Communications and Design Director at Busara Center

Position Summary: The Communications and Design Directors support Busara’s growing global team from its headquarters in Kenya.

This is a strategic level position that cuts across Busara with a focus on building a world-class communications department and disseminating policy, research, and intervention design both to the external community, as well as within the Busara team.

At Busara, communications serves multiple traditional and non-traditional functions.

Thus, Communications and Design Directors must have expertise across multiple domains of communications; from PR, marketing, and outreach, to internal communications, knowledge management, and behavioral design.

Busara is a behavioral science research and advisory organization that conducts projects across a wide range of sectors and disciplines. From highly academic lab experiments for world-class universities, to strategic consulting for pan-African telecoms, the communications work at Busara must be as flexible and far reaching as our work.

As an organization that prizes rigor in all the work that we do, the communications strategy should embody the same discipline and use of data that we use in our client-centered work.

That means using the latest research from behavioral science and optimizing our communication strategy through rigorous testing should occur wherever possible.

Furthermore, Busara uses good design as good communication. One of the key functions of our Communications and Design Directors is the ability to advise, inform and design behavioral interventions to support our project work.

The Communications and Design Directors will be integral to building the communications division at Busara, thus a self-starter with experience in management positions or previous experience building teams will be essential for this role.

Our Communications and Design Directors report to the VP of Communications.

Note, the role of VP of Communications is currently being filled by the Chief Strategy Officer.

Core Responsibilities:

• Lead the overall development and execution of a communications strategy, with the support of the VP of Communications.
• Harmonize communications initiatives to support the other organizational divisions.
• Develop and coordinate a consistent Busara brand, both externally and internally.
• Contribute to the overall strategic goals and planning at Busara, with a particular emphasis on Communications and Design.
• Use Communications and Design to drive growth at Busara.

Furthermore Communications and Design Directors should have expertise across at least two of the following sub-divisions within communications.

For each of these sub-divisions, the core responsibilities are as follows:

Policy and Outreach

• Build and implement a policy and outreach strategy, whose goal is to disseminate Busara’s research and advisory work and establish Busara as an intellectual leader in behavioral science.
• Develop a core strategy for outreach and engagement, including publishing a white paper series, ensuring our attendance/participation at conferences and events, and using social media and website as a tool for outreach.
• Oversee public relations functions and coordinate PR initiatives both at the local level as well as the international level.

Internal Communications and Knowledge Management

• Lead the development of a knowledge management system to ensure transparent and efficient communication across project teams.
• Lead trainings on the organization’s brand and vision
• Organize and create best practices guides around common learnings across project for both internal sharing and external dissemination.
• Lead the design of our communications collateral, including pitch decks, 1-pagers, internal memos, interactive dashboards, and business cards. Enforce common design standards across all organizational outputs.

Behavioral Design

• Lead design capability at Busara, using best practices design including UI/UX, and user-centered design.
• Support project teams in developing creative and sustainable behaviorally-focused interventions for clients.
• Lead internal testing at Busara, running embedded interventions for internal initiatives across divisions (i.e. Operations and People)
• Create budgets for communications and outreach activities.

Core Requirements:

• Deep understanding of Busara’s business and organizational culture and how to use communications and design to support that culture.
• Ability to work with and inspire people from a variety of cultures, backgrounds, and experiences.
• Experience leading teams, with a particular focus on communications, social media, policy outreach and design.
• History of contributing strategically to organizations at the highest level, with an emphasis on communications and design.
• Use of data and state-of-the-art research in developing communications and design initiatives.
• Live and work from our Nairobi, Kenya office.
• 3+ years’ experience in communications, policy outreach, PR, marketing, design or a related field.
• A Degree in Public Communication, Journalism, Public Relations, Mass Communication, International Relations. Preferably Master’s degree in Communications, Marketing, Public Relations or relevant field.

Benefits:

• A quickly growing, dynamic work environment
• Full health benefits
• Competitive remuneration package with travel benefits
• Professional development budget