Associate Manager - Data Learning (MLE) at Evidence Action

Job purpose

The Associate Manager will work closely with the MLE department and the program teams to be able to understand the M&E needs of the programs and to translate lessons learned from data collection to decision making.

The Associate Manager’s primary responsibilities encompass;

• Working closely with the communications and MLE strategy team to help promote MLE content including briefs, reports, brown bags and visual data.
• Ensuring adequate information flow within and between program teams and MLE divisions;
• Providing visual, technical and editorial guidance to program teams on communication material and methods with stakeholders.
• Assist with research proposal development and communication findings on a timely manner.
• Engage with MLE stakeholders to ensure clear channels for feedback;
• Coordinate professional development activities within MLE;

Duties and responsibilities

Accountability

• Compile donor reports by interpreting and triangulating all necessary information from MLE strategy and delivery teams.
• Fully understanding program needs for data and translating that back to the MLE team, including developing tools that enable clear and effective information gathering.
• Seeking out, prioritising, and communicating requests from programs teams to the MLE team.
• Identifying, and documenting the best approaches for the MLE team to serve programs.

Ensure effective information flow and communication of lessons learned from MLE to programs

• Spearhead the development, redesign, and review of current reporting tools and templates making them very effective and consumable by all.
• Synthesize, Identify and recommend effective communication systems and channels useful for MLE and programs.
• Collecting and organising/curating information from various sources (i.e. existing program (primary) research, external (secondary) research, new analyses, management information systems, etc.) to help programs in making decisions.
• Writing and editing reports and presentations with a keen eye for how the information should be phrased based on the viewpoint of the target audiences (i.e. data visualization software, infographics, etc.)
• Provide flexible, easy to internalise reports and infographics to clearly inform program decisions.
• Support special projects including data analysis to guide MLE-D team strategy.
• Extracting learnings from analysis and research products that enable program teams to make evidence-based decisions.

Market and Showcase MLE services

• Communicate with program leadership how upcoming and completed research and tools developed by the Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation (MLE) team can assist programs in making evidence-based decisions.
• Provide campaign M&E data and information for wider dissemination and ensure M&E pages of the various sites are kept up to date with support from communications colleagues.

Team Management

• Coordinate and manage MLE-D work plans and SOWs to ensure compliance.
• Managing the data learning work plans and priorities.
• Managing the productivity, professional development skill building and managing at least one (Senior) Associate, Data Learning.

Key performance Indicators

• Timely submission of MLE reports to programs and other stakeholders.
• Expedient communication of MLE research and improvement to processes.
• Deliver quality dashboards for the program and MLE in coordination with the IS team.
• Identify and implement innovative communication strategies for reports and newsletters.
• Well-coordinated professional development sessions internally and externally.
• Improved and standardised reporting templates for the various programs.

Qualifications and Experience

• Master’s degree (preferred) or Bachelor’s (and additional work experience) in data-oriented social sciences (i.e. statistics, economics, quantitative political science), data-journalism, public health, epidemiology, or related field
• A minimum of 5 years work experience generating high quality, clear, thought leadership pieces and managing communications within organisations and to partners and external audiences.
• Experience in data visualisation and/or building infographics and/or using design and infographic software (e.g. PowerBI, Tableau, Gapminder, StatSilk, Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop, OmniGraffle etc.)

Skills Required

• The ability to work independently with minimal instruction.
• The drive to seek out new opportunities for work.
• Strong interpersonal skills and ability to work effectively with a team that is geographically dispersed.
• Self-directed/self-motivating personality, with proven ability to manage demands from multiple supervisors while adhering to program deadlines and priorities.
• Strong critical and analytical thinking skills.
• An active approach to problem-solving and an orientation toward practical knowledge-seeking through learning, questioning, and experimentation.
• A belief that the timely and right-sized application of knowledge and information is a requirement for strong decision-making and high-quality service delivery.
• Highest quality, professional writing and communications skills.
• Intellectual flexibility and willingness to form and adjust opinions based on evidence.
• Quick to learn, motivated to self-teach and capable of independently translating new knowledge into practice.