Are you a sustainability communications consultant with expert knowledge across both environmental and social issues?
We are partnered with an expert in sustainability strategy, disclosure and communications, and their projects often sit at the intersection of all of these disciplines. Their team provides in-depth knowledge of the sustainability agenda alongside engagement and communications skills to bring strategy, ambition and impact to life.
As the Senior Sustainability Communications Consultant, you will work in partnership with other specialists in the team across strategy and engagement projects. A strategic communications perspective helps translate technical issues and insights into engaging strategic models and effective communication with stakeholders. Work is often 'upstream' of communications outputs and can involve research and benchmarking, workshop exploration and insight development to help shape strategic responses to client challenges.
During a strategy development process, your role will be to help successfully bridge between business, brand and sustainability strategy to deliver well-articulated ambitions and propositions. This also creates a faster route through to engagement and communications, which often includes audience mapping and the development of key messaging and assets or tools for stakeholder engagement - meaning they can manage the whole project lifecycle.
As a Senior Sustainability Communications Consultant, you will also lead large research and reporting projects - working from best practice, trends and insights through to content mapping, content development and creative execution (including in digital channels). Therefore, key skill is analysis, strategic writing and storytelling expertise. You will need to bring together both technical sustainability and communications expertise so that final outputs are rigorous, insightful and engaging. Recent examples of this include a large report for the Department for Education on the sector's Net Zero pathway (co-created with 21 universities and colleges); an internal report for a luxury fashion brand on the intersection of Women and Climate; and an external Sustainability Report for a US pharmaceutical company including disclosure against the latest frameworks and ESG regulations.
At a more tactical level - you will also lead communications planning and execution alongside their client's teams. You will work with writers, designers and project managers to creatively launch strategies, initiatives and events to internal and external audiences. At times they are also asked to collaborate with their clients' communications and marketing partners, from PR companies to advertising agencies, providing a unique insight into the sustainability agenda.
In addition to client challenges, you will also help develop new business opportunities by creating content for their own marketing and thought leadership, as well as shaping proposals for new and existing clients. This includes an internal role of managing their social media content calendar with a member of their project management team.
Key skills
Communications experience in:
- Sustainability engagement and communications (at a brand or corporate level) - with expert knowledge across both environmental and social issues
- Corporate communications and corporate affairs experience - developing strategic comms plans, managing key issues and developing content targeted at a range of stakeholders
- Strategic content and proposition development - including crafting messages, writing toolkits, thought leadership, reports and digital content
- Trend and research analysis and conclusions - focused on actionable outcomes
- Crafting engaging presentations or papers for clients - translating technical sustainability issues or findings into actionable insights for senior leaders
- Report planning and execution - client engagement, strategic planning, content structure, key message development, integration of key disclosures and regulation
- Designing, leading and facilitating strategic brainstorms and workshops
What this means to clients and the team
You will be the expert in the team who helps bridge from sustainability know-how to effective strategy articulation and engagement of key stakeholders. This helps clients effectively engage and consult across the organisation and sets them up for success when activating the sustainability strategy.
You will also bring a different perspective to the strategy development process by applying an outside-in view of brand, comms and partnerships that is often lost via purely insight-led strategy work. This can be vital in bringing to life what strategic decisions could mean.
Your skills will also integrate with their clients' own communications and marketing teams/partners, bringing everyone needed to contribute to the process while maintaining the credibility of content and ideas for activation.
What this means day-to-day
- You will be introduced to clients as the Communications lead on key projects - becoming their lead communications advisor and helping to shape workstreams, comms plans, briefs and key outputs
- You will partner with leadership on larger projects with existing or future clients - and take ownership of the day-to-day communications delivery
- You will work alongside strategic sustainability consultants to provide thinking and ideas on how projects are framed or articulated
- You will work directly with members of the Client Management Team, who provide the client service and project management for all projects, supporting them on project planning, key actions and next steps
- You will work with their Design Director and freelance creative team to shape creative briefs and provide content for concepts and implementation
- You will lead communications and reporting trends research, and support the rest of the team with ongoing best practice and ideas to energise the thinking
- You will champion an area of the company's internal 'Knowledge Tracks' with a small internal team to gather and share knowledge on specific topics or issues such as DE&I, ESG raters or emerging disclosure frameworks. Everyone in the company leads a key area and they use this to build and share knowledge universally.
Please apply now or contact Jamie Ferguson directly at Jamie.ferguson@acre.com.