Head of Audience Strategy

Are you an engaging leader with the ability to motivate your teams, influence senior stakeholders and champion the power of strategic audience development? Do you want to be part of our once-in-a-generation opportunity to beat dementia by driving growth and impact through audience strategy?

We are recruiting for a Head of Audience Strategy to join on a permanent contract. This is a home-based role working full-time, 35 hours per week, with occasional travel required for team and stakeholder meetings and events.

The last few years have seen unprecedented growth in the public profile of dementia, driven in part by the growing size, impact and ambition of Alzheimer’s Society – the UK’s leading dementia charity. We now need to ensure that everyone who needs dementia support today can access it, while improving our ability to attract, engage and retain the donors, volunteers and campaigners who so generously give money, time and voice to deliver enduring change. Crucial to this is strategic audience development: driving growth by being clearer about who we need to engage, why, and how.

As Head of Audience Strategy, you will develop a comprehensive strategy that delivers a step-change in the maturity and effectiveness of audience insight at Alzheimer’s Society. Built on a range of high-quality insight, data analysis and modelling, the strategy will reflect the evolving relationship to dementia and our Society among the public and other key external stakeholders.

You will work to identify the priority groups we need to engage to drive sustainable growth across all areas of engagement. You and your team will support teams to develop acquisition and engagement strategies which feel truly audience-led, orchestrating warm supporter communications and journeys which ensure we’re growing the right audiences to meet our objectives.

A priority will be ensuring that teams have the right tools to understand, segment and target their priority audiences. You will also be responsible for supporting teams to generate high-quality evaluations of activity in relation to audience goals – using these to capture new insights that improve our overall understanding and demonstrate the value of your team. At all times, you’ll act as an articulate champion of the power of audience strategy. You will lead senior conversations across the Society about what we know and wish to achieve with our audiences and constantly seek opportunities for your team to support others to enhance their impact and deepen their engagement.

We have provisionally scheduled the first stage of interviews for this role to take place on Wednesday 19^th and Thursday 20^th November.

About you

Joining us, you’ll have experience in developing and implementing audience or engagement strategies, and extensive experience of diverse qualitative and quantitative research methods and data analysis. You will also be able to demonstrate proven ability to synthesise these insights and apply them to all levels of the marketing funnel, across cold and warm audiences.

Crucially, you’ll be able to build positive relationships, influence key stakeholders and use your communication and leadership skills to manage and motivate cross-functional teams. You’ll be able to take a holistic view across the areas you manage and use this insight to contribute to organisational strategy through an audience development lens.

You don’t need to have a background in the charity sector, and you may or may not have a connection to dementia, you might be an accomplished Audience Insight professional looking for progression or be an established senior leader in this area already. We’re interested to hear from you if you feel that your skills and experience could be transferrable to this role and we hope the Society’s purpose and ambition resonates with you, and you’ll be motivated to help drive significant growth across all our engagement channels in the coming years.

What you’ll focus on:

• Developing and implementing a Society-wide audience strategy that demonstrably helps to drive growth by clearly laying out the key groups that Alzheimer’s Society needs to engage (including how and why) to progress different areas of our activity.
• Supporting senior stakeholders to create sub-strategies that help directorates and departments working on specific activities, campaigns, content and channels to clarify their target audiences for engagement (acquisition and retention) to drive growth and impact.
• Acting as our leading ambassador and spokesperson for audience strategy and insight, representing our audience knowledge and approach in senior forums as well as with key external partners (e.g. media and creative agencies).
• Leading the evaluation of you and your team’s contribution, developing a high-performance culