About Race Forward
Race Forward's mission is to catalyze movement building for racial justice. In partnership with communities, organizations, and sectors, we build strategies to advance racial justice in our policies, institutions, and culture. Race Forward imagines a just, multiracial democratic society free from oppression and exploitation, in which people of color thrive with power and purpose.
Since 1981, Race Forward has brought a systemic analysis and an innovative approach to complex race issues to help people take effective action toward racial equity. In 2017 Race Forward united with the Center for Social Inclusion to become the new Race Forward.
About Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE)
GARE is a national network of local, regional and state government jurisdictions. Racial equity practitioners within member jurisdictions design and implement strategies that serve to advance a more racially just and equitable society.
Specifically, GARE fosters critical connections among racial equity leaders and practitioners in order to develop and share skills, lessons and approaches to strengthen racial equity policies, practices and cultural strategies within jurisdictions
Position Summary
The GARE Online Community Manager manages the GARE Network Portal, a growing online community platform that connects 9000+ racial equity practitioners working in government. As a member of GARE's Network Strategies team, the Online Community Manager develops and manages key infrastructure supporting the network's engagement strategies, building mechanisms to identify opportunities for network-led collaboration and connection guided by the questions, discussions, and contributions of community users. They ensure that the online community's information architecture, database, and automation rules effectively connect users to resources and to one another and can leverage the collective knowledge within the network. They work with teammates in the process of recommending and implementing tactical improvements to the online community, including utilizing platform marketing and engagement tools, managing resource libraries, and developing protocols to support network-led groups and registration for network events and learning opportunities. The Online Community Manager also identifies and solves problems, provides oversight and moderation, and assists with overall platform design and development of processes and protocols in partnership with the Director of Online Community.
Duties and Responsibilities
Works under the direction of the GARE Director of Online Community to:
- Manage all aspects of the GARE Network Portal on the Higher Logic Online Community (or similar) platform, including building and maintaining discussion forums, social features, events, and resource libraries.
- Design and deploy campaigns to foster participation within the online community, creating automation and personalization rules to encourage users to engage (e.g. join new groups or complete their user profiles).
- Build mechanisms to elevate topics, discussions and patterns of accomplishments that serve as examples for advancing racial equity work in government.
- Develop curation strategies and tools to identify member-created content that can be aggregated into resource guides and libraries.
- Provide online community research support to inform content and network connections to disseminate content (tools, issue papers, resource guides) developed by GARE Transformative Strategies team and other partners, providing a perspective grounded in the online community of practice.
- Create and apply information architecture, including site maps, navigation, and taxonomies facilitating user connections and information retrieval.
- Conceptualize, test, deliver and iterate product enhancements that improve user experience while balancing stakeholder needs, organizational strategic direction, privacy and regulatory considerations, and long-term operational goals.
- Participate in design and implementation of platform moderation strategies that uphold community values.
- Provide research assistance and resources to members while encouraging peer support and community engagement.
- Collaborate with GARE Operations and Transformative Strategies teams to build reporting systems, dashboards, and metrics that demonstrate impact to internal and external stakeholders.
- Establish strong partnerships with internal and external stakeholders, including participating in or leading meetings with cross-departmental groups within GARE/Race Forward, developing protocols for onboarding users and group admins to the online community and making presentations at network events.
- Provide material support to subject area working groups, discussion spaces and other member-led network spaces.
- Collaborate with Director of Narrative and Communications and Membership Coordinator to coordinate and standardize marketing, onboarding, and other communications assets.
Knowledge Skills and Abilities
To perform successfully in this role, incumbent should possess skills identified below:
Required
- Demonstrated commitment to racial equity and social justice work
- Strong organizational skills and ability to synthesize information, with a high attention to detail
- Ability to analyze social and behavioral data to identify opportunities and insights
- Commitment to user or experience-centered design approaches
- Ability to establish and maintain effective, collaborative working relationships with other staff and online community users. Must also be able to work independently.
- Ability to multi-task and juggle priorities and multiple communications platforms
- Ability to work well under pressure, to meet deadlines while making sound decisions, and to accommodate shifting priorities
- Strong communication skills, written and oral
- Ability to generate and curate content related to racial equity
- Ability to design and implement marketing strategies specific to government audiences
- Strong research, information retrieval and data analysis skills
- Fluency with MS Office systems, including Word and Excel
- Familiarity with Salesforce or equivalent CRM
- Enthusiasm to work as part of a fully remote team
- Strong relationship-building skills and able to authentically convey a sociable, caring, engaging, and approachable affect in order to build meaningful relationships with members on behalf of the organization
Qualifications and Experience
- Bachelor's degree in communications, marketing, public relations, information management, or related fields or equivalent experience
- 3+ years of project management / information management / digital engagement experience
- 2+ years creating content strategies to increase user engagement, demonstrating success by utilizing analytical data
- 2+ years of building and maintaining online communities within a dedicated platform, like Higher Logic, preferably for social impact networks, non-profits, or associations
- 2+ years administering Learning Management Systems, like Elevate
