Head of Student Communications and Content

Campus / Location: Strand Campus

About King’s:

The King’s community is dedicated to the service of society. King’s Strategic Vision 2029 sets out our vision for the future, shaped around five priority areas: educate to inspire and improve; research to inform and innovate; serve to shape and transform; a civic university at the heart of London; and an international community that services the world. Our ambitious Education Strategy sets out the actions that we must take to transform how we teach, how and where our students learn and how we support them during their time with us.

The Student Knowledge & Information department brings together colleagues who are focussed on helping students to get the information they need quickly and easily and also to engage with their programme and university life more broadly, through management of inbound enquiries and service requests, static and dynamic digital content, and outbound communications. Our remit covers all King’s students, from enrolment to graduation.

The Student Communications & Content team deliver innovative, digital-led and student-focused communications and content to equip our students with everything they need to know outside the content of their programme to complete their studies successfully and get the most out of student life.

We are part of the Students & Education Directorate, a collection of wide-ranging professional services in place to support King’s students and their education. As a directorate we manage the student lifecycle from application to graduation and beyond, to ensure a coherent and seamless student experience and effective administrative processes, working closely with King’s faculties to do so.

About the role:

The Head of Student Communications and Content will lead and manage a team, or be a subject matter expert, in the key operational service area of student communications and content, ensuring the senior team, and wider Directorate, are fully supported with effective processes and systems across a wide range of business and operational workstreams.

Head of Service and/or Senior Managers have operational responsibility for a defined portfolio of education and student professional services, as:

• A departmental lead within the Students and Education Directorate; or
• Project/programme/departmental lead within an academic faculty; or
• the lead of defined divisional-wide initiatives

Heads of/Senior Managers work within and across teams and functions, engaging with a wide range of colleagues across King’s. They contribute and lead on activities which positively impact the student experience. This includes ensuring:

• Close working with their Associate Director, and across organisational boundaries, to identify and action opportunities to improve efficiency and consistency of service (or project) delivery
• Efficient resource utilisation and organisation of work resources within their department (or project)
• Proactive engagement with service users and stakeholders to facilitate mutually effective working relationships
• Their department (or project) embeds a culture of service, transparency and continuous improvement

Heads of /Senior Managers will have an understanding of the priorities, cultures and pressures of a research-led university and of academic processes and the structure of the academic year. 

The Head of Student Communications & Content leads a team delivering innovative, digital-led and student-focused communications and content to equip our students with everything they need to know outside the content of their programme to complete their studies successfully and get the most out of student life.

Shaping development and directing implementation of strategy, they motivate the Student Communications & Content team to drive performance and productivity and ensure high quality of output across multiple channels, supported by customer relationship management (CRM) and other software. This includes emails and newsletters, articles on the Student Services Online knowledge bank, campaigns around particular aspects of the student lifecycle (e.g., Welcome), external and internal webpages, social media, the King’s Student app and more. They ensure the team is continuously improving in response to data-led insights and student needs.

Key responsibilities include:

• Oversee all day-to-day operations in the Student Communications & Content team to support delivery of a high-quality service, providing support and guidance to managers around staff recruitment, induction, training and development; documentation of processes and knowledge sharing; planning and prioritisation; and other business-as-usual and project activity. Develop expert knowledge on all relevant processes and policies.
• Supported by the Associate Director Student Knowledge & Information, set strategy for the Student Communications & Content team and direct its implementation across the team in defined annual plans, in alignment with other key strategies across King’s such as Vision 2029.
• Line manage direct reports and build a positive culture within the team in order to drive high performance and productivity, promoting trust, constructive feedback, empowerment, innovation, ongoing professional development, celebration of success and collective responsibility. Motivate and inspire colleagues while protecting staff wellbeing.
• Provide support, guidance and a final point of escalation or decision making within the team in the planning and delivery of specific pieces of content/communications work and broader campaigns or customer journeys, across multiple channels.
• Deploy insights from collated quantitative and qualitative analysis in decision making, ensuring the team is delivering value for students and continuously meeting their needs.
• Work closely and build effective relationships with colleagues across the university (especially teams elsewhere within the Students & Education Directorate, for which we manage content and provide direct support, and in faculties) to ensure alignment and that our output is accurate, accessible, consistent, engaging, effective and compliant with legislation like GDPR. Act as our main point of contact for other communications teams at King’s on strategic decision making and issues involving reputational risk.

This is an exciting opportunity for candidates looking to spearhead improvements to content and communications in support of enhanced student experience, and who wish to utilise their skills and expertise in leading and motivating a diverse team. This is an opportunity to grow your skills in development and implementation of strategy within a major higher education organisation.

We encourage applications from candidates who have experience from both within and outside of the Higher Education sector where they can demonstrate the skills needed to succeed in this role.

This is a full time post (35 hours per week), and you will be offered an indefinite contract.

About You:

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

1. Relevant work experience and/or education: We think a wide range of different work and educational experiences could support you to be successful in this role. Relevant work experience might include work in content management in higher education, or leading communications teams in large and complex organisations. Relevant educational experiences might include higher education in a related discipline, professional qualifications or other training.
2. Ability to engage in collaborative working across King’s professional services, Faculties, and academic and student communities, with a meaningful and visible commitment to Diversity & Inclusion policies and practices.
3. Experience of working in a federated environment where facilitation and networking skills are core to resolving complex cross departmental problems.
4. Developed leadership and interpersonal skills, with a proven ability to motivate and inspire a team, enhance performance, build trust and support effective time/resource management and prioritisation.
5. Experience leading the creation of engaging multi-channel content for different platforms and diverse audiences, and of using customer relationship management (CRM) systems and/or content management systems (CMS) for delivery.
6. Ability to communicate with all students and staff with excellent written/verbal skills and attention to detail, capable of synthesising complex information in a way that is accessible for a variety of audiences.
7. Ability to analyse, interpret and report on complex quantitative and qualitative data, with strong presentation skills, and incorporate insights into effective strategic decision making.
8. Ability to manage the workload of yourself and your team in a fast-changing environment and meet challenging deadlines towards delivery of strategic objectives.

Desirable criteria

9. Adept at maintaining progress on multiple agendas and projects simultaneously.

10. An understanding and working knowledge of governance in the higher education sector, and the regulatory and legal arrangements for UK university governance.

11. Experience using Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer relationship management (CRM) software for customer service and/or Contensis CMS. 

Full details of the role and the skills and experience required can be found in the attached job description which is provided on the next page.

Closing date: 05 May 2024