email engagement analytics
• High proficiency with HTML, image editing, and writing for marketing
• Broad range of experience working with multiple CRMs, CMSs, and analytics packages.
• Excellent communication and troubleshooting skills.
• Strong organizational, leadership and decision-making abilities, including goals and projection setting, and a proven ability to navigate ambiguity and change.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, deadline-oriented environment.
• A passion for progressive policy with an entrepreneurial mindset, including a focus on possibilities instead of obstacles.

American Progress offers full and competitive benefit packages. Candidates from diverse backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply.