The Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority seeks an experienced communications professional to strategically plan and execute the Authority’s communication and audience engagement plans. Reporting to the External Affairs Manager, this position collaborates with all departments to provide relevant information across all media platforms.

The Ideal Candidate

You are a self-directed, detail oriented and creative communications specialist, with a desire to contribute to your community through your work. You are an effective relationship builder – with the public, with media outlets, with vendors, with Authority partners, and within the Authority team. You bring top-notch communications skills; mastery of public speaking including on-camera interviews; the ability to write engaging content; and strategic thinking.

In this role you will be responsible for the all aspects of the Authority’s communications and audience engagement plans. You will create and manage the editorial calendar, developing strategies and timelines for campaigns that reflect the work happening across all departments of the Authority. The Communications Specialist has ownership of the Authority’s style guide, to ensure it is being implemented consistently across the agency and that staff have access to needed resources, so they can always represent the Authority brand appropriately.

The Communications Specialist builds and maintains relationships with media outlets that represent all of the Santa Clara Valley and beyond. In this role you will be the face of the Authority, responding to media inquiries, providing comment, appearing on video interviews to represent a suite of Authority projects and topics. In addition to responding to earned media, the Communications Specialist will create the strategies for paid media campaigns.

The Authority publishes content across a wide range of primarily digital platforms, from press releases to social media posts, newsletters and blogs to video creation. The Communications Specialist is responsible for ensuring that the content created meets the strategic needs of the Authority, accurately tells the Authority’s story. Staff - and occasionally consultants - are primary content creators, but the Communications Specialist should be comfortable with creating content for a variety of platforms. The Authority has invested significantly in creating a website that is transparent to the public, provides engaging content to visitors who come for a wide variety of information, and is aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. 

The Authority’s Communications Team includes the Community Engagement Coordinator and the Communications Coordinator. This powerhouse team looks to the Communications Specialist for leadership, guidance, and support. As an engaged manager you will work with the Team to ensure they each have access to what they need for their own success. The Authority looks for supervisors to build trust within the Team so all feel comfortable and empowered to bring up constructive, out-of-the-box suggestions. You will also manage relationships and contracts with a variety of professional consultants.

Please review the complete position classification here: https://bit.ly/3oLH4V2