Director, Portfolio Growth

BlueLena was founded by an experienced team of publishers, journalists and marketing executives to create a sustainable future for independent local media. We do so by deploying world class technology, and delivering the expertise and professional services to support audience growth, build recurring reader revenues and cultivate major donor relationships for long-term publisher success. BlueLena provides publishers with hands-on help, aiding resource-strapped teams to execute with the efficiency of a global media organization.

Today we support over 250 newsrooms across North America, Asia and Europe.

BlueLena is hiring a Director of Portfolio Growth dedicated to a networked community of high-performing and rapidly growing nonprofit publications, managed under an enterprise services agreement. This role will report to the Chief Strategy Officer, and oversee a multi-disciplinary team in the deployment, delivery and ongoing support of our technology, strategy consulting and professional services to facilitate growth, engagement and monetization of audiences.

Key Responsibilities:

At a high-level, this role is responsible for the performance, satisfaction and growth of the portfolio managed under the enterprise agreement. To that end, duties fall into two distinct, but related, buckets:

Community Management

• You will serve as an advisor, collaborator and thought partner to the publishers and senior leadership of our enterprise client, helping to define long-term organizational strategies for growth and success.
• You will gather, review and disseminate performance metrics for the entire portfolio, providing context and insight to the numbers.
• You will identify and propose audience development experiments to run across multiple publications, and be hands-on in executing those experiments from concept to completion. Experiments are designed to optimize the funnel in meaningful and measurable ways, surfacing new best practices for the portfolio.
• With support from the VP of Growth, you will lead regular community-wide check-ins, training sessions, and “show and share” events with audience team members.
• Additionally, in conjunction with the Marketing team, you will create and promote content that highlights the project’s narrative, including lessons learned, local successes, challenges encountered and new best practices to share with the local news ecosystem.

Publisher Management

• In collaboration with the Chief Strategy Officer, you will establish SMART goals and overarching funnel strategies to guide individual publications in building relationships with audiences through a comprehensive lifecycle.
• With assistance from a Publisher Success Manager, also dedicated to the program, you will work directly with local audience leads to support the goals of each publication, while seeking to improve overall community metrics.
• In collaboration with the Chief Strategy Officer and Publisher Success Manager, you will translate overarching SMART goals and strategies into actionable 12-month plans, leveraging the automations and features of BlueLenaCXA and drawing on best practices from BlueLena’s publisher journey curriculum.
• You will be responsible for measuring and tracking each publication’s progress toward these goals and developing systems of accountability to ensure that each publication receives the necessary training, support, and services.
• You will also maintain continuous dialogue with local audience leads to identify and replicate best practices across the community.
• You will also collaborate with BlueLena’s Product team on introducing and deploying new BlueLena products to Community publishers, including lead acquisition, direct mail and adoption of our CRM/moves management system.

Our ideal candidate

• You previously led a team responsible for audience growth, reader revenue and digital strategy at a U.S. major metro daily, statewide nonprofit journalism org or growing local news organization.
• You have significant experience deploying the tools and technology that power local news organizations, with a deep understanding of best practices and innovation in the sector, including: CMS products for local news, Google Analytics, ESPs, marketing automations, on-site pop-ups, online giving and member registration systems. You are a quick study who will commit to learning the intricacies of BlueLenaCXA and other tools on which we standardize.
• You are a “roll up your sleeves” type of person who can cheerfully jump into a publisher’s system to help solve a problem or demonstrate how to complete a task.
• You are a data nerd, and can ferret metrics out of many systems, surface insights from those metrics and weave a compelling narrative of success and opportunity.
• A coach by nature, you are comfortable and energized by training and teaching, to groups or in 1:1 sessions. You are able to tailor your messaging to meet your audience where they are. In this role, those audiences may include CEOs and publishers, Chief Audience Officers and department leads, or early-career membership managers and digital producers.
• You are well-versed in best practices for experimentation and product sprints. You have demonstrated experience in applying those principles to local newsrooms and working through operational logjams and setbacks to achieve results.
• You are thoughtful about your role as Community Leader and aim to strike a balance between directly supporting newsroom leads and helping them develop their own leadership skills and audience strategies.

Our clients’ jobs are difficult, and our primary goal is making financial sustainability a reality without overly burdening them. The ideal candidate will think beyond the solutions available today, identifying emerging needs within the client base and proposing solutions that we can build and scale across the network.

In addition to these role-specific expectations, our ideal candidate also exhibits the qualities that define our BlueLena team members, including:

• Collaborative: BlueLena is a true learning environment, and despite our org chart, we’re a relatively flat organization. Great ideas and best practices come from team members across the org, and it’s not uncommon for our senior leaders to play a support role when needed. We don’t hoard knowledge, we support each other, and we do whatever we can to back each other up.
• Motivated: You are a detail-oriented project leader with the ability to multi-task and get things done in a fast paced, ever-changing environment.
• Accountable: You are an experienced people leader who represents the organization with integrity and professionalism. You embody standards for personal accountability while maintaining work-life balance.
• Curious: You ask good questions, show empathy, are great at listening and synthesizing large amounts of information.
• Strategic: You are comfortable with identifying and proposing solutions to complex challenges. Although not immersed in daily business operations, you understand them and can identify/recommend opportunities for improvement.

Not you but think you have something to offer? Job descriptions are tough to write and rarely comprehensive. The above is only one way we’ve envisioned this role. We welcome people of all backgrounds and experiences to apply; come with a passion for supporting the independent news ecosystem and an ability to learn and tell us how you think you can make an impact with BlueLena.

To apply, please send a short email to join@bluelena.io outlining how you would make an impact at BlueLena. Include a resume or LinkedIn link.

About BlueLena:

BlueLena was founded in 2020 by an experienced team of publishers, journalists and news marketing executives to create a sustainable future for independent local media. We do so by deploying world class technology, and delivering the expertise and professional services to support audience growth, build recurring reader revenues and cultivate major donor relationships for long-term publisher success.

Today we support over 250 newsrooms across North America, Asia and Europe.

The BlueLena publishing membership represents a diverse mix of nonprofit and for-profit newsrooms, including pure digital and hybrid print + digital publications, as well as established and new media brands. Our clients represent membership with the American Journalism Project (AJP), the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN), LION Publishers, the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), the National Association of Hispanic Press (NAHP), the Black Press Association (NNPA), and the Local Media Association (LMA).

We facilitate the sharing of best practices through a weekly newsletter, community Slack channel, and monthly Zoom meetings where we spotlight success stories from across the BlueLena publisher consortium.

BlueLena is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

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