KIPP Texas Public Schools is a network of 59 public charter, open-enrollment, pre-k-12 schools educating nearly 34,000 students across Austin, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. Together with families and communities, our mission is to create joyful, academically excellent schools that prepare students with the skills and confidence to pursue the paths they choose —college, career, and beyond—so they can lead fulfilling lives and build a more just world.

Founded in Houston in 1994, and operating as KIPP Texas since 2018, our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism in our classrooms, in our offices, and in the communities we serve is unwavering. We are looking to hire a diverse team of dynamic, collaborative, and dedicated individuals with an unyielding belief that every child will succeed. Join our Team and Family and champion equity, chase excellence, persist with purpose, bring joy, and help us rise together.

KIPP Texas is part of the national KIPP network of 255 college-preparatory public charter schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia. Nationwide, KIPP students complete four-year college at a rate of 36 percent, comparable to the national average for all students and approximately three times higher than the average of students from low-income communities.

You can see all our job opportunities at https://kipptexas.org/join-our-team/.

The Opportunity

The External Communications Manager will steward KIPP’s brand locally, regionally, and nationally by spearheading KIPP Texas’ social media and blog strategy and will also assist with media relation efforts that the Director of External Communications leads.

In this role, the External Communications Manager will focus on building and implementing strategies around KIPP Texas’ yearly goals and milestones, lead the creation, planning, and distribution of social messages across the network, including content planning and creative design ideation, and provide guidance to social media administrators across the network, build engaging content partnerships and announcements for diverse external audience members, and provide digital reputation management guidance and reporting, along with frequent monitoring of messages and comments across channels.

S/he/They will report to the Director of External Communications. This work will occur across all four KIPP Texas regions: Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio.

Responsibilities

• Develop and oversee social media and blog strategy, which includes but is not limited to:
  • Create a yearly blog editorial calendar with a goal of publishing and posting four blogs per month on the KIPP Texas website resulting in an average of 1,000 monthly blog views
  • Manage all editorial content for KIPP Texas’ external blog to promote strong brand storytelling and increase positive owned stories about KIPP Texas and its mission, organizational successes, students, and staff. 
  • Drive KIPP Texas social media efforts, including campaign creation and execution, training school social media admins, and driving traffic and engagement to KIPP Texas pages
  • Build yearly social media goals around the growth of channels, such as followership, engagement, and more. 
  • Lead efforts on social media reputation management, including the management of daily monitoring of comments and messages across channels and propose strategies and messages to continue to build and protect the brand. 
  • Provide campus-level resources, training, and best practices for managing campus social media pages by creating and distributing the monthly social media newsletter and leading bi-weekly social media calls
  • Ensure content shared on social media channels is optimized to achieve communications objectives
  • Track analytics to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of content across all KIPP Texas Social Media Channels
  • Support the Student Recruitment and Enrollment Team with developing specific social media content that will help boost school applications efforts
  • Support the marketing team with digital and paid social media efforts, including but not limited to boosted content strategy, paid enrollment content support, new region entry success, and school boosted post planning throughout the year

• This individual will be assigned a region to manage media relations which will include, but is not limited to:

  • Develop written materials, including press releases, media alerts, op-eds, and media pitches.
  • Build relationships with key media contacts in the assigned region and identify opportunities to proactively pitch brand, staff, and student stories through media outlets as appropriate.
  • Provide media prep documents and media prep meetings for KIPP team members that are going to be interviewed by media members
  • Monitor media calls, requests, and inquiries for the assigned region
  • Use department tools to research media contacts who cover topics of interest for top-tier publications such as The Washington Post and Huffington Post
• Assist the External Communications Director with Crisis Communications support
• Daily distribution of KIPP Texas Public Schools’ media report
• Provide media recaps that include the number, reach and value of negative stories, when needed
• Answer emails that are sent to [email protected]

• Education: Bachelor’s Degree with Marketing, Communications, or Journalism Emphasis
• Experience: 5 years of experience in a related role
• Spanish speaking is preferred, but not required

Compensation and Benefits:

In addition to a competitive salary scale, a part of KIPP Texas’ competitive benefits options, KIPP offers all employees an $0 HMO plan for the employee only. In addition to our $0 plan, KIPP provides a $600 employer contribution towards a Health Savings Account and a variety of other supplemental benefits such as Dental, Vision, Short and Long-Term Disability, Pet Insurance, Life, etc.