Commercial/ funding raising manager for small education charity.

The Education Media Centre is looking for a commercial manager who can help us to secure and maintain new sources of income. This small charity is five years old and in our early days we were backed by grant funding – but now we are developing new income streams to ensure sustainability and stability over the longer term.

The EMC is a charity whose purpose is to improve public awareness and understanding of education research and evidence, via the media. We are looking for someone who’s interested in working with us on a freelance basis –around 2 days per week – and whose role would be to find new opportunities for raising income so that we have the funds we need to continue our work.

The main ways we fulfil this purpose are by:

• Identifying good, newsworthy academic research on education and telling journalists about it.
• Helping to ensure that the evidence that lies behind running news stories is easily accessible. We do this mainly via social media and via our weekly newsletter.
• Helping journalists to make contact with experts who may be able to provide comment, context or other expert input for articles they’re writing on education topics.
• Working with academics to improve their media and communication skills.

In addition to our core, charitable work we have developed a programme of sponsorship packages which fall into four categories:

• Training and mentoring work with universities and research institutes. These involve one-to-one mentoring, blog, social media and media training and advice on where and how to pitch specific pieces of research to journalists.
• A sponsorship package with a major academic publisher, under which we receive advance notice of academic research so that we can identify potential stories before the papers are published.
• A series of ‘masterclass’ seminars with BESA, aimed at education businesses who want to improve their media or communication skills.
• Expert consultancy, which has included advice on web-based information services and on research impact statements.

Our USP is that we are staffed by top-flight education journalists. All those currently working for EMC are former education correspondents in the national media, and all are still working as journalists on a freelance basis alongside their EMC work.

We are looking for a freelance commercial manager who has good contacts in the world of education along with commercial and/or fundraising experience. The work is very flexible in terms of hours and location, and is part-time.

If you would like to apply, please contact Fran Abrams, Chief Executive of the Education Media Centre: fran.abrams@educationmediacentre.org