Senior Strategy & Planning Manager - Strategy and Campaigns - GCS

About the GCS Profession

Government Communications is the professional body for communicators across the UK Government. With over 6,000 communicators working across ministerial departments, agencies and arm's-length bodies, we are one of the largest and most influential communications organisations.

Our mission is to deliver exceptional communications that make a difference - informing citizens, changing behaviours, and building trust in government. The media landscape has fundamentally changed: citizens consume information differently and trust in institutions is harder to earn and easier to lose.

Government Communications is meeting this challenge by shifting from reactive, press-first communications to integrated, always-on campaigns that reach citizens where they actually are. We're putting audience insight and data at the heart of everything we do.

And we're creating a profession that attracts and develops the very best talent.

We work across every major policy area, from health and education to defence, policing and the economy, reaching millions of people every day through innovative campaigns, digital content, media engagement and stakeholder communications.

The Team

This is a small, dynamic and creative team of communications experts that assure, enhance and support the delivery of all major government campaigns, ensuring they are effective and deliver value to the taxpayer. We provide oversight of UK Government brands and ensure that the Prime Ministers priority themes for communication are identified, agreed and shared across departments and arms-length bodies (ALBs). This team works collaboratively across government to respond to crises and to create impactful campaigns that support PM and Ministerial priorities. This team works in a highly matrix fashion across the GCS Strategy and Expert services function.

Job Description

This role will support the delivery of the Cabinet Office spend control process for advertising, marketing and communications (AMC) spend across government. You will work with internal Cabinet Office stakeholders, departments and ALBs to ensure the efficient and effective delivery of the process, identify and mitigate against risks, and develop suggestions for improvements.

You will manage delivery of a cross-government Director of Communications (DoCs) steering group, ensuring forward thinking and timely sharing of updates within the DoC community and other stakeholders. You will coordinate plans across the year, including advising senior leaders which topics should be focused on, when and how; making connections with previous meetings and other relevant sessions; and being a point of contact for people to propose areas they might like to focus on, showcase, etc.

Responsibilities & Duties

• Work with the wider Strategy and Campaigns team to ensure the effective delivery of the cross-government AMC control approval process.
• Lead on reporting and correspondence on the control, including its efficacy.
• Engage with communication teams across departments and ALBs to promote and explain the AMC control and how they can best engage with the assurance process.
• Work with teams across government to identify opportunities for improvement. Test and manage any process changes with stakeholders, ensuring they have clarity on what to expect over the year.
• Work closely with internal and departmental stakeholders, including engaging senior leaders, in order to develop and publish an overarching government communication strategy that is supported across departments and ALBs.
• Oversee planning for and actions resulting from DoCs meetings to ensure tasks are actioned, blockers are removed and any issues and risks are flagged.

Person specification

• Experience as a trusted communication advisor, building and maintaining successful and productive working relationships across complex organisations.
• Experience or substantial understanding of campaign and campaign planning, insight and evaluation strongly desirable.
• Experience of working in highly collaborative, mutually supportive, inclusive and high performing teams.
• Postholder will ideally have experience of, or appetite for, working collaboratively across government departments.
• Excellent attention to detail, proven organisational skills and the ability to work to tight deadlines under pressure.
• Excellent communication skills: coordinating communication strategies, presentation skills, briefings, verbal updates.
• Excellent judgement, creative problem solving skills, political awareness and the ability to identify future/developing risks and issues.
• Ability to work in ambiguity.
• Responsible for planning and delivering your area of work, on time and to full objectives/KPIs.
• Responsibility for advising the team on delivery progress and decisions requiring senior steer or escalation.

Technical

• Affiliated with professional body for comms an advantage but not necessary (e.g. CIM, CIPR, PRCA)

Additional information:

Cabinet Office policy is that a minimum 60% of your working time should be spent at your principal workplace. For some roles, due to their nature and the business need, this may be up to 100%. Requirements to attend other locations for official business will also count towards this level of attendance.