Insight Manager, Ventures at Mercy Corps

• This role will be responsible for supporting the development of Insights Strategy, and will execute on this strategy through the production of robust and respected insights, and intentionally disseminating them through a thoughtful Communications Plan to our target audience of donors & funders and venture capital firms & impact investors.

This role is for you if:

• You have a demonstrated interest and expertise in the startup, tech, or innovation ecosystems in our key regions of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. You have expertise or demonstrated interest in our key sectors of financial inclusion and climate resilience.
• You have a strong ability and excitement to write - a large part of this role will be extracting insights from our team, partners, and portfolio companies, and turning them into digestible insights as blogs or publications.
• You are excited to support our team to share our insights to influence the ecosystem of peers, funders, and investors through digital channels (twitter, LinkedIn, etc), live events (panels) and have other creative ideas for sharing impactful insights. Maybe you already have a following or strong network through a relevant industry-related email newsletter, LinkedIn posts, or event that you support or manage.

See our Medium page for our recent insights .
Essential Job Responsibilities
INSIGHTS (50%)

• We produce insights to showcase our approach, our learnings and insights, and the innovative solutions that we support. This is an essential pillar of our strategy to ensure we’re externalizing our insights for our target audiences to take interest and/or action, and for us to be seen as thought leaders.
• Leveraging the insights generated across all of our teams - including investments, platform, venture lab, and impact - you will be responsible for generating, stewarding, and polishing our insights production across a number of key pieces of content:

Shorter insights pieces:

• Why We Invested blogs to highlight new investments, outlining the challenge, market opportunity, and solution being built by our latest portfolio companies, profiling their story for later-stage investors (example: The hyper-accurate tropical weather forecasting algorithm building farmer and food system resilience: Why we invested in Ignitia ).
• Venture Lab launch blogs or insights blogs, detailing the problem statement, solution, and impact evaluation of a Venture Lab pilot (example: Pilot Insights | Driving Climate Resilience for Smallholder Farmers in Kenya Through Smart Contract Weather Index Insurance ).
• Venture Platform insights on the unique challenges and opportunities of supporting early stage, high-impact startups (example: Venture Platform Support: Leveraging Impact Management Tools For Climate Resilience With Verqor ).

Annual Insight Series:

• Our insights series is produced annually, and enables us to dive deeper into a particular nascent, but high potential, technology, topic, or sector to inform our own investment thesis and decision making, and move the industry forward through deeper research. (example: our 2021 insights series detailing the challenges and opportunities for the microinsurance industry to scale to support more than 600 million smallholder farmers around the world).

Annual Impact Report:

• Each year, Mercy Corps Ventures publishes an external-facing Annual Impact Report, led by our impact team. As part of Impact Measurement and Management best practices, this report tells the story of our year through impact numbers, case studies, trends, lessons learned, and plans for the future. This report includes impact data from all active MCV investments, along with a ‘‘Fails & Lessons Learned’ section, which is intentionally designed to transparently share Mercy Corps Ventures’ own learnings and failures as early-stage impact investors. See our 2022 Impact Report here 

This function contributes to insights strategy development, and includes all insights planning, production, and management activities:

• In coordination with team leadership, contribute to the development of an insights strategy for MCV.
• Manage the Insights function for MCV, including strategy implementation, management of insights or comms team members, and budget management.
• Production of key content, including development, writing, reviewing, and copy-editing:
  • Short insights pieces (Why We Invested blogs, pilot insights blogs, etc.) with subject matter experts in team (Portfolio Managers, Pilot Managers, Venture Platform team, etc).
• Alongside MCV’s impact team, manage the production of the Annual Impact Report.
• Manage the production of the Annual Insights Series:
  • Contribute to and manage scoping theme or focus area for insights series.
  • Selection of external partner or vendor.
  • Project management and support of research, synthesis, and writing phase.
  • Development and execution of a communications and dissemination plan.
• Develop insights partnerships with peers or industry stakeholders for insights. production (co-authorship).
• Source/procure and manage external vendors to support delivery of insights, such as research agencies, copy-editors, designers, etc.
• Manage the publication of insights products (uploading and publishing via digital channels such as Medium, the mercycorps.org website, etc).
• Visual content collection as it relates to insights (photo & video).

MESSAGING & BRAND MANAGEMENT (30%)
This pillar of the insights manager role ensures that our messaging and brand are consistent across all of our internal and external channels, and that this messaging and positioning is strong, clear, and differentiated. This includes all messaging and brand management related activities:

• Maintain the MCV messaging platform and updates to core materials (website, pitch decks, social media channels, etc).
• Support the team with understanding key messaging, utilizing key messaging for media, events, publications, etc.
• Production and management of brand style across visual artifacts (brand guidelines, internal templates, etc).

COMMUNICATIONS (20%)
This pillar ensures that the insights we produce reach our target audiences effectively. We present a cohesive narrative through our insights which feeds into our wider messaging and brand perception objectives. This includes all insights-related marketing and communication:

• Design and deliver communications and marketing initiatives to profile MCV’s insights, in collaboration with key members of the MCV team
• Campaign design for insights dissemination (e.g. media engagement and advertising, podcast placement, paid & organic social media design, conference sponsorship, direct dissemination, Newsletters, etc) including internal dissemination to Mercy Corps’ 40+ field offices and 5,900 staff globally for Ventures team insights.
• Engage media by pitching op-eds, issuing press releases, and facilitating interviews with team spokespeople in collaboration with the Mercy Corps PR team and/or other media agencies.
• Prioritize a quarterly and annual events agenda that aligns with our insights goals, curate and pitch relevant panels to showcase and explore insights topics, produce related talking points/scripts, and negotiate events packages
• Manage and grow digital channel engagement of our insights (current and future - including website, Medium, social media, newsletter, etc).
• Execution of marketing production activities (social media scheduling, SEO, etc).

Supervisory Responsibility

• This role may include the direct management of marketing and communications team members.