Marketing and Communications Officer

The Role and the Department

Northern Accelerator is led by Durham University in partnership with Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside - who come together through Universities for North East England (UNEE).

We are seeking a skilled, creative and experienced Marketing and Communications Officer who can provide excellent communications and events support for Northern Accelerator. The postholder will also work with the programme team to support the commercialisation eco-system with a programme of excellent internal communications activity. The postholder will work closely with the Northern Accelerator and SCENE project teams, side-by-side with the Marketing Officer for SCENE. Internally our projects are separately funded, but externally you will support a strong cohesive Northern Accelerator brand across all activity.

Northern Accelerator is an ambitious project strong aims and multiple partners and the role of communications will be key in ensuring the visibility of the various aspects of the programme and maintaining a strong sense of common endeavour.

Ideally, the postholder will have a good understanding of innovation and commercialisation purposes and mechanisms and be able to work flexibly and collaboratively with our partners and stakeholders to design and ensure delivery of effective communication plans. They will also need to understand the purpose of our national and regional funders in allocating the resource, in order to maintain alignment of Northern Accelerator communications activity with the economic plans in the North East and national commercialisation objectives.

The main duties of the post will be:

• Working with the Head of Regional programmes, Programme Manager and other team members, design and ensure a strong and visible communications and events plan to support the effective delivery of the Northern Accelerator programme.
• Co-ordinate internal communications activity between the University partners and the wider network of Strategic partners to underpin the success of the commercialisation ecosystem.
• Work closely with the wider network of Communications staff to ensure there are complementary communication activities across, Northern Accelerator, the SCENE programme, the Commercialisation and Spinout Fund, and any other projects which re-enforce their brands and demonstrate the collaboration between North East universities.
• Provide support, advice, information, presentations and guidance to University staff regarding the communications activities within the project, including ensuring compliance with the expectations of partners and funders with respect of use of logos and other corporate or programme identities and to be the focal point for communications across the University and strategic partners.
• Monitor communications activities against a key set of metrics and make proposals for improvement

The postholder will sit within Durham University's Research and Innovation Services (RIS) team, accountable to the Head of Regional Programmes.

RIS is a professional services directorate at the heart of Durham University which provides expertise, leadership and support to academics and professional colleagues across the University for all research, research-related, knowledge exchange and economic development activities and aims to strengthen their University's role at the leading-edge of research and innovation, inspiring change across the world and in our region.