Marketing and Communications Officer – Food

Main purpose of this role:

This role will help to support FareShare's relationship with Tesco through the FareShare Go team. FareShare Go is a service of FareShare that connects local stores to local charities across the country to collect daily food surplus. The role will help the FareShare Go team to deliver on their objectives around food collection and redistribution to charity.

About FareShare:

FareShare is the UK's largest food redistribution charity, fighting food poverty by tackling food waste. FareShare sources food that is surplus to requirements from retailers and manufacturers and engages many volunteers to help redistribute this to local charities and community groups that provide meals to vulnerable people including families and individuals who are homeless, unemployed, socially isolated or recovering from addiction.

FareShare operates 21 Regional Centres (depots) across the UK and supports over 9,600 local charities and community groups. In the last twelve months, the FareShare network redistributed 16,992 tonnes of food nationwide, helping to create 36.7 million meals and feed 772,000 people each week. 

The Marketing & Communications Team:

The role is part of a growing marketing and communications team that oversees and delivers on a wide range of marketing, communications and PR activities, including developing and promoting FareShare's brand values and delivering effective support to teams across FareShare and a network of 21 Regional Centres.

Having been mainly an organisation which focused upon its Business to Business relationships within the food industry, FareShare is now expanding its communications strategy to promote its operations and impact to consumer audiences, to increase its visibility as well as to reach new audiences for volunteering and fundraising.
As a result, there are new projects, new approaches and new systems being developed to enable FareShare's growth and overall expansion.

Key focus of this role:

This role is vital in strengthening FareShare's ability to promote its work to the food industry. The successful candidate will make an active contribution to the challenge of securing increasing volumes of food to support the FareShare network. S/he will need to develop engaging content that demonstrates the impact of FareShare's work and create stronger awareness of how we address food waste and food poverty to prospective and current clients as well as the media. 

She/he will be working directly on key manufacturing accounts with a team of commercial managers.

We are looking for an energetic, enthusiastic individual who feels passionate about food poverty and food waste in the UK. Ideally s/he will come with experience or knowledge of effective marketing in the food industry or agency-side, but most importantly they will have a track record of effective stakeholder engagement through a range of communications. S/he will need to demonstrate a 'can-do attitude and combine that with an effective demonstration of the experience and skills outlined below. This is a great opportunity for someone to make a real difference in an area of significant relevance and interest.

Key Responsibilities:

1. To support the Food Team in engaging with existing & prospective clients

• Work directly on key retail and manufacturing accounts collaborating with a team of commercial managers and members of the Senior Management Team
• Develop and maintain a range of collateral that effectively promotes awareness and demonstrates impact for key partners
• Delivery of a comms plan to support category targeting
• Identify relevant communication channels that support the team's new business development
• Develop engaging web content and maintain a range of industry case studies
• Maximising relationships across clients' in-house departments such as Marketing and HR to leverage new opportunities such as product promotions, volunteering and staff engagement

2. To promote FareShare's work and evidence of impact

• Provide content and evidence of FareShare's work and impact (e.g. case studies,
  research, current data) that will engage with the food industry
• Identify and share stories of best practice within the food industry
• Develop a programme of comms and assets across different media, such as video, digital platforms etc
• Maintain a contact strategy for external stakeholders relevant to the food team
• Work with the Senior Press and PR Manager to identify opportunities to secure news coverage of food partners.
• Manage Fare Share's Linked-In account

3. To develop an active presence and visibility for FareShare within the Food Industry

• Assist the Marketing Manager on research activities / surveys, including research into client insight about food redistribution and surplus management
• Develop a presence at key Trade Shows, for both speaking and exhibiting activities, where relevant
• Support the Food Team's relationships with Industry bodies such as the Food & Drink Federation, the National Farmers' Union, and the Fresh Produce Consortium amongst others, by providing content, news, blogs etc

3. General Marketing

• Develop briefs for marketing materials, write copy and liaise with designers to publish

• Maintain a pipeline of award applications and write and submit entries

• Support the development of the FareShare website's Food industry and contribute to social media content

Person specification:

Experience

• Demonstrable experience of using marketing and PR to raise the profile of an organisation or a national programme
• Demonstrable experience of working on key corporate accounts / within the food industry
• Experience of working within communications or marketing with project planning, story/creative development, delivery, monitoring and evaluation
• Professional use of social media and email marketing campaigns
• Experience of coordinating marcomms processes in for a national brand or business
• Experience of working with, and managing, third party/external agencies 
• Relationship development with multiple stakeholders in different locations across the country

Skills, knowledge and abilities

• Excellent written skills including copywriting and proof reading, along with a similar level of verbal communications skills
• Marketing and/or communications/PR experience for an national organisation with national reach
• A self-starter with proven ability to work on own initiative, meet objectives and tight deadlines under pressure
• Knowledge of the not for profit sector and ideally the charitable/sustainability sector (desirable but not essential)
• Able to demonstrate attention to detail whilst also having a flexible approach and an ability to work in a team
• Knowledge of CRM systems and content databases for case study management
• Good working knowledge of Microsoft Office and Mailchimp
• Advanced user of graphic design software such as Illustrator, InDesign and/or Photoshop

Values and behaviours

• A commitment to Equal Opportunities
• An appreciation of FareShare's mission and strategy
• Flexibility of approach and ability to work in a team
• Proven ability to develop and maintain good working relations, with both internal and external audiences