Introduction

Thank you for considering our Consumer Insights and Marketing Executive role at Fair4All Finance. As we continue our exciting growth plans and begin to deliver on our ambitious goals, we are seeking a passionate and enthusiastic person with experience in delivering consumer insights projects and direct to consumer marketing activity to support our customer focused product and marketing design. Your work will have a direct impact on the lives of potentially millions of people who are living in vulnerable financial circumstances, building awareness of the organisations that can help them the most and supporting them design more effective marketing plans. During covid 11m people accumulated £25bn of debt and arrears for essentials – our work is focussed on helping those customers have better alternatives and more affordable credit.

You will be joining a talented and driven team drawn from a range of backgrounds spanning CEO, Partner and Director roles within Financial Services institutions through to leaders in impact investing and social purpose organisations. The reach and influence of our team makes this an exciting place to work and enables us to engage important stakeholders at the highest levels.

We believe this is a hugely exciting opportunity for an experienced consumer insights and marketing professional who enjoys a diverse range of work and is seeking further development in their career. If this sounds like the role for you, please do get in touch!

Role purpose

Organisations in the Community Finance sector (namely credit unions, community development financial institutions and social fintechs) excel at serving customers in vulnerable circumstances across the UK and are experts in their customer base. Despite their strength in serving customers, awareness of these organisations is generally low, as is penetration within their potential customer base.

The person in this role will be responsible for managing our consumer insights projects, getting to the heart of the complex and varied issues that our end consumers face, sharing this insight internally and externally and recommending (and delivering) activity that can improve the lives of people in financially vulnerable circumstances.

We are also looking for someone to support community finance providers to develop their marketing capability, increasing the effectiveness of marketing through sector wide support and helping marketing teams within organisations to develop their skills and experience. You’ll either deliver this from your own marketing expertise, or by being incisive and focused on identifying challenges and finding the right marketing specialists to support organisations.

This role will suit someone who is passionate about putting consumers first in their work. You’ll have led consumer insights projects and have been actively involved in turning insights into action. You’ll have direct to customer marketing experience or have worked closely with marketing teams and understand the fundamentals of marketing strategy and delivery. You’ll be excited to drive change across a sector, working with organisations at differing levels of capability and working with a range of external stakeholders. You’ll be organised, often owning several project plans at once and thinking ahead to how the outputs of our work can have the most impact.

Your responsibilities

1. Managing consumer insights projects from initial brief through to delivery to ensure our product, marketing and operational work is fit for purpose and meets customer needs – 40%

This will include:

• Developing your understanding of our strategic aims and initiatives, and where new consumer insights are needed to maximise the impact of our work
• Ensuring that our broad stakeholder groups are considered in the overall brief, and in the outputs, of our work
• Being an expert in Fair4All Finance’s consumer segments, and an advocate for these internally and externally which may include running workshops to embed learnings
• Ownership of procurement of consumer insights agencies including writing briefs, managing assessment processes and contracting, working closely with our Operations team
• Working with agencies to design a clear project plan, and keeping all parties on track of both the objectives of the work and the deadlines
• Planning required deliverables, including toolkits, webinars, videos or other content, to share the outcomes of our work (working closely with our Communications team)

2. Through direct delivery and working with marketing agencies to ensure community finance providers get excellent support for marketing strategy and delivery – 30%

To increase awareness of the community finance sector, you will manage initiatives that help to develop marketing capability across the sector. This will include:

• Working with marketing agencies on the development of marketing toolkits to support capability development across the sector, including guidance on marketing performance measurement, channel strategy, brand strategy and more. This applies to marketing that is both direct to customer, and through referral routes (for example through employer or housing association partnerships with lenders as many organisations currently have these relationships but have low penetration of the membership base)
• Identifying new market and customer opportunities for the sector, monitoring market trends and delivering insights and recommended actions to support fast and effective execution
• Developing a content plan for regularly sharing knowledge to improve capability, whether directly or by procuring additional support. This could include a wide range of support for marketing leads across the sector including:

   

  • facilitating webinars or roundtable events on specific aspects of marketing;
  • collating best practice content, activity, practical guides and templates;
  • commissioning content that can be white labelled for use by multiple organisations eg materials for employers to use in internal communications to drive uptake of the products and services they are able to offer through partnerships with lenders for.
  • Commissioning and managing the roll out of technical product training materials which help to enable referrals from organisations to lenders to target those most in need eg engaging with housing associations, whose residents are amongst the most vulnerable, to build understanding within their teams of the benefits of community finance lending and savings products and how to refer to lenders using HM Treasury approved credit broking exemptions aimed at facilitating help getting to those who need it most

   

Success looks like increased brand awareness, reduced cost per acquisition and helping organisations to reach and serve a more diverse customer base (in terms of product holding, financial circumstances and into minority characteristics who we know are more likely to be excluded from mainstream financial services).

3. Awareness raising activity for the Community Finance sector – 20%

To support our strategic priority of growing the affordable credit sector, support and lead initiatives that help grow the awareness of affordable credit. This could include working with other organisations such as Money and Pensions Service to provide content and support for their plans, or to directly lead activity that raises awareness of community finance providers through direct to customer campaigns that we deliver or fund lenders to implement using white labelled campaign collateral (for example, leading work to design one set of campaign assets that can be used by a range of providers)