Communications Officer

Job Description

About the role

The Communications Officer plays an important role in ensuring our audiences get the information and the support that they need across our key channels. This is a varied role where you will gain experience in several areas of communications and marketing, including social media, content creation and email marketing. You will be working alongside our Communications Lead, who will provide mentorship and support to help you excel in your communications career. You will also benefit from working across programmes and projects with all members of the Student Minds’ team, growing your communication and relationship skills and knowledge of higher education and student mental health.

Our social media accounts are a key communications tool for the charity. They enable us to engage with our networks, provide resources and support, and communicate our work, impact, and the importance of student mental health. These tools work together with our digital marketing and website to effectively communicate with our audiences. We use several social media platforms, including Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, BlueSky, YouTube and Facebook. This role will help us improve our platforms and storytelling, ensuring students’ voices and experiences are at the centre. This will involve working with students and our advisory groups to share their stories and listen to their improvements for change. You will play a key role in communicating our work to ensure no student is held back by their mental health.

Key details

Location: Flexible, open to hybrid and remote working, with occasional travel to Leeds required.

Hours of work: Full time (37.5 hours a week)

Contract: 12 months fixed term

Salary: Band E £26,227.5

Start date: As soon as practicable

Role purpose: To support the charity's communications and marketing activities. Sharing support for students, our programmes, influencing and advocacy, and income generation on social media. Working with the wider team to support their project comms, sharing key learnings and evaluations with the wider team to develop and improve how we communicate with our key audiences.

Key responsibilities

Social media

Scheduling posts on our social media management platform and organising our social media calendar.

Creating content for social media channels, including designing digital assets such as photo and video content.

Content moderation and responding to comments, questions and messages across our social media platforms.

Helping us react to news and events happening in real-time which impact students and university communities.

Keeping up to date with any changes to social media platforms and trends and making changes if needed in response to them.

Communications and marketing

● Support and create digital campaigns to promote our programmes and vision.

Collate, edit and schedule content for our national digital newsletters, tailoring the content to the relevant audience.

● Work with the Communications Lead to champion brand compliance and make sure we are consistent with our branding across all of our work.

Prepare content for key student, higher education and mental health awareness days, holidays and events throughout the student calendar.

Storytelling and student voice

Champion student involvement in content creation and support students to safely develop and share their stories and experiences through videos and blogs.

● Work with our Senior Digital Product Manager to share stories on our website.

● Create and share newsletters with the Student Minds Student Community, working with our student engagement committee.

● Work with students, influencers and partners to create and make content with us to share across our channels.

Have an understanding of students' needs and values, keeping up to date with current trends to successfully engage students through communications and marketing.

Address: Student Minds, PO Box 157, Leeds University Union, Lifton Place, Leeds LS2 9NG

No student should be held back by their mental health

Monitoring and evaluation

● Analyse and share key insights and learnings about our social media platforms with the team.

● Evaluate our national newsletter and make changes to improve it.

● Evaluate our communications campaigns and share key learnings with the team.

Support the wider team with communications/project support

● Create and share the internal newsletter to share updates with the staff team

● Support other members of staff with project-specific digital newsletters.

Become a digital champion and utilise website data and evaluations to improve our communications and content development.

Provide communications support, knowledge and insights to project teams to help them achieve their goals. Help team members explore how to reach their target audiences based on the available budget and resources.

Other duties

● Such other duties as may be reasonably prescribed by the organisation, appropriate to the grade and responsibilities of this post.

Attend regular team meetings with the Student Minds team and colleagues throughout the year as required.

● Keep up to date with knowledge in your own area of work.

Uphold the organisation’s values and ensure the team upholds these, including embedding Equity, Diversity and Inclusion practices and engaging with our antiracism work.

Follow data protection, safeguarding, confidentiality and relevant organisational policies and procedures.

● Work in a flexible way and undertake tasks to support Student Minds colleagues as needed.

Please note that this job description is an indicative list of responsibilities of the role, and it’s not exhaustive.

Person specification

The successful candidate will be able to demonstrate the majority of the following competencies and experience:

No student should be held back by their mental health

Lead criterion

To ensure a fair and efficient review process, we assess all applications against one lead criterion first. Please note that if your application does not clearly demonstrate this experience, it will not progress to the next stage of shortlisting.

Social media and communications campaigns: running social media accounts or creating communications campaigns for a cause. This includes using SproutSocial or a similar social media scheduling tool.

Essential/Minimum:

Digital image creation: using Canva or a similar programme to create and share digital images.

Communication skills: good communication, both written and verbal, with experience writing engaging content for different audiences, with a high level of accuracy and attention to detail.

Knowledge of marketing and social media: a good knowledge of social media platforms and trends, including the best way to reach students and university communities through marketing.

● Stakeholder relationships: ability to build and maintain good working relationships with a range of stakeholders including internal colleagues, beneficiaries and external stakeholders, and work both independently and collaboratively with team members. This includes confidence in sharing constructive feedback in a fair and supportive way.

Time management: excellent time management skills, with the ability to apply good judgement to manage, prioritise and balance conflicting demands.

Commitment to Student Minds vision and values: including our priorities of student co-production, inclusion and anti-racism and an interest in mental health and wellbeing.

Desirable:

● Video creation: sharing and editing videos and adding captions for social media and YouTube.

Newsletters and email marketing: using Mailchimp or a similar email marketing system to share newsletters with a large audience.

Sector knowledge: knowledge of the mental health landscape in UK higher education and issues facing students generally. This could include experience working with students, in higher education or within the mental health sector.

● Navigating the hostile environment on social media: ability to respond and react to difficult messages and respond in a rational and timely way.

No student should be held back by their mental health

Evaluation: knowledge of evaluation techniques and how to turn this data into learning.

Technical proficiency: Practical use of digital collaboration tools (e.g. Google Workspace, MS Office, Slack, Asana)