Updated 4th March 2011. Recruiting has been extended, and a slightly edited version of this description (including new instructions on how to apply) is available at the Guardian Jobs website.

mySociety Communications Manager

Do you enjoy communicating through all the channels that the modern internet has to offer? Do you enjoy helping users as well as pitching to journalists and companies? Are you looking for a communications job with a greater sense of purpose? If so, mySociety’s new Communications Manager role could be for you.

Is this you?

mySociety is a project of registered charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, currently running award-winning civic and democratic websites like TheyWorkForYou.com and FixMyStreet.com. Our services had over 5 million unique visitors in 2010, but we believe that there are a lot more people who would benefit from what we do, if only we were better at communicating. The job of the new Communications Manager will be to help mySociety reach out to these potential beneficiaries, as well as to prospective commercial clients.

The Communications Manager will be a new post at mySociety, funded by the Omidyar Network, with a 12 month contract in the first instance.  This is a home working position and the successful candidate can be located anywhere in the UK. Occasional UK travel will be required to meetings and events. Salary: £28-31k.

Organisational Context

mySociety has ten full time staff, and a wider community of energetic and creative volunteers. This is a newly created, full-time role as an employee of mySociety Ltd, reporting to the Head of Operations and Finance but working with everyone, including the volunteers.

mySociety operates a number of not-for-profit websites, and carries out high quality software development on a commercial basis to support the charity. The key objectives of this role are:

1. To drive public awareness and usage of our not-for-profit websites.
2. To work with users of our not-for-profit websites to help them achieve their goals, whether on our sites or elsewhere.
3. To drive awareness of our commercial sites and services, respectively building their traffic and generating commercial sales prospects.

It is important to communicate that the position is a combination of a classic PR role with a more modern digital community management role: the successful candidate will need to feel as comfortable over quiet lunches with journalists as they are with Facebook’s ever-changing featureset.

The focus of activities would be primarily within the UK, but will involve supporting our team’s international partnerships and projects. We have no fixed offices, and have team members working from home spread across the country who work and communicate primarily via the net. There are face-to-face meetups every week or two.

Key Responsibilities and Deliverables

1. Helping mySociety to make the most effective possible use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media, through a combination of authorial skills and analytics.
2. Sourcing the materials for a monthly email newsletter, writing and delivering it, and processing click-through data to improve the next iteration.
3. Working directly with users of our sites, especially FixMyStreet and FixMyTransport, to help them work together to achieve their goals.
4. Blogging on mySociety’s site, and encouraging the rest of the organisation to blog and communicate more.
5. Building relationships with journalists, and gaining media coverage of new launches and noteworthy events in the mySociety universe.
6. Co-organising occasional events with mySociety’s Office Manager.
7. Producing copy and coordinating design for commercial briefing documents, such as sales brochures.
8. Managing our Google Adwords account.

Person Specification

Must have:

• At least 2 years experience in a role that involved regular authoring of press releases and blog posts
• At least 12 months involvement with some kind of predominantly online community
• Graduate level spoken and written communications skills

Desirable qualities:

• Experience as a journalist
• Experience of fighting campaigns, especially at a local level
• Experience of monitoring performance of Google Adwords, Facebook adverts, email mailshots, postal mailshots or other kinds of marketing which can be improved through quantitative testing and iteration
• Experience of both charitable and commercial PR
• Pre-existing relationships with journalists and bloggers in a variety of sectors
• Trusted reputation within at least one online social service that is issue specific (e.g. Mumsnet, Rightsnet, Ravelry)