Email Manager

Overview

• Start date: ASAP
• Reporting to: VP of Growth
• Visa sponsorship: Unfortunately, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role. Applicants should have the right to work in the UK at the time of application.
• Background checks: Due to the nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history and right to work.
• You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by:  EOD 28th July
• Salary expectations: We aim for transparency on salary bands. If our range is misaligned with your expectations, we’d welcome an open conversation as early as possible.

Role

Why we’re hiring

Our email communications are one of the most powerful tools we have to reach and engage public servants globally. With an expanding portfolio of content, learning offers, and communities, we need an Email Manager to make sure every message we send is high-quality, well-targeted, and mission-aligned.

Summary of the role

The Email Manager will be responsible for overseeing our email marketing operations, ensuring all campaigns are timely, accurate, and aligned with member interests. You’ll manage cross-team coordination and ensure email quality through content curation, rigorous QA, testing, and performance analytics. By increasing the relevance and reach of our emails, you will shape the experience of hundreds of thousands of public servants worldwide in accessing knowledge to make governments smarter.

Team

You’ll sit within the Growth team and work closely with colleagues in Communications, Product, Events, Partnerships and Learning. This is a collaborative, cross-functional role, so you’ll be a central point of coordination for anything email-related across the business.

Tasks and remit

You’ll be:

• Coordinating email campaigns across teams, ensuring clear plans and timely execution
• Managing experimentation and A/B testing to improve email performance
• Owning the QA of all outbound emails by proofreading for accuracy, link/functionality, and ensuring copy is clear and engaging.
• Curating user-generated content for newsletters and learning emails
• Segmenting and managing email targeting lists to ensure relevance and high engagement
• Publishing new content in our CMS (Contentful) and using AI tools for editing
• Supporting our transition to increasingly automated email workflows. You’ll work with Product to implement smarter automation to improve efficiency.

You won’t be:

• Leading paid marketing or social media
• Owning broader content strategy; you’ll curate and quality-check content, not set editorial themes
• Building email templates from scratch in HTML (though you’ll work with design and product colleagues who can support)

Role expectations

Timelines may vary depending on individual onboarding and support needs, but we expect most team members to achieve the following milestones:

Within one month, you will…

• Be fully onboarded into our email, CMS, and CRM tools (SuprSend, Contentful, HubSpot)
• Understand our current email strategy and goals
• Take ownership of weekly email coordination meetings

Within three months, you will…

• Own the planning, QA, and delivery of all outbound email campaigns
• Establish and monitor email testing and analytics processes
• Regularly curate and quality-check user-generated content for promotion

Within six months, you will…

• Improve the performance of our email programme through experimentation
• Drive increased engagement through improved targeting and segmentation
• Recommend and help implement automation improvements in collaboration with our Product team

About you

This is a great fit if you…

• Take real pride in spotting the small stuff — from typos to broken links — and enjoy bringing rigour and polish to every campaign you touch
• Have strong organisational and editorial skills, with a sharp eye for detail
• Are comfortable using tools like HubSpot, SuprSend, Contentful — or excited to learn
• Enjoy curating and optimising content to meet audience needs
• Are a strong written communicator, able to adapt your tone to match Apolitical’s brand voice
• Have an interest in UX writing or microcopy — this could become part of the role as our product and emails evolve
• Love refining systems and processes to make things work better
• Are excited by the challenge of scaling a manual process into a streamlined, automated system — and finding creative, pragmatic solutions along the way
• Have an interest in lifecycle marketing and the ways automation can improve member experience and impact

This likely won’t be the right role if you…

• Don’t enjoy being in the detail. This role involves carefully reviewing every email sent to tens of thousands of members, where small mistakes can have a big impact.
• Prefer a highly predictable workload. This role involves working across many teams with shifting priorities.
• Need hands-on management to stay on track. This role requires a high degree of independence and accountability.
• Want to focus on long-form content writing or storytelling. This role is about precision, targeting, and curation more than writing from scratch.

Don’t meet every single expectation? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Apolitical is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Application Process

Apolitical uses Applied in our recruitment. Applied aims to overcome unconscious bias in recruiting. Instead of using your CV alone, we'll be asking you to answer questions to test skills needed for the role. The answers are then anonymised, and reviewed in a random order by members of our team. 

The Applied platform also asks some demographic questions before you start your application. These answers are never visible to the hiring team and don’t affect your application in any way. We only see summary statistics to help us check if our candidate pool is balanced and if everyone has an equal chance to get hired irrespective of their background. If you prefer, you can easily opt out of answering these questions.

Using AI in your application answers

At Apolitical, we embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work. However, as AI becomes more prevalent, it can be difficult to distinguish between machine-generated content and the unique perspectives of candidates. We’re excited to see how you use AI tools to structure and refine your answers, but we value your unique insights above all else. Ensure your application reflects your voice and how your skills align with our mission.

Stages in our hiring process:

• Culture interview [45m on Google Meet]. We ask you questions on fundamental skills and behaviours for working at Apolitical. This call is about finding candidates who will add to our culture. It’s an opportunity to get to know you and for you to get to know us as an organisation, so we make time at the end for you to ask us questions about how we work.
• Work sample [async]. We use work samples to see how you approach problems and give you a sense of the type of work you would be doing in the role. We use them because they’re reliable in assessing and predicting performance in a role. Our work samples are designed to take less than 2 hours to complete.
• Team interview [45 on Google Meet]. We ask you questions on fundamental skills and behaviours for the role. It’s an opportunity to meet some of the people you might end up working with, so we make time at the end for you to ask us questions about the team and role.
• IF RELEVANT - Management interview [45m on Google Meet]. When up to 70% of employee engagement is driven by manager effectiveness, our objective is clear: hire effective managers who will help our team members thrive. Much as in the team interview, this interview considers the skills and behaviours expected of a manager at this role level.
• Executive interview [30m in person]. One or two of our senior leaders build on conversations you've had with other team members to learn about your motivations and drivers at work and within the Apolitical context.