Strategist (Social Impact & Sustainability)

The Opportunity

Our strategy team has a vacancy for a strategist to join our sustainability and social impact hub (practice area). We work with our clients to help them develop bold ambitious social impact and sustainability strategies that underpin their purpose and create true value for their business as well as positive impact for the world. 

More and more of our work is focussed on social impact and therefore we’d like to find someone who has social impact experience as well as ideally also having some sustainability experience or knowledge. 

As examples of the diversity of the work we do in this area, in recent times we have been working on:

• Helping a major beer brand shape their social impact strategy and a new charity partnership related to it;
• Helping the UK’s largest building society develop their social impact and investment strategy;
• Carrying out a review for the Board of a purpose-driven global consumer-healthcare company’s social impact strategy, assessing it against best practice and others in the industry;
• Helping a major global home improvement and retail company develop its social impact strategy and programmes;
• Developing and activating a social impact strategy for a group of family care and intimate care brands;
• Helped an emerging sustainable athletic wear and shoe brand develop a bolder sustainability strategy to reaffirm their commitment as an industry leader in sustainability;
• Helped a major confectionery company with a creative corporate communications platform related to their sustainability and social impact commitments and actions they have taken to meet them;
• Working on how best to communicate and activate a new initiative to help address the systemic gender bias in Formula 1.

We want to do more fantastic work in this area, and we’re therefore looking for a Strategist who can support in the following:

• Apply experience to challenge thinking on how to develop bold and ambitious social impact strategies and sustainability strategies;
• Support in delivering some of our larger projects and programmes in this area;
• Act as a social impact and sustainability adviser on social impact and / or sustainability issues on other purpose work or creative communications work for our clients;
• Help to support the evolution of our offer, approach and contribute to thought leadership in this area.

This role will see you contributing to projects, helping uncover disruptive insights, preparing for and running workshops, engaging clients and their leadership teams to make clearer and bolder strategic choices which also unlock new opportunities and ideas for their business and brand. You will play a prominent role on our sustainability and social impact projects specifically, but as we are a dynamic and nimble agency with a fast-moving ideas culture, you will need to be comfortable stretching your skills and expertise across the full range of services that we offer.

You'll need to feel comfortable working on lots of different challenges at any one time. You might, for example be 

• helping a client identify their overall social impact strategy and partnerships, setting related goals and targets, 
• developing a sustainability strategy and roadmap of actions required to achieve these targets, 
• develop the content and narrative for a sustainability report, 
• or using your social impact and sustainability knowledge as part of a team working on a piece of consumer-facing communications, or as part of a purpose and values project aimed at helping to embed broader purpose into a company culture and decision-making.

We're a growing team, and we nurture our talent, which means there’s scope to grow into a more senior role, playing more of a leadership role on projects over time.

About you

We want this role to go to someone with a grounding in what it takes to deliver real and meaningful change and impact around complex issues in often complex businesses. 

You will bring at least 3 years experience in social impact and / or sustainability, ideally including time in a strategic consultancy, marketing or innovation agency or in a client side role. You’ll be passionate about the role businesses and brands can play in creating real world change and have experience of delivering social impact, sustainability and/or purpose projects for businesses and brands. You’ll ideally have great technical expertise and knowledge in social impact and also ideally in sustainability.

You’ll have experience of supporting delivery of strategic and analytical thinking, alongside excellent communication skills, the ability to offer a point of view that’s based on past experience, insight you have uncovered and be someone who thrives in a fast-paced environment.

We’re looking for someone who can demonstrate confidence in their own experience, has a solutions focused and proactive attitude, and who is collaborative and hands on in their approach. You must be comfortable supporting on driving projects forward, delivering to project timelines and producing exceptional work (with targeted guidance and support from senior colleagues). Importantly, as a growing, ambitious business, we need you to feel comfortable applying your skillset across different types of projects, clients and challenges, which may not always fall directly within our social impact and sustainability offer.

