Communications Specialist

About CEA

The Centre for Effective Altruism’s mission is to build and nurture a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.
To foster this community, we run conferences, support hundreds of local groups, and provide online resources and forums for discussion.

About this role

CEA is looking to hire multiple people to improve how we communicate core EA ideas effectively and accurately, and also to share stories about the impact that people in the community are having.
EA is at a point of inflection: as we have grown we have started to gain significant media attention. If we engage with this well, it could increase the amount of high-quality engagement with our ideas and projects. If we fail to do so, we might lose much of our potential.
We are building up the capacity to handle this attention, but we need people to help across a wide variety of areas (listed below). Because this area is critically important and extremely hard to get right, we think that it is worth the time of people who have a significant opportunity cost.
The title for this role will be communications associate or communications specialist, depending on your experience. The role will report to Shakeel Hashim, our Head of Communications.

Goals for this area

Our goals are:
  1. Have discourse around EA and related projects and ideas not become needlessly “toxic” in a way that could cause lots of people (especially in our key audiences) to actively oppose them.
  2. Convey an accurate and inspiring understanding of effective altruism to our key target audiences: Work with the media to put out a strong message that motivates exceptionally capable, open-minded people to get involved with the movement.
  3. Help the EA community use the media to promote specific ideas (this might include, for instance, working to promote the importance of biosecurity).
Notes:
  • This is not about doing communications for CEA - it’s a role at CEA that’s focused on communicating about EA and the causes we care about.
  • In much of this work, we expect you to be coordinating closely with other organisations in the EA and related communities.

What would you do?

We are looking to hire several people, and will shape roles and responsibilities around each person.
Some of the areas that we’re looking to add capacity in are:
  • Researching and writing articles, op-eds, newsletters, and other material to communicate EA ideas.
  • Social media engagement, to share EA ideas and updates on key platforms like Twitter. This will include drafting our strategy, working with spokespeople on the platform, creating content that can be shared, and running our main accounts (for CEA and EA). If this is of particular interest to you, please apply to our Social Media Specialist position.
  • Building, testing and maintaining key communications resources (key messages, key opportunities and threats, responses to common misconceptions, a list of strong speakers across different EA topics, key distribution channels).
  • Engagement with journalists to build relationships, identify opportunities for coverage, and coordinate interviews and information-sharing.
  • Reviewing high-stakes public materials that are posted by CEA and our partners, to ensure that they have a consistent message.
  • Operations and research work to support the above (e.g. running message tests).
We are also looking for senior candidates who can autonomously develop and implement communications campaigns around particular events or themes (for instance, around the release of GPT-4, or a long-term campaign to share updates on EA-related global health work).

What attributes are we looking for?

We are looking to shape these roles around people. So if you’re a great writer, or a great communications strategist, or great at editing others’ writing, we’re interested in hearing from you even if you don’t satisfy all of the below criteria.
We are looking for people with:
  • A strong understanding of EA ideas: We think that you need to understand the ideas well to communicate them.
  • Clear, nuanced, compelling writing
  • Sound judgement: about the risks and benefits of different communications strategies and tactics
  • A track record of acting proactively, even under great uncertainty (while continuing to track the risks).
In addition, we prefer candidates who also have:
  • Connections with journalists and other people in media to streamline pitching of EA-related stories
  • Experience with a broad range of communications formats e.g. SEO, social media, print media
  • The ability to build strong relationships with our partners, and navigate disagreements about what to do.
We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion, and we encourage individuals with diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply.

Process

Applications close on January 15th, but we will assess applications on a rolling basis before then. The hiring process will consist of a short trial task, followed by 1-3 interviews and a longer set of trial tasks (for which we will pay candidates). We will invite the most promising candidates to a short paid work trial.

Title, reporting, salary etc.

This is a full-time role, reporting to Shakeel Hashim (Head of Communications). We prefer candidates who can work in a time zone between the UK (GMT) and the US West Coast (GMT-8), and particularly those who can work from Oxford or London.
The salary range in Oxford is £49,000 to £77,000, depending on prior experience, skills, and location. There may be flexibility in salary for exceptional candidates. We vary salaries by location - the range in SF would be $89,000 to $140,000.
Benefits include health, dental, and vision insurance, flexible work hours, a £5,000 annual professional development allowance, a £5,000 mental health support allowance, extended parental leave, ergonomic equipment, 10% pension contribution, 25 days of paid vacation, and more.
This position is now closed.
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