Online Community & Partnerships Leader, Iridescent (FT)

Job Title:
Online Community & Partnerships Leader, Iridescent

Full Time

Job Description:
Iridescent is a science education nonprofit with a mission to inspire and equip underserved children to imagine and invent. We work closely with scientists and engineers to bring cutting edge science and engineering to underserved groups. Iridescent has been in operation for 7 years, reaching more than 18,000 participants globally. We have a very clear sense of what works and doesn’t and where we are headed.

Briefly, what works is as follows: high need communities need a combination of in person programs to establish relationships between STEM experts and children. Following that, the children need to spend at least 100-200 hours (annually) practicing critical thinking skills, solving problems, inventing solutions. We are looking to foster the majority of this practice online, through the Curiosity Machine, our online learning platform.

Iridescent’s focus is thus shifting from solely providing in-person programs to needy communities to one that engages communities through web and mobile tools – over decades. The online platform, Curiosity Machine, is key for this strategy. In this website, children can access videos with scientists and engineers talking about their cutting-edge research, build open ended design challenges based on their work and submit it online for feedback. Mentors trained by Iridescent provide one-on-one support and encourage students to improve their designs.

We are looking for a visionary and courageous team member who will support us to take the Curiosity Machine to millions of students worldwide.

Responsibilities
Develop and implement a Marketing strategy to amplify the impact of the Curiosity Machine. Our goal is to create a vibrant community of inventors and promote science and engineering as a fun hobby.

Partnership development

  • Identify and recruit partners that can use Curiosity Machine curriculum with their students such after school programs, libraries and homeschoolers’ groups with national reach.
  • Develop and run regular online trainings and professional development sessions for the partners’ staff
  • Support the partners as they implement Curiosity Courses with their students.
  • Identify and maintain special partnerships to broaden the reach of the Curiosity Machine. For instance, we recently partnered with the Warner Bros and the new Gravity movie in a space related design challenge and are currently partnering with ARKive, the largest library of videos of endangered species, to bring Curiosity Machine curriculum to their partner teachers around the US and UK.

Student’s community development

  • Develop and implement communication plan to engage the community of students.
  • Be active in the Curiosity Machine! Regularly read student submissions and understand how students are using the site.
  • Write newsletters, blog posts, articles and actively promote the Curiosity Machine to students using social media channels.
  • Cultivate and grow online relationships with key target audiences.

Public Relations

  • Develop and implement PR strategy for the Curiosity Machine to establish it as the number one science and engineer mentoring platform.


Qualifications

  • Highly creative and media savvy.
  • Creative writing and skills in content creation.
  • Ability to gather information and strong data analysis skills.
  • Demonstrated expertise in social media tools and techniques.
  • Strong organizational skills.
  • Enthusiasm, with an ability to foster relationships with different team members and external stakeholders.
  • Entrepreneurial – should be always learning and working out of his/her comfort zone.
  • Self-starter, willingness to learn and experiment.
  • Passion for the organization’s mission, an appreciation for science education and working with underserved communities.
  • Major in Business Administration, Marketing, Communications, English or Public Relations.
  • Location in a major city. Preference will be given to Chicago applicants, but applications will be considered from all locations.

What we offer

  • A brilliant team that supports you, and the freedom to pursue and deliver your best effort;
  • Remote work environment;
  • Medical and dental benefits.

To Apply
Please complete the following screening task (here is our rationale on why we ask candidates to invest the time upfront):
TASK 1
Describe what would be the 3 first steps to develop the Marketing and Communication plan. How would you reach the broader goal of taking the Curiosity Machine to students worldwide and retain them as users of the platform?
TASK 2
What story does this graph tell you? Can you write a blog post about it?

Send a cover letter, resume and screening tasks to recruiting@iridescentlearning.org

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