Content Marketing Lead

London (p/t or f/t), or remote 

Full Time (preferred) or Part Time. Flexible working supported

£28,000 - £35,000 (depending on experience) + meaningful equity

Our vision

At Patch, we’re building the physical infrastructure of the ‘Work Near Home’ era (WNH). We offer thoughtfully designed spaces for work, events, creators and community to come together near to where they live. By creating a blend of shared workspaces and public events in our buildings, we can enable a more balanced and equitable way of life for every community and high street in the UK.

You can read more about our vision for ‘Work Near Home’ here. In short, we believe that:

• Our work and personal lives should exist in concert, not in competition. 
• More time spent in our local communities is better for our physical and mental health.
• Commuting unfairly limits wider participation in our workforce, and with our local high streets.
• We are experiencing a once in a lifetime opportunity for change. The time is now.

You’ll be joining at a pivotal point for Patch and play a crucial role in our growth. In 2021, we raised funding from prominent investors, launched our brand and opened our first location, an historic site in Essex. 2022 is going to be transformational. We will grow from operating one site, to a national brand with several locations in towns around the country, and starting our online community.

So far, our message has spread organically through word of mouth, local events, and occasional press coverage. As a consumer brand with a revolutionary vision for how we gather, we're now looking for our first marketing hire to start building our content led approach to brand, and to start engaging our online community. You will be at the heart of this.

Your opportunity

You will be as excited about sharing this vision as we are, and will want to contribute to how it develops. Working collaboratively with the central team, you will be responsible for shaping how, when and to whom we engage with, through visual and written content.

As we grow, we’ll be excited to hear how you’d like to widen our perspective on community, and help us develop new communication channels.

You will be joining the central team of our Founder, Freddie Fforde, Head of Product and Creative Director, Paloma Strelitz, and Founder Associate, Varun Vassanth. You will work closely with our Site Directors and Community Managers - first in Chelmsford, and then across new sites.

You will report to Paloma, who has written about her vision for Work Near Home here. You too will have a meaningful influence on the direction of the company.

The primary responsibilities will ask you to:

• Build brand awareness through origination and management of communications and content, including written and visual content.
• Grow paid social activity through a test and learn strategy.
• Make your mark in the areas of communications and engagement that you are excited about and well placed to develop.
• Develop a rhythm of original written content to define the post pandemic narrative towards Work Near Home, with the support of the team (see our existing writing here). This could be short form (social media), long form (newsletters and blogs), or a mixture.
• Own the newsletter, which goes to 1,000+ and growing signups all around the UK, and develop our comms with this group in general.
• Think strategically with both the Founder and Head of Product on how to manage both our national brand strategy (for Patch), and support our local communities (in each location).
• Grow your own role through a combination of self directed initiative and with the guidance of our team and external mentors

We believe that your work will develop into a cornerstone of our community strategy, an ongoing conversation between us, our members and community stakeholders, and then between these groups. We’ve shared some further reading on these topics below:

Lessons learned building a community

A collection of Sifted pieces on communities

Rise of the community department

You will receive meaningful equity, huge freedom for personal growth and the opportunity to build the company from scratch. We have a strong culture of people development, led by the founding team’s passion for the topic.

What we’re looking for

There are a few interpretations to this role, and we are keen to hear yours. You might be from a visual or written background, have several years behind you or just a few.

You will success in this role if you have some or all of the following:

• Proven experience building brand and engagement through the curation of engaging content.
• A strong creative pedigree, with a flair for new and creative ideas.
• An excellent eye for written or visual media (or both), and an ability to create engaging work.
• A natural interest in the measurement of success of your work.
• Curiosity and the ability to learn new things, particularly willing to experiment with other ways of achieving our overall growth aims.
• Technical capability in the Adobe Suite, skills in additional creative media a plus

We also have a few guiding principles when thinking about our critical early hires:

• First principles thinking, willing and able to figure out knotty problems without prior knowledge. You are resourceful, action orientated, and motivated.
• Curiosity and optimism. You don’t know what the future looks like but you’re constantly thinking about how it could be better, and you’re even more excited about building it.
• It’s what you’re capable of doing, not necessarily what you’ve already done.
• We are a team that reflects the diversity of our communities, with a range of accompanying perspectives, ideas and influences that make us stronger.

We like people who can demonstrate a ‘Product mindset’, meaning always working with the customer in mind and gathering evidence of their needs and feedback wherever possible. 

We’d love to see evidence of your work building brands or communities wherever you have it. If you host a meetup, run a newsletter or are active in specific groups, we’d love to know!

Our values

Near

• Wherever possible, choose local (suppliers, people etc)
• Ask what is best for our customers and their communities
• Don’t be a cookie cutter, be relevant
• Celebrate and promote the potential of every corner of the UK

Balance

• Work and personal needs should be in concert, not in competition
• Prioritise the personal - mental health, family and physical wellbeing
• Environmental Sustainable sourcing of our materials

Built to last

• We leave a place better than how we found it
• We choose the right thing over the fast thing
• We build this for our grandchildren

Next steps

The first step will be an informal call with interested candidates, for which no preparation is required. We will explain the background of the company, answer your questions and share details on how we will assess formally. These are taking place throughout February and March (which will include a task, and meeting the team).

We’ll respond to every application with feedback and next steps.