Families Belong Together Communications Director

FLSA: Exempt
Work Location: Remote but must be willing to work east coast hours
Reports To: Families Belong Together Director 
 

Background: 
The National Domestic Workers Alliance, where Families Belong Together is based, organizes domestic workers in the United States for respect, recognition and labor standards. We work to guarantee labor protections for domestic workers by winning legislation at the state level, pushing for regulatory changes at the national level, through the International Labor Organization at the global level, and elevating domestic workers as key leaders in building a powerful movement for a more just economy and democracy. 

NDWA was founded in 2007 by 13 local domestic worker organizing projects around the country. By 2016, the alliance had grown to include 60 affiliate organizations and 3 chapters. In 2016, we launched our membership association in order to dramatically increase our scale, power and sustainability. While most of our core leaders are engaged as leaders in NDWA affiliate organizations and chapters, the vast majority of our members will be workers who we engage with remotely and online.

Families Belong Together, a campaign of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, is an immigrant justice campaign and loose coalition of nearly 250 organizations to end family separation and detention, reunite families, fight for immigrant justice, and challenge anti-immigrant racism through organizing, storytelling, and earned media. 

We leverage rapid response to ensure widespread press coverage of the abuses of DHS against children and families, capture that energy, to build a pro-migrant base for long-term change. Our work requires a multi-pronged response that includes persuasion work, culture change, storytelling, distributed action, movement generosity, and serving as digital, comms and organizing expertise for our partners. FBT’s unique approach—digitally-focused rapid response with a positive, values based frame paired with organizing and deep power-building—is key to achieving our ultimate goal: ending child detention and family separation and do right by the families that have been harmed. 

Position Summary

Families Belong Together seeks a Communications Director to drive our earned media and storytelling strategy. The position is ultimately responsible for our narrative strategy, which includes strategic communications, rapid response, digital media, videography, audience growth, and close partnership with our Culture Change department. 

The Communications Director should have strong management skills, exceptional communications and storytelling instincts, and be intimately familiar with the immigrant justice movement. The director should also have a strong moral compass and trauma-informed lens when working directly with victims and advocates to tell their stories from a position of dignity and power. 

The ideal candidate will have extensive management experience, experience working with press, experience working in coalition settings, experience working with a strategic communications firm, strong writing/editing skills, refined earned media instincts, and the ability to synthesize and operationalize polling data, cutting-edge research, and analytics into effective messaging. 

Your Responsibilities 

• Management
  • Manage a strategic communications firm 
  • Manage a digital firm 
  • Manage a full-time, in-house videographer 
  • Manage a digital manager
  • Potentially oversee the expansion of the communications department to include a communications assistant
     
• Proactive Flacking 
  • Leverage earned media in support of FBT’s goals 
    • Identify and pitch earned media opportunities; place op-eds and LTEs 
  • Work with a strategic communications firm to identify broadcast, print, digital, and podcast opportunities for FBT principals
  • Work with reporters to break news 
  • Highlight FBT wins; grow the Families Belong Together brand and audience 

• Digital 
  • Manage a digital staffer who will oversee a strategic digital firm 
  • Oversee the development of rapid response digital toolkits and graphic design assets 
  • Approve social media content to ensure consistency across social channels 

• Coalition and partner work 
  • Provide communications and digital support to coalition partners on the front lines; serve as a communications thought partner and signal booster in moments of rapid response 
  • Forge relationships with other coalition communications and culture staffers; participate in weekly movement communications calls 
  • Identify new and emerging stories through relationships with advocates on the frontline that can uplift FBT’s narrative

• Rapid Response 
  • Rapidly respond to breaking news on family separation, camp conditions, immigration, asylum, ICE raids, medical abuse in custody, sexual abuse in custody, and migration with the goal of keeping family separation in the public eye and expanding the definition of family separation beyond the now-infamous zero tolerance policy 
    • Approving press statements (in English + Spanish) quickly 
    • Spokesperson prep 
  • Provide trauma-informed comms and storytelling support to coalition partners on the front lines
  • Strategically respond to breaking news; write and disseminate statements in English and Spanish 

• Messaging: Data-informed narrative work 
  • Manage the FBT message architecture
  • Develop topline messaging around asylum, legalization, detention
  • Stay abreast of the most recent immigration-related polling and research
  • Interpret and operationalize the latest digital metrics 
  • Work with an in-house digital ads team to expand storytelling reach 
  • Have a clear understanding of Families Belong Together’s brand, tone, and position within the constellation of groups that make up the immigrant justice movement and ensure consistency of that tone 

• Culture change
  • Work closely with our culture change department to use art and storytelling, creative partnerships and cultural organizing to advance our work 

• Campaigns
  • Serve as the communications representative on asylum-related and legalization related multi-partner campaigns 

Skills  

• 7-10 years of experience on campaigns, progressive causes, and/or journalism (editors highly encouraged to apply) 
• Excellent management skills; experience managing in-house staff as well as consultants 
• Excellent strategic communications skills, including the demonstrated ability to drive communications initiatives 
• Familiarity with the landscape in immigration and one or more of the following, intersecting areas: racial justice, gender, and/or asylum work
• Must be able to thrive in a fast-paced, start-up environment where priorities shift depending on the news cycle; excellent prioritization skills and a “can-do” attitude 
• Comfort working in an environment that is more “start-up” than it is static; excellent and collaborative teammate 
• Experience working in coalition spaces with organizations with different values and priorities 
• Alignment with Families Belong Together’s vision and values; passionate about the intersection of gender, race, and immigrant justice

Preference will be given to: 

• Bilingual English/Spanish speakers with the ability to write, edit and converse in both languages 

Women, People of Color, People with Disabilities and LGBTQ people strongly encouraged to apply. Please submit a cover letter, resume, and writing sample here: https://domesticworkers.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=136

Please include a daytime phone number where we can contact you. This position will remain open until filled.