When I was a student many, many years ago, I worked for a year or two for my student union in the entertainments team. We did the promotions, tickets, events.  We booked & looked after the DJs and bands.  Basically we filled the venues.

The role required a mix of talents. 

• We had to find a mix of well known, expensive DJs and Bands and up-and-coming, cheaper ones.  Each would bring in crowds, either with their name with the potential to excite people's sense of discovering the next new thing.
• We had to convince busy people to let us book them and come all the way to Dundee to perform, which wasn't always easy.
• We had to figure out how to promote the events, when to promote (within the maelstrom of other noise), which students to target, how to design the posters and fliers, how many to print, how to dress the venue and how much to invest, ratios of tables/dance-floor for best bar yield versus fire capacity and so on. 
• Last, but by no means least, we then had to sell often quite expensive tickets to poor students...

To give some context for our Community Champion role - just swap bands for journalists, swap students for news readers.

The last activity on that list was real work - often walking in laps around the sprawling union bars for days or weeks before a big event; stopping at every table, interrupting conversations, talking to students about their plans for the specific night, persuading them to put the flier in their bag or pocket and not the floor, even dragging them to the box office... and then going back to the next table and doing all over again.

In amongst that role therefore are all sorts of aspects of

• strategy, planning
• budgeting
• activity performance measurement/learning
• marketing execution
• communications 
• legwork

Now, I've had some fabulous people within my team over my 20 years running Deep Blue Sky.  Many of those people had quite a few of those skills.

There are two things, however, that are typically lacking:

1. The capacity to always, always be analysing any strategy or activity, measuring it and most crucially attenuating their assumptions, strategies and spend to maximise the output.  It takes a mindset of never assuming a strategy is correct, of always testing and observing and the confidence to be forever attenuating everything.
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2. What I call "The legwork" - which is absolutely, absolutely fundamental. In my youth this was the activity of actually going, face-to-face and interrupting people's day with enthusiasm, humour, understanding, empathy, positivity and persuading them to stop, think and hopefully engage.

So, somewhere in the description of the role - or in the interview process - we will need to tease out which people really have those skills, particularly these last two.  The honest truth is I don't know how to do that - I'm not even sure I possess the skill to articulate, much less identify, these traits in people.

At its core, our Community Champion role is a marketing role.

But it absolutely has to be hands-on, face-to-face, personal relationship building - across open social media channels, and via direct approaches.  It is not - it simply cannot be - a passive activity of designing advert and foisting them on people.  OneSub (and our sister, twiDAQ) are both platforms build for people - they exist to help us change and improve the world.

For us to get that message across requires a person who knows how to speak to people, directly.

To my mind the role is very similar to that role I had over twenty-something years ago.  If you'll forgive the metaphor you only really need to swap DJs for journalists and students for news readers.

We're not trying to get students to gigs.  We're trying to get members of the public to change their news-diet and reading habits.  

To propagate and sustain our early growth it's even more crucial that we help real journalists to see value invest their time and energy creating content on our platform.  They are typically busy, overworked people with a lot of people already begging for their time.  Asking for their time with the promise that they will enjoy a strong audience in time - or the with FOMO that others will grab their audience from them - is a tough gig.

So my question is: does this sound like you?

If you, or anyone you know, would like a new challenge we are offering a fully-flexible, fully-remote Community Champion role at £20-30k within our more established sister organisation and incubator, Deep Blue Sky.  That role will be split ~70:30 between OneSub and our little sister, twiDAQ.