Public Practice is seeking a creative content producer to join its team in London.

Term: permanent position with six-month probation

Hours: full-time, following our nine-day-fortnight working schedule

Salary: £38,000 per anum

Start date: January 2024

Location: hybrid, London office one to two days a week and regular travel to locations across the country

About Public Practice

We are a small social enterprise dedicated to supporting local governments in building and developing their placemaking teams. We do this by helping built environment professionals transition into careers in the public sector and celebrate and support the work of those already there. Read more about us on our website, through our widespread press coverage, or watch the video about our work with a local authority in Cambridge.

About you

As our creative content producer, you will be comfortable working collaboratively with others, taking initiative and learning as we expand our services and impact. You will be motivated by the prospect of becoming our very own internal designer and creative producer, publishing beautiful content to help change perceptions of careers and the work of public sector placemaking.

For this role, we are specifically looking for the following:

excellent graphic design skills: creating and producing graphics, illustrations, infographics and engaging visuals
confident technical skills: utilising software like Mailchimp, Eventbrite and GA4 to support and report on effective marketing campaigns and customer journies
ability to produce engaging, accessible copy: translating a company tone of voice and synthesising it, particularly for short social media posts and email newsletters
highly organised: with the ability to prioritise, schedule and plan content across multiple channels manage photo and video shoots
eager to gain experience implementing digital marketing campaigns: learning more about the set-up and best practices of paid, organic and social campaigns
interest in the built environment industry: both the work and its key audiences

Please note only applicants who have the right to work in the UK can be considered for this role. As a micro business, we currently cannot support visa sponsorship.

The role as our creative content producer

As our creative content producer, you will be designing, capturing, editing and coordinating our external digital content (newsletters, videos, social media, slide decks and website assets) and using your graphic skills to illustrate and format our resources and external publications.

You will work closely with our head of brand and marketing, who leads our overall communication strategy. Your goal will be to maintain and deliver the strategy in-house, playing a critical role in ensuring we continue to produce and push the high visual quality of our content across all our channels and work. This role is vital and exciting for the company as in 2024, we will launch our new website, a new print publication and expand into Instagram.

The core responsibilities of this role will be to

Visual content production – 40 per cent

You will be responsible for producing all of the company’s visual assets. You will ensure they are accessible and continue to create new, exciting graphics, videos and photography, maintaining the quality and uniqueness of our brand.

Developing our core brand guidelines, you will master how to create beautiful templates and layouts in Google slides and docs for all the team to use. Utilising your strong graphic and creative talents, you will be regularly using Adobe CS to produce beautiful visual assets in-house, including image reels, GIFs, illustrations, infographics, video shorts, develop report layouts etc. As well as work with external suppliers to capture new, crafted photography and moving images, often going on shoots to support and coordinate its delivery. In addition, you will maintain our files and template libraries in our Google Drive to make it easy for all the team to find and access materials and produce their own assets when needed.

Channel and campaign management – 25 per cent

You will coordinate and publish all our social media and website content. You will be challenged to ensure high levels of impressions and interaction with our content and help to ensure we deliver successful paid campaigns.

Planning in advance the content style and format across the channels, providing short copy to accompany the posts and monitoring comments and their performance.

During periods when we deliver paid campaigns, you will be logging into Linkedin, Facebook and other platforms to ensure the campaigns are running well and we are tracking the user journeys.

Newsletters and event marketing – 15 per cent

You will lead on coordinating, designing and sending our numerous newsletters on a monthly basis, ensuring a high open rate and low bounce rate. You will also be responsible for promoting our public and industry-focused events via third-party platforms such as Eventbrite, making sure we attract as wide and diverse audience as possible.

Day to day, this will include:

working with colleagues to gather copy and information to update Eventbrite listings, website pages and ensuring we are reaching and promoting our work to the correct audiences
maintaining our Mailchimp audience lists and scheduling and designing our numerous newsletters, ensuring they are sent out at the optimum times of the day and continue to be accessible and beautiful

Reporting and analytics – 10 per cent

As the owner of our digital channels, you will be responsible for ensuring we are tracking and capturing the data we need to help inform our strategy and monitor our wider impact.

You will delve into G4 and other reporting platforms on a regular basis. You will produce the right tracking tags and links between our Typeform surveys, website button clicks and social click-throughs and then, reporting on that data for colleagues to analyse and learn from.

The other ten per cent of your time will be covered by core, team and professional development activities throughout the year.

The first six months in the role

Within the first six months as our creative content producer, you will have:

hit the ground running in your first month by taking on the management of social media postings and developing assets to support our officer survey open throughout February
worked with external photographers and videographers to produce beautifully edited career and place-based story content for our new print publication and website
supported the production and implementation of our next digital recruitment campaign, launching in April, with the support and guidance of our external communications agency, learning how to implement and track a paid campaign
developed our company slide decks and produced new materials to support the launch of new services in 24/25
produced infographics and helped format our next recruitment and resourcing insights report
taken on the responsibility of coordinating and sending our monthly newsletters
attended numerous meetings with colleagues and input into our 24/25 marketing and content strategy
worked with colleagues to produce new engaging website images and be trained in how to manage the back end of our new site
supported and attended our next in-person forum event in March and continue to develop the visual style of our talk series
improved the accessibility of our digital content and updated our career shaping video series, with more stories and visual assets
attended a number of professional training days and developed your own personal development plan

Working at Public Practice

We are a small company but work hard to ensure we provide and continue to develop inclusive and progressive policies and benefits. Currently, we provide all employees with the following:

we operate under a nine-day-fortnight working policy for ten of the twelve months of the year
two days of office access per week at the co-working office Better Space, Farringdon, of which we currently require a minimum of one day in the office per week (on Wednesdays) by all staff
regular team away days and team lunches
27 days of holiday per year excluding bank holidays
a flexible and remote working policy that allows employees to work their own hours beyond agreed core office hours and to work from abroad for two months of the year (in August and December)
provide a four per cent employer’s pension contribution
enhanced sick, maternity, paternity and adoption leave
£600 annual training budget and up to four professional development days a year
Employee perks budget provided by With Juno monthly

The hiring process

Our hiring process assesses a candidate’s ability to meet the attributes we think are necessary for someone to do well in the role. We are also interested in a candidate’s motivation and interest in working at Public Practice and in a small company team. We do not review CVs or a candidate’s educational background when making hiring decisions. To us, it doesn’t matter how you built your skills and knowledge, just that you have the right ones for the role we want to hire for.

We remove as much bias as possible during our hiring process, and candidates remain anonymous to all assessors until stage two and are all marked against pre-set criteria. We also aim to collect and provide as much feedback as possible to all applicants at each stage of the process.

Stage one (13 October to 6 November, 10 am)

Submit an online application answering some short written questions and providing a few graphic examples of your work. All applications are then anonymously assessed. Those scoring above a minimum threshold are then invited to stage two.

Stage two (14 November)

Attend a structured online interview with the head of brand and COO, which lasts approximately 25 minutes.

Stage three (21 November)

Selected candidates will then be asked to present a prepared response to two tasks at a second stage interview and meet other colleagues in the team; this can be in-person or online (at the candidate’s choice) and will last approximately 45 minutes.

Stage four (23 November)

We aim that all candidates will have been communicated with an update on their application and the selected candidate will receive an offer of appointment.

We hope to see the candidate in the post in January 2024, but we are flexible for either earlier or later start dates, depending on the candidate’s situation and notice period.

How to apply

The first stage of the application process asks candidates to complete just five questions, which will then be scored anonymously by three Public Practice colleagues. The online form also asks some questions about you. This data will not be shared with those assessing your application.

The five questions are:

why do you want to work for Public Practice (100 words max)
why are you applying for this role (100 words max)
please upload three examples of your previous visual design work, showcasing your ability to produce high-quality and accessible content for various channels. We would ideally like this to include an example of a social media post, a report or publication and one other of your choosing.
(three image attachments max)
describe a scenario where you delivered a successful email campaign and include software features and functions you found most helpful and how you approached producing the copy for the campaign to ensure it was accessible for users whilst meeting the tone of voice of the brand (250 words max)
describe a current topical issue within the built environment industry that interests you or impacts your life or local area, and tell us why (100 words max)

Please ensure you stick to the word limit listed for each question – any words beyond the limit listed will be lost when taken for anonymous assessment!

Complete and submit this online form by 10:00 am, Monday 6 November, 2023.

Please note we do not accept applications outside of this system and any direct emails with CV’s sent to us will be deleted.

Want to know more or have a question?

If you would like to speak to the COO (the hiring lead) about this role and whether it could be the right fit for you, or if you have any specific access adjustment needs we haven’t addressed:

There are several 10-minute call slots available during the advert period on a first-come-first-serve basis.

If you would prefer to email your questions directly, email us and we will aim to respond within 48 hours.

If you have a question about this role but want to remain anonymous, we’ve created an anonymous question form, open till 30 October, with our answers being shared openly across our social channels soon after.

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