Senior Brand Strategist

You’re a gifted, confident communicator and facilitator, even with the toughest stakeholders. You enjoy and have a knack for building relationships, knowing that building trust will pave the path for our team to make beautiful, useful, and successful campaigns. You have the strategic vision to brainstorm and identify new opportunities mutually beneficial to our company’s growth and the growth and success of our partners.

You love meeting prospective partners to understand their vision and get excited about the opportunity to help them carry it further. “Sales” may not be your thing, but fostering and stewarding relationships is. You’re comfortable contributing to the process by helping future partners understand who we are and how we can help them. You hit your stride when you’ve built a trusting partnership and can drive ongoing, long-term relationships that contribute to the top line.

You’re comfortable and fluent with branding and how it can be applied across all mediums (print, digital, live events, etc.) to support an organization’s goals and are excited to develop plans and ideas. You’ve helped clients develop everything from competitive analysis to project briefs, strategic marketing plans, and more. At the same time, you think critically about the client and various projects we’re supporting them with and can point out potential problems and solutions–or even opportunities.

You love seeing all of the disparate pieces of a puzzle and seeing how they all fit together with clarity and ease.

You’re a fantastic collaborator. You’ve worked closely with designers and writers, and you are excited to see your foundational work represented conceptually with impactful execution.

You are proactive, self-motivated, and organized. You thrive in creating clarity out of chaos - communicating the clarity you’ve created and bringing people along. You’re comfortable presenting work to clients and listening for what they’re not saying. You enjoy facilitating conversations and exercises in workshops, presentations, and meetings and thrive when you have to think on your feet. You can work a room. You can defend your decisions with confidence, professionalism, wisdom, and research. You are curious, empathetic, and – most importantly – willing to set your ego aside for the greater good of our partners and teammates.

Bonus round: You’re knowledgeable about nonprofits and fundraising campaigns. You’re excited to help our partners crystallize their vision for their organization’s future, and you embrace your toolkit of research methods to help them arrive at relevant strategies and tactics that empower them to meet their goals.

The Role

The Senior Brand Strategist will work closely with our creative, project management, business development, and leadership teams to help service the agency and our partners’ needs. The responsibilities listed below follow the phases of our process.

Key Responsibilities

• Be curious about what makes our partners tick and what will motivate their constituents.
• Get excited about researching partner organizations and others in the landscape.
• Build a good understanding of the nonprofit world, fundraising campaigns, our partners, their peers, competitors, etc., and use that knowledge in practice with partners.
• Listen to partners with intent and know what to do with the information received (e.g., how it informs research, how it could spark a creative idea, how it could be a red flag for us, etc.).
• Ask questions that lead to uncovering truths or ideas.
• Facilitate strategic workshops in a room full of egos and politics.
• Synthesize findings into themes and ideas and collaborate with a writer to create impactful briefs.
• Think on the fly, be creative, and be comfortable with the fact that we all have bad ideas, and that’s ok.
• Have a toolkit for finding/building alignment with large groups.

Discover

• Research: Researching partner materials and other relevant landscapes to summarize highlights and opportunities.
• Interviews: Facilitating discovery interviews with problem-finding, insights, and opportunities in mind.
• Backlog: Capturing ideas to help activate the brand in a backlog.
• Summary: Driving and facilitating internal discussions around key strategic insights captured throughout the Discovery process and setting up our writers to deliver the Executive Summary and Key Insights report.
• Report: Reviewing key discernment summaries that capture research insights and analysis.

Write

• Workshop: Working with teammates and co-facilitating collaborative workshops with clients, ensuring key insights are carried from Discover into Write.
• Framework: Guiding and reviewing our essential questions, ensuring the who, what, and why it matters is accurate and aligns with strategic findings from the Discover process.
• Insights: Participating in strategic naming, messaging, and identity design recommendations.
• Backlog: Continuing to capture and add activation ideas to the backlog.

Design

• Concepts: Collaborating with the creative team to establish core and directional ideas.
• Critique: Sharing keen observations, opinionated viewpoints, and objective feedback with teammates to ensure our solutions are world-class and aligned with the throughlines of findings from Discovery and Write phases.
• Account: Capturing and owning key creative ideas in Design and throughout, looking for opportunities to help activate the brands we’re building. Adding to the backlog of activation ideas.

Accounts

• Working with our partners, navigating conflict, staying on target, developing, growing, and building stronger partnerships.

Activate

• Leveraging activation ideas captured in the backlog throughout and beginning the activation process.
• Facilitating Monthly, Quarterly, and sometimes Annual Strategy "Dreamspace" sessions with partners to further build out the strategy for their fundraising campaigns and adding to our backlog of Activation work to support these efforts.
• Working with the account team to ensure that campaign strategy is carried out properly across deliverables.

Support

• Working with the CEO in the business development process to help pitch existing partners, as needed.
• Remaining high-level on accounts to maintain the client relationship, continue conversations, and probe for information that will allow you to develop helpful and actionable strategic recommendations or new projects.
• Supporting and coaching our partners in their day-to-day needs (in ways that may be non-traditional - like coaching) but relevant to our work, helping position the partnership for an even stronger relationship.
• Help case studies take shape to best represent our strategic solutions with new business in mind.
• Sharing expertise through short- and long-form thought leadership in an effort to help us expand our reach and further grow partnerships.

Background/Requirements

Minimum of 10+ years of experience in a client-facing strategy role for a consultancy (branding agency experience preferred). Experience in the higher education/non-profit campaign fundraising space is an added bonus.

This is a full-time remote salaried position commensurate with experience. We are a fully distributed team. Travel is required. We are only accepting applications from candidates currently residing in the continental United States. We are committed to building a diverse and passionate team. Women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals are encouraged to apply.

Parisleaf provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, genetics, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or veteran status. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.