Global Director of Strategic Communications

About the role

The role of the Global Director of Strategic Communications is to help credible local voices be heard, trusted and repeated in the places where public and political opinion is formed. The postholder will build OCH's central public-influence capability - known internally as the Air Game - from the ground up.

Responsibilities

• Build OCH's central strategic communications and public-influence capability, including shaping the team, external support and operating model required for the build phase.
• Define what good Air Game work looks like across the network: the shared language, standards, frameworks and practical tools that country teams can adapt to their contexts.
• Work directly with country teams in the early phase to develop their strategies, then move progressively into a coaching and advisory role as country capacity grows.
• Develop a network-wide spokesperson methodology: how country teams identify, prepare, support and sustain credible voices over time.
• Create a rapid-response capability so credible local voices can become part of relevant breaking stories in a timely way.
• Create shared infrastructure for narrative testing, media monitoring, intelligence gathering and cross-network learning, so that good practice travels quickly.
• Position OCH's voices, stories and data for an AI-shaped media environment, including how information is found, summarised, trusted and reused.
• Help country teams map and build relationships with the outlets, validators, think tanks, creators and platforms that reach their audiences.
• Lead on developing crisis response protocols.
• Manage a budget focused mainly on developing capacity and skills across the network.
• Plan the handover from the start: define the milestones at which central support reduces, what country teams need to demonstrate before taking fuller ownership, and how the function moves to a lighter-touch model.

Qualifications

Essential: Senior strategic communications judgement, recent, hands-on experience of placing stories, developing spokespeople, managing narratives and working with journalists, editors, creators or platforms at pace, builder instinct, coaching orientation, political fluency, network orchestration, temperament.

Desirable: Experience of building, spinning out or scaling a new entity, function or practice, experience of multi-country civil-society networks, international NGOs or politically diverse coalitions, experience in climate, environment, energy, land, rural affairs or adjacent public-policy debates, experience working with philanthropic funders, boards or senior political stakeholders.