Beyond client work, you'll have the ambition to drive us forward and support the agency to grow and develop through playing a supporting role in developing this part of the offer, both through the development of our IP and thought leadership. Finally you’ll be excited to work in a fast-paced, creative, ideas culture, ideally with experience of working with creative teams to deliver brilliant creative ideas.

Day to day responsibilities:

Strategic thinking and insight 

• Support strategic thinking on a range of social impact, sustainability and purpose projects, producing quality, insightful, and relevant recommendations 
• Bringing a confident and well articulated perspective on projects based on your experience, offering challenges and solutions to better our work, demonstrating key knowledge of the issues, impact and measurable strategies in this space.

Project delivery 

• Play a key supporting role on large social impact and sustainability strategy projects 
• Developing exceptional client facing deliverables, such as workshops, interviews, insight gathering tasks, presentations and strategic outputs (with senior support)
• Bring your specific experience to help shape our response to social impact and / or sustainable strategy client challenges and briefs

Managing client relationships 

• Build strong, healthy relationships with clients and an understanding of their business 
• Be a trusted point of contact for your clients’ projects 
• Awareness of project profitability and account growth, helping to make sure projects are delivered with commercial success 

Business development 

• Help develop our thought leadership and IP in social impact and sustainability, based on your experience 
• Support on pitches and proposals as part of a proposal and/or pitch team 

Team and culture 

• Play an active role in the Given culture and in all areas of the strategy team and internal initiatives
• Be comfortable in a fast paced ideas-led culture & environment

About Given 

In recent years, purpose has risen to the top of business agendas. As the originals in this space (no-one’s been doing this longer than we have) we’ve helped clients like IKEA, John Lewis Partnership, Bupa, On Running, Diageo and Lloyds Banking Group on their purpose and sustainable transformation journey, helping them truly unleash the power of purpose in their organisations and the wider world. For more than a decade, we’ve used ideas to fundamentally rethink the role businesses and brands play in the world, while capturing imaginations and changing behaviour.

We believe to do this well you need to put people at the heart of the process and transformation, as well as bringing brilliant strategic thinking and amazing creativity. That’s why we have strategic consultancy and an in-house creative studio all under the same roof. 

We’re ambitious about leading the purpose and impact agenda in the UK, Europe and internationally as we evolve our offer and the range of work we do for clients.

Our offer cuts across all stages of a business becoming more purpose driven: from the development of a true purpose and purpose strategy for businesses and brands, helping them embed this purpose in their ways of working, culture and decision-making, underpin it with strong sustainability and social impact strategies and activating it through customer-facing comms, brand experience and product and service innovation. 

Recruitment process 

Our first step will be a 30 minute phone call to understand a bit more about you and why you’ve applied. Next, we’ll invite candidates to a first round interview to get into more detail about your experience and expectations of the role. The final stage will involve answering a short brief that should only take a few hours of your time to prep, and present back to us. We’d love it if at least one stage of the interview process was face to face in our Shoreditch office.

For our people

• Hybrid working, with one fixed day in the office a week.
• We offer 26 days paid holiday per calendar year pro rata, plus public holidays. We also close the office between Christmas and New Year, which is in addition to your paid holiday allowance
• Company bonus scheme, eligible after passing your probation 
• Pension Scheme with Aviva, eligible after passing your probation
• Health plan with SimplyHealth, eligible after passing your probation
• £100 working from home allowance to help your home office set up, eligible after passing your probation
• A tenure bonus reward after 3 and 6 years of employment
• Work from anywhere for 1 month of the year, after your first year of employment
• Interest free season ticket loan and Bike to Work scheme 

Given strives to be an equal opportunities employer and everyone’s commitment to this process will be expected. We are proud to be different and that starts with our people. We believe in equal opportunities for everyone. Individuality is what makes us great, we want everyone to bring their full self to work and create something amazing. We are happy to discuss flexible and agile approaches to working for all our roles - we can’t promise we will be able to offer you everything you want or need but we do promise to discuss it with you openly and honestly. If you have any reasonable adjustments required in order to fully participate in the recruitment process, please discuss it with our recruitment team.