Special Projects Manager (Communications Team)

As Special Projects Manager, you will:

• Develop briefs: translate stakeholder requirements into clear, actionable creative and technical briefs, and push back constructively when asks are unclear, conflicting or unscoped.

• Oversee project performance and progress: work with internal and external stakeholders to define what success looks like for each project, integrate those goals into design and content strategies, and develop/execute comms projects that reflect them.

• Identify, onboard and manage agencies and contractors: identify the skill gaps required to make a project shine, then source and steer talent to fill those gaps through web development agencies or individual freelancers.

• Own quality assurance: define what "done" looks like — reviewing deliverables against brief, brand guidelines and accessibility standards (WCAG), running structured review rounds, and holding the final quality bar before anything ships.

• Product innovation: ideate and develop digital products to help achieve FLI’s mission and meet org objectives.

• Run special projects: deliver multi-month initiatives such as international creative contests end to end.

• Steward brand coherence: work with the website development agency to maintain our design system and keep high-volume output visually consistent.

Required experience and qualifications:

• Based in a timezone between West Coast, USA and the UK (UTC-8 to UTC+1).

• Proven ability to coordinate complex, multi-stakeholder projects — comfortable navigating competing priorities, securing alignment from senior colleagues, and turning messy input into clear direction.

• A track record of building or significantly improving delivery processes — intake, review, QA or approval workflows — not just operating within them.

• Project management experience across design, communications and/or digital/web projects, ideally including managing external agencies.

Required skills and qualities:

• Genuine interest in FLI's mission and the issues we work on — able to represent our work credibly to agencies, judges, contest entrants and partners.

• Sharp quality instincts and the confidence to send things back when they're not right (ideally provable with a portfolio of shipped work you've quality-assured).

• Calm under deadline pressure; comfortable saying no and offering alternatives.

Preferred qualifications, skills and qualities:

• Experience running participatory or multi-stakeholder projects — contests, awards, grant rounds, festivals or similar.

• Familiarity with website delivery: CMS platforms and enough technical literacy to triage issues and talk credibly with developers.

• Working knowledge of SEO and digital audience growth: technical and on-page fundamentals, analytics tools (e.g. GA4, Search Console), and how content and campaign decisions affect reach.

• Nonprofit, policy, advocacy or campaign experience.