Senior Strategic Communications Manager in Gainsborough

We are looking for a dynamic, strategic leader to shape the future of communications at Acis Group. As senior advisor to our Executive and Senior Management Teams, you will set the direction, lead a new team, and build a trusted function that strengthens our brand, protects our reputation, and drives delivery of our 2030 corporate strategy.

Over the next year, you will:

• Build a strong internal business partnering model aligned to corporate priorities.
• Lead crisis preparedness and response, oversee internal communications, and shape external positioning.
• Launch a unified, compliant website consolidating multiple subsidiary sites.
• Partner with our retained creative agency to deliver major campaigns and specialist expertise.

A typical day might look like:

• Acting as strategic communications lead and advisor across the organisation—partnering with our Executive Leadership Team (ELT) alongside the Senior Management Team (SMT) on priorities, risks and opportunities.
• Owning the communications strategy and annual plan: setting the tone of voice, KPIs and standards; aligning messaging to corporate priorities.
• Leading on the development of, and impact of a wider business partnering model in the Marketing and Communications function, forming excellent working relationships with key internal stakeholders and departments, ensuring the team delivers in partnership strategic level outcomes.
• Building the capability and resource of the wider organisation to enable teams to self-deliver localised marketing, promotion and awareness raising activities, whilst retaining corporate oversight and guidance.
• Leading on our crisis communications: maintaining business continuity and scenario plans and escalation routes; chairing meetings on emerging issues and key line of response.
• Being the brand custodian: ensuring consistent application across channels, campaigns and subsidiaries; approving high-impact assets.
• Acting as lead corporate copywriter for strategic narratives, leadership messages and disclosure statements.
• Providing the strategic overview of internal communications, developing the Internal Comms BP on programmes, channels and engagement, ensuring that our internal communications delivers strategic alignment to our goals and objectives, while staying true to our values, culture and engagement.
• Shaping external positioning and relations for Acis Group as an entity: stakeholder mapping, thought leadership and reputation-building initiatives.
• Directing the website transformation: unifying subsidiary sites into a single, compliant CMS; setting publishing and accessibility standards; implementing content governance and review cycles.
• Overseeing product/service marketing narratives and impact analysis: dashboards, reporting and insight to inform decisions.
• Leading and developing your team, setting clear objectives, ways of working and “The Acis Way” behaviours to deliver at pace.
• Working closely with leaders across our corporate functions to align messaging, strategic direction and focus to enable the department to continue to contribute towards our corporate strategy, enabling and gaining benefit from our shared capabilities.
• Collaborating with the retained creative agency to deliver strategic campaigns, creative assets and additional capacity for flagship projects like Acis Students.

Some of the experience/skills you will need to be considered for this role:

• Senior-level experience leading integrated communications in a social housing regulated or not-for-profit environment, advising executive teams.
• Proven expertise in strategy, tone of voice and brand stewardship, with a track record of reputation management.
• Demonstrable crisis communications leadership: preparedness planning, live incident management and post-incident reviews.
• Experience directing complex digital projects (e.g., multi-site website consolidation) with clear publishing standards and accessibility at the core.
• Advanced corporate copywriting and editorial judgement for high-stakes, cross-audience messages.
• Ability to lead and develop a multi-disciplinary team, setting goals, measures and agile delivery rhythms.
• Strong stakeholder skills: external positioning, partnership working and interface with regulators and sector bodies.
• Impact orientation: focusing on results, not just activity. Expertise in creating dashboards to track performance, evaluating and using insights to improve future communications.
• Experience managing external agencies for strategic challenge, creative development and campaign delivery.

What will make you stand out from the crowd:

• Experience embedding content governance (templates, playbooks, editorial calendar) and coaching business teams to self-serve.
• Background in thought leadership programmes for senior leaders and writing winning-award submissions to showcase impact.
• Familiarity with agency management, using retained partners for strategic challenge and specialist delivery.
• Experience integrating intranet and employee engagement tools alongside external channels for a coherent voice and consistent brand.

Being part of the Acis team, you will get:

• Generous holiday entitlement – 25 days annual leave rising by 1 per year to a max of 30 plus bank holidays.
• Pension contributions up to 10%.
• The opportunity to undertake professional training, funded by us.
• One day's paid leave a year for volunteering work (in addition to your annual leave entitlement).
• Staff benefits with Paycare – A health and benefits scheme giving you support and contributions towards various health benefits such as counselling, eye tests, vaccinations and much more.
• Benefits with Acis Perkz – a discount scheme giving you savings off hundreds of schemes including discounts on your coffee, weekly shop, days out and much more!
• Employee recognition scheme, where we celebrate and award our Stars within Acis, including gift vouchers.
• Long service awards for our loyal employees.
• Cycle to work scheme.
• Employee Assistance Programme to give you confidential advice and support when you need it.
• Professional membership subscription to support your continuous professional development.
• Death in service benefit as part of our pension scheme.

As soon as a suitable candidate is found for this role we reserve the right to close the job advert ahead of the closing date, so please do not delay in submitting your application.

Acis are committed to equality and diversity, are a proud member of disability confident and welcome applications from any applicant who feel they hold the essential skills to fulfil the role. We recognise that people need flexibility in their role and we are happy to discuss flexible working options with the successful candidate in addition to any aid with interviewing that you might need.