Social Impact Senior Communications and Execution Manager

Social Impact Senior Communications and Execution Manager

Location: Swindon or London

Salary: Circa £81,000

We are looking for an experienced senior manager to join the Social Impact team, part of the Customer, Brand & Engagement (CB&E) function.

This critical leadership role will be accountable for activating and amplifying our Social Impact strategy. Your team will be the connection between our fantastic charity partnerships and our colleagues, customers, and communities. To find out more about our Fairer Futures strategy click here.

Working closely with the Lead Manager for Strategic Relationships and Strategy, you’ll be responsible for owning and driving initiatives and programmes which have a meaningful impact on society and deepen customer and colleague sentiment and advocacy. With your depth of experience in communications and engagement, defining the best channel mix and messaging to drive true engagement and passion will be second nature. You and your team will lead on all planning and execution – from timing and operational plans, through to budget, content, delivery, accessibility, and measurement.

It goes without saying that you’ll be an experienced people leader who invests time into building a team who are as happy as they are high performing.

It’s an exciting time to be in Social Impact and we are looking for someone to join us who has the drive, ambition, and passion to make the most meaningful impact on customers, communities, and society.

This role is within the Customer Brand and Engagement Function, which is responsible for building and maintaining Nationwide’s brand and reputation both for customers and colleagues.

The Social Impact team ensures that the 1% of pre-tax profits that Nationwide’s puts to good causes is spent in a responsible and impactful way that connects colleagues, customers and the wider community with our brand in positive and meaningful ways.

At Nationwide we offer hybrid working wherever possible. More rewarding relationships are supported through our hybrid approach, bringing colleagues together across our UK wide estate, whilst also supporting generous access to home working. We value our time in the office to solve problems, to learn, and to feel connected.

For this job you'll spend at least two days per week, or if part time you'll spend 40% of your working time, based at either our London or Swindon office. If your application is successful, your hiring manager will provide further details on how this works. You can also find out more about our approach to hybrid working here.

If we receive a high volume of relevant applications, we may close the advert earlier than the advertised date, so please apply as soon as you can.

What you’ll be doing

You’ll be leading the promotion of, and engagement with, Fairer Futures across the Society – proactively championing the work and impact of the programmes.

You’ll lead a team who are creating outstanding communications and collateral, and executing impactful, memorable moments for colleagues and customers. You will exhibit strong creative judgement and have established seamless ways of working to enable the team to operate at pace with best practice and robust processes.

You will role model what good looks like through your direct involvement of managing internal and external relationship and executing against the planned activity. You will be confident and capable of building strong relationships with a wide range of stakeholders, including our Executive Team and Board, our charity partners, colleagues, and our Social Impact ambassadors.

You will use your excellent planning and organisational skills to apply focus and clarity on priorities and be comfortable flexing where needed and managing multiple activities simultaneously with high standards and expectations for delivery.

You’ll be an integral part of the leadership team, seeking opportunities to maximise the impact of the available budget and creating a culture of support, development, collaboration, and high performance.

About you

• Strong line management experience, along with leadership and mentoring experience. You can demonstrate your ability to nurture and lead a high performing team leveraging individual styles and preferences.
• A successful record of converting an organisational strategy into delivery plans and leading teams to deliver against them - high impact, well planned, strong comms and engagement delivery and to budget.
• Direct experience or can demonstrate a strong interest in the third sector.
• Strong relationship management skills, confident at engaging the most senior stakeholders, supported by strong negotiation and influencing capabilities.
• Excellent planning and organisational skills and ability to manage and own multiple competing priorities and deliverables. Able to create and work within a well governed environment and optimise processes.
• You will have the ability to demonstrate decisiveness and sound judgement on a consistent basis and have solid copy and creative development expertise.
• With strong critical thinking, you’ll comprehend and assimilate information rapidly, break down complex problems and provide support and challenge in a clear and understandable way to suit different audiences.
• You are an experienced system thinker – able to understand interconnectivity and interdependencies within the Social Impact agenda.
• You must be a highly motivated self-starter, able to work in ambiguity and turn the vague into a working brief. Able to work autonomously as well as part of a team.

Our Customer First behaviours are all about putting customers and members at the heart of how we work together. You can strengthen your application by showing the behaviours that resonate with you, and how you might have already demonstrated these.

• Say it straight - This is about being honest and direct with good intent and saying what needs to be said in the room. It’s also about being clear, precise, and using language that we and, importantly, our customers and members can understand.
• Push for better - This is about aiming high and constantly looking for better in how we work together and serve our customers and members.
• Get it done - This is about prioritising what will have the greatest impact, being decisive and taking accountability for delivering on the end-to-end outcome.

We know applying for jobs can sometimes feel like you’re sending an application into a black hole. We review each application individually. So, it’s a good idea to call out your most relevant experience on your application to give yourself the best chance.

The extras you’ll get

There are all sorts of employee benefits available at Nationwide, including:

• A personal pension – if you put in 7% of your salary, we’ll top up by a further 16%
• Up to 2 days of paid volunteering a year
• Life assurance worth 8x your salary
• A great selection of additional benefits through our salary sacrifice scheme
• Wellhub – Access to a range of free and paid options for health and wellness.
• Access to an annual performance related bonus
• Access to training to help you develop and progress your career
• 30 days holiday, pro rata
• Individual healthcare cover

What makes us different

Nationwide is the world’s largest building society. With over 15 million customers, we have a relationship with almost a quarter of the UK’s population. We’ve got the scale to compete with the big banks, but we’re not a bank.

As a building society, we’re owned by our members – that’s our customers who have their current account, mortgage or savings with us. It means we can do things differently to deliver our Purpose – Banking – but fairer, more rewarding, and for the good of society.

When you work at Nationwide, you can experience that difference for yourself. You’ll be part of a high-performing, purpose-driven organisation that offers rewarding career experiences and a highly competitive range of benefits to match. You’ll also be joining us at an important time as we seek to reach more and more people in the UK. We want everyone in the UK to know that they don’t have to bank with a bank. They can choose a modern mutual instead.

Please note that should you be successful in securing this role the job title on our internal systems will be Social impact Senior Manager