Head of Membership Experience

This role acts as the senior subject matter expert for Fellowship user and experience design, with full responsibility for shaping and delivering an outstanding, end-to-end Fellowship journey. It leads the team dedicated to designing and enhancing Fellowship experiences, particularly at scale, ensuring that experience design is embedded across the entire Fellowship lifecycle.

The contribution of this role will drive improved conversion at recruitment, increase engagement, strengthen net promoter scores and positive sentiment, and boost retention rates. It will work in a matrixed way across the department, championing experience-led thinking and ensuring that fellowship communications, Circle, interventions, and micro-communities all reflect a high-quality Fellowship experience.

This is a new role leading the Experience team within the Fellowship Department, working closely with other teams to join up the end-to-end fellowship experience. The team is responsible for the overall fellowship experience, lifecycle comms and creating outstanding experiences across Circle, Interventions and Micro-Communities. This role will suit someone who enjoys a fast-paced environment, leading diverse teams, but also wants to continue to use their subject matter expertise of shaping excellent member experiences on a daily basis.

Working with a range of internal and occasionally external stakeholders, this role ensures the alignment of the overall fellowship experience and organisational aims and objectives.

SCOPE

• Financial: Budget holder for budget of circa £60K. Direct income target of £20K.
• Staff: 6 direct reports: Community Manager (Global), Community Manager (Interventions), Community Manager (Micro-Communities), CRM Automations Manager, Fellowship Officer (Lifecycle and Experience) and Fellowship Coordinator (Lifecycle and Experience).
• Key internal contacts: Director of Fellowship, Head of Fellowship Development and Services, Head of Fellowship Engagement (Areas), Head of Digital, Head of Marketing, Senior Recruitment and Partnership Manager and Senior Services Manager.

MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES

STRATEGY (20%)

• Lead senior level decision making on the overall fellowship experience to ensure they are designed with holistic intention, and that targets are met.
• Develop the long-term vision and strategy for the fellowship experience at the RSA across teams and departments.
• Lead the Fellowship Experience Team ensuring team members receive ongoing support with prioritisation against the strategy, responsibilities and processes.

EXPERIENCE DESIGN (35%)

• Lead the user and experience design of Fellowship products and services, ensuring they are simple, are targeted to fellows’ needs, and offer world-class experiences for the fellowship.
• Use subject matter expertise to put user and experience design at the heart of processes, experiences and existing strands of work.
• Lead user research to understand the needs and desires of the end-users, turning insights into product and service improvements that meet the needs of key audiences and segments.
• Designing and testing prototypes to validate new user flows, processes, and content.
• Develop and own design principles, guidelines, and best practices to guide the development of user-centred products and services.
• Stay up-to-date with best practice and the latest research across user and experience design, as well as email and text engagement.
• Work closely with other teams to ensure the design is tested and implemented correctly, and that the end-product or service meets the desired user experience standards and impact goals.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design and implement streamlined and user-friendly processes and journeys for joining and renewing fellowships.
• Conduct a thorough analysis of the existing fellowship application and renewal processes to identify areas for improvement, pain points, and barriers.
• In partnership with the Data & Insights Manager to continuously monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of experience improvements, making data-driven adjustments as needed to improve conversion rates and overall user satisfaction.

LIFECYCLE EXPERIENCE, COMMS & AUTOMATION (10%)

• Own the full lifecycle comms experience for fellows, starting at onboarding and through to renewal, fostering early adoption, engagement and retention.
• Work with the Fellowship Coordinator, Experience and Lifecycle Officer and CRM Automation Manager and wider department to develop and maintain design principles across full lifecycle.

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT (10%)

• Lead a team of three Community Managers focusing on core audiences such as global, micro-communities and intervention, delivering outstanding experiences at its core:
• Micro-Communities: Ensure fellow-led micro-communities offer consistent, meaningful and outstanding experiences for all members.
• Online: Assume full oversight for our global community platform, Circle, ensuring it is a core part of the overall fellowship experience.
• Interventions: Work closely with RSA teams to embed fellowship participation and experiences across all interventions (i.e. projects and programmes).

LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT (15%)

• Responsible for ensuring the RSA upholds its commitments to Diversity Equity and Inclusion, ensuring all of our people feel included at work and collectively we are creating the best ‘One-RSA’, conditions for cross-organisational collaboration.
• As part of the cross-organisational leadership and management team, responsible for effective leadership and management of the whole staff team across the organisation.
• Leads by example and role models collaborative, inclusive and impactful behaviour.
• Enables impactful goals and strategic objectives to be achieved by embedding our values in everybody’s work.
• Champions, motivates, and leads continual professional development for Fellowship members, supporting employees to grow and build their skills and careers at the RSA.
• This includes setting individual and team goals, performance management, recruitment and wellbeing and pastoral support.
• Accountable for departmental budget management including expenditure and any income targets.
• Accountable for ensuring the team’s compliance with internal policies and processes at the same time as GDPR, PCI, Gift Aid, copyright and other relevant governance regulations as required.

PERSON SPECIFICATION

Essential qualifications

• Relevant experience or education.

Essential knowledge

• Deep understanding of user-centered designed methodologies, including user research, personas, user journeys, prototyping, and usability testing.
• Ability to align user and experience strategies with organisational goals, and develop long-term vision and roadmaps that drive user satisfaction and organisational growth.
• Knowledge of audience/community engagement at scale.
• Strong knowledge of best practice across user-design, digital and email engagement.

Essential experience

• Proven experience in designing and executing scalable strategies, preferably with a focus on comms and in a customer-focused or member-based organisation of at least 10K members or more.
• Experience in conducting a comprehensive analysis of existing processes, identifying pain points, and proposing design improvements.
• Proven experience of leading user-experience design across multiple products, audiences and entry-points.
• Experience of working in a commercial, revenue generating environment.
• Proven experience of developing outstanding experiences for people from a diverse range of expertise and interests.
• Experience of shaping digitally-enabled end-to-end experiences at scale, e.g. with digital platform/online communities.

Essential skills and abilities

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and the ability to understand and translate complex ideas to diverse audiences.

Essential behaviours or qualities

• Organised, persuasive, diplomatic, agile and data-driven.
• Commitment to the RSA’s mission, values and core expectations.
• Responsible for ensuring the RSA upholds its commitments to Diversity Equity and Inclusion.

Desirable

• Experience of working with customers/members/subscribers.
• Experience of working in revenue generating teams with clear commercial outcomes.

This job description is intended to be forward thinking and indicative rather than final and exhaustive. The listed responsibilities and key duties and tasks may develop and evolve over time. The RSA endeavours to keep substantial changes to a minimum and to promptly update this job description to take account of such developments.

If you are interested in applying please send your CV to simon.pickerell@green-park.co.uk