Senior Media and Communications Officer

Salary: £34,980 per annum

Location: Hybrid Work Culture. We are proud to promote a truly hybrid work culture, recognising that every role is different and everyone has unique needs and preferences. 

This role is eligible for the Hospice UK Hybrid Working Arrangement from the start of employment. Our office is a short walk from King’s Cross station in London. Our expectation is that you will come to London at least two days each month for team meetings, including a quarterly ‘all staff’ event. The Communications team mostly comes into the office at least once a week.  

You may also find it useful to visit member hospices. You can work remotely for the rest of the time. Equally, you may prefer to work from the office full-time. 

Contractually this role is London-based.

Contract: Permanent, full time (35 hours per week)

Benefits:

• 25 days annual leave rising to 30 days after 2 years (+ an extra 10 days on each 5th year)
• Matched pension scheme up to 7% of salary
• Support for staff with caring responsibilities
• Family-friendly culture

How to Apply: CV and supporting statement - using Hospice UK’s supporting statement document – see below

Closing date for applications: 6pm on Wednesday 29 November 2023. 

Interview dates: Interviews will take place on Wednesday 6 December 2023, with a possible follow up on Friday 8 December 2023.

Interviews will take place in person in London or remotely via MS Teams. We’ll send questions to you in advance so that you can prepare. Let us know if you have any specific needs to be able to fully engage with the process.

The Role:

As Senior Media and Communications Officer you will take a lead on delivering Hospice UK’s media relations strategy, generating regular, high-quality national and regional media coverage for our work, and thinking creatively to promote the organisation’s work through the media and other communications channels.

You will make use of some of the best data in the sector to place stories that support hospices, change perceptions of end of life care, and tell the story of how important – and sometimes overlooked – hospice and end of life care is in the UK. Working with storytellers, fundraisers, corporate partners, and member hospices, you will have the great privilege of telling deeply moving human stories of compassion at the end of life. 

Working closely with the Communications and Campaigns team, you will help design and deliver communications strategies for different projects across the organisation and will contribute to creating content for Hospice UK’s digital channels and campaigns, including Dying Matters and Hospice Care Week.

The Team:

Our Communications and Campaigns team is made of seven people. Most of us have started in the past three years and together we’ve been changing how we go about our communications and campaigns work. We’ve had some brilliant successes and are consistently delivering ‘firsts’ for Hospice UK in terms of media coverage, political campaigning, and digital mobilisation. 

We work across media relations, campaigns, brand, digital marketing, social media, and content delivery and there's opportunities for everyone to get involved across the board and work closely together on projects. 

The Communications and Campaigns team is part of the newly formed External Affairs department at Hospice UK. This new team brings together our communications and campaigns work, our policy, advocacy and influencing work, and our membership engagement.

Hospice UK:

Hospice UK is the national charity for hospice and palliative care. We provide support, leadership, expertise and advocacy for over 200 member hospices across the UK.

Our membership offer for hospices and their staff teams includes online resources, newsletters, conferences, networks, clinical and advocacy programmes. We bring hospices and sector partners together to discuss new ideas and collaborate in new ways, sharing good practice and celebrating the brilliant and innovative work that happens every day in hospices around the country.

We are looking for:

We are looking for a creative and skilled writer who can tell a good story, has a strong news sense, and an ability to understand how and why Hospice UK’s work might resonate with different audiences,

You’ll need to be able to juggle a number of concurrent projects, be ready to work with a range of colleagues from different specialisms, and be instinctively comfortable with multiple communications channels and audiences, from a local paper, to a corporate partner’s intranet, to our digital channels.

This role requires good attention to detail and the ability to take initiative. We are looking for someone with a flexible, can-do attitude, a willingness to learn, and a passion for writing clear and engaging copy.

If you would like to ask any questions before applying, you can contact Molly Evans. 

If you would like to apply for this role, please send the following documents to recruitment@hospiceuk.org by 6pm on Wednesday 29 November 2023 

• Your CV. Ideally in Word format.
• A completed supporting statement form
• A completed equalities monitoring form

We believe in fair recruitment and working to remove bias, so all applications will have identifying indicators removed before being submitted to the shortlisting panel.

Please make sure you provide your contact details in your email. We’ll contact you to let you know whether we would like to meet you. Please do note the interview dates above.

Additional notes:

To be considered for this role you must have the right to live and work in the UK for your application to be progressed.

Hospice UK is an Equal Opportunities Employer.

This pack includes the job description and person specification as well as information about the team this role will work in.