JOB DESCRIPTION

Vittana is looking for a scrappy, experienced marketing / PR manager who will help shape our public personality and take our mission to the next level. You will join a dedicated, passionate team working to bring student loans to developing countries throughout the world.

You will take over our existing PR and marketing efforts from our CEO and do whatever it takes to get thousands of students the loans they need to finish college.  You’ll collaborate with our CEO, CTO and world-class advisors to improve our website product, grow our relationships with journalists and media outlets, develop and implement marketing plan using both traditional and non-traditional media (chicken suits!), and generally do whatever it takes to get this bird off the ground.  (You might be able to convince the CEO to put on a chicken suit if you buy him lunch.  He’s usually happy with a burrito.)

Responsibilities:

• Shape a fun, inspiring and effective public personality for Vittana
  • Developing the right site, community and media messaging
  • Balancing many different personality requirements: fun, inspiring, humble, genuine, effective
  • Training our CEO and external-facing team members to make sure they stay on message
• Drive a regular flow of effective, meaningful media hits
  • Developing and maintaining personal relationships of trust with journalists and media outlets
  • Developing a long-term arc of stories and angles over the next year for different media outlets
  • Researching background on, approaching/cold-calling journalists and doing whatever else it takes to get the “right” story
• Improve our website product iteratively over time
  • Collaborating with our CEO, CTO and top-tier design, PR and startup advisors
  • Shaping website messaging in accordance with the public personality you’ll develop
  • Quantitatively tracking website performance and critical customer metrics: visitor-to-lender conversion rate, retention and visit frequency, website virality (k-factor)
  • Increasing said customer and conversion metrics through creativity and A/B testing
• Develop and implement a marketing strategy using both traditional and non-traditional media
  • Building out a deep, effective, sustained social media presence: Facebook, twitter, blog
  • Collaborating with our Communities Manager to develop a bottom-up marketing strategy
  • Experimenting with and developing innovative, effective non-traditional marketing tactics
  • Making it all happen — ultimately, are more students getting loans through Vittana every month because of you?
• Helping manage volunteers, bloggers, interns and (eventually) other staff
• Collaborating with our Communities Manager to develop a fun, innovative work environment
• Offloading as much work as possible from our CEO before his head explodes
• Doing whatever else it takes to get this bird off the ground

We’ve been fortunate to receive some great media attention lately, and it’s clear that our cause resonates with people.  As we enter the next stage of our mission, we need to tap into even more inspiration and translate that into more real impact.  Your job is simple: pay for yourself, 10 times over.  We’re looking for someone who wakes up every morning, thinking “How do I put more students in college today?”

You will be underpaid, overworked — just like the rest of us! — and may on occasion be asked to carry 6-ton elephants on your back across a bed of nails while being chased by a pack of hungry Antarctic penguins.  (And deal with the CEO’s bad jokes!)  But, as a very early employee and a member of the core team, you will help build the next generation of microfinance and you will help set the direction of what that really means.  In short, what you do will matter.

Though we’re still a young startup, we are financially healthy and backed by world-class entrepreneurs and executives from companies like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and world-class microfinance organizations and foundations like Unitus, the Peery Foundation and the Mitch Kapor Foundation.  We’ve been featured in the New York Times, and were recently voted the #1 game-changer in philanthropy by 1.7M people on Huffington Post.  Vittana students currently have a 97% repayment rate on their loans.  Lenders from around the world — 16 different countries! — make loans to students every day.  We’ve helped develop and deploy 6 student loan programs in Latin America and Southeast Asia and are growing at a rate of 40% month over month.

SKILLS & QUALIFICATIONS

Required:

• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Strong interpersonal skills in both business and personal contexts
• Deep familiarity with metrics-driven, iterative website marketing and A/B testing
• Proven ability to be creative, try wild + crazy ideas and be (at least occasionally) right — do you have a proven track record of driving conversions?
• Not just a demonstrated ability to thrive in ambiguous/chaotic environments, but a real, visceral need to work in one
• Familiarity with the news cycles and constraints of different media types
• 3 to 5 years of experience
• M.B.A. in marketing or PR/communications

Desired

• Experience in a startup or early-stage non-profit/company
• Existing relationships with journalists and major media outlets

ORGANIZATIONAL DESCRIPTION & MISSION

Vittana is an early-stage non-profit startup working to bring student loans to developing countries.  Though we’re a non-profit, we’re a technology startup through and through — we just happen to be in the business of creating good, not money.  We partner with microfinance banks around the world to develop and deploy brand new student loan programs.  Students from those programs then appear on our website and then, through the loans that people from around the country (and, at this point, around the world), are able to finish college, graduate, get jobs and then repay their loans.  This is a loan, not a donation — when you make a loan for $25, as the student repays, Vittana repays you your full $25.

HOW TO APPLY

Though our conversion rates are comparable to other related organizations and well-known e-commerce companies, our CEO believes that we can do much better.  Look through http://vittana.org, read through our past media coverage, what the community is saying and come up with 3 concrete, well-described suggestions of what you would do to improve our conversion rate and traffic.  If you’re hired, this is exactly where you’d start.

Email your 3 suggestions, resume and a few sentences introducing yourself to jobs@vittana.org with “Marketing + PR Manager // [your name]” in the subject line.