Communications Coordinator (Job Code: YLCC)
 Save the Children (Young Lives project)
 Location: New Delhi
 Last Date: July 15, 2010
 Email: jobs@savethechildren.in (Reference: DevNetJobsIndia.org)

The Communications Coordinator has a vital role to play within the Young Lives team in India. S/he will be responsible for ensuring that the work of Young Lives is effectively and enthusiastically shared with a range of stakeholders – policymakers, other researchers and students, civil society organisations, media, and the Young Lives children and their communities– nationally as well as internationally. This will involve both reactive and proactive work to produce tailored messages and targeted outputs to raise Young Lives profile as an authoritative research-to-policy study of childhood poverty in India.

Young Lives is a broad-based study, following the lives of 12,000 children in Ethiopia, India (in the state of Andhra Pradesh), Peru and Vietnam over 15 years. We take a multi-dimensional approach to poverty, emphasising particularly children’s resilience and resourcefulness. The current focus for our policy engagement work in India (2009-11) is social protection, nutrition and vulnerability. Other areas of research include child well-being, work and education.

The Communications Coordinator will be based in the Delhi Office of Young Lives and report directly to the Young Lives Country Director. S/he will work very closely with the Policy Coordinator placed within Save the Children, researchers (who are based at the Centre for Economic and Social Studies in Hyderabad, and at SPMVV, the women’s university in Tirupati), as well as with the Communications Manager and policy staff in Oxford

Responsibilities
1. Work with Young Lives Country Director, country team and Oxford staff to develop and implement a communications and policy engagement plan for Young Lives within India. This will involve liaising with researchers and policy staff and keeping in touch with their plans and analysis in order to spot opportunities for effective communication and dissemination of our work.

2. Maintain awareness of development and policy debates in India and develop key messages, summaries and briefings from Young Lives research, targeted and tailored for different audiences.

3. Work closely with the Communications Manager to develop high-quality communications materials, ranging from policy briefs to leaflets and presentations, and ensure that all outputs adhere to housestyle and agreed messages and reflect the image and values of Young Lives.

4. Maintain and develop the country webpages. This might be by commissioning or writing new material, updating existing information, deciding where new information could usefully be added, editing and assembling information from researchers and policy staff, etc.

5. Devise and coordinate Young Lives events and workshops with various stakeholders such as government ministries (at national and sub-national levels), donors, NGOs, civil society and the media in order to raise the profile of Young Lives research and engage stakeholders.

6. Identify opportunities for networking and building external relations, supporting the Country Director to ensure Young Lives is properly represented at external events and key relationships are maintained, and that a contacts database is developed and kept up-to-date.

7. Design and implement an effective dissemination plan for Young Lives publications, using events, electronic media, mailing lists, abstracting services and multipliers as appropriate; and arranging translation and summaries of Young Lives materials for a national audience (as per a translation plan agreed with the Communications Manager).

8. Coordinate Young Lives press and media work by generating ideas as well as responding to enquiries from the press, writing press releases and contacting journalists to interest them in child poverty-related stories, and organising media events. This will involve maintaining and developing a media contacts database, facilitating media training and assisting researchers to prepare for media interviews.

9. Contribute to research reciprocity activities through developing appropriate communications materials to be used with children, their families, and other community stakeholders, and support the research teams to organise reciprocity events.

10. Collaborate with the Save the Children policy and communications team to ensure that Young Lives research is fed into and supports their work as appropriate.

11. Support the Country Director to ensure effective internal communications within the India team, and work with the staff in Oxford to facilitate project-wide communications.

12. Coordinate the reporting of research and policy activities and outputs as part of the project-wide monitoring and evaluation system.

13. To assist in other Young Lives discussions and communications-related activities as required, including fundraising.

Person specification
• First degree (or equivalent experience) in mass communications or a relevant subject
• An interest and broad knowledge of childhood poverty and other social policy issues in India
• Minimum five years of experience of working in a communications role in an NGO, research project, or similar organisation in India
• Experience of strategic planning and the ability to turn plans into practical action
• Strong all-round communications skills especially writing and editing (for publication and the web), and ability to distil and summarise research messages in clear, non-specialist language
• Excellent influencing, networking and relationship-building skills, with the confidence to work with people at all levels of seniority and from different backgrounds
• Excellent written and spoken English. Competence in Hindi/ Telegu would be an advantage
• Good basic design sense and the ability to lay out documents professionally
• Relevant experience of working with the media, preparing press releases and organising events
• Attention to detail and ability to prioritise a range of tasks in order to meet competing deadlines; a self-starter with ability to use initiative and work with minimal supervision
• A team-player accustomed to task-based and collaborative ways of working, with energy, enthusiasm and a commitment to communicating about development.

In this role there is likely to be regular travel for events and meetings in Delhi and Andhra Pradesh, and the possibility of occasional short overseas trips. This is a contractual position for a period of two years

Interested candidates should mention the job code in the subject line and send their CV as an attachment at jobs@savethechildren.in  

Save the Children aims to be an equal opportunity employer. Women candidates are encouraged to apply. Recruitment and selection procedures & checks reflect our commitment to protect children from abuse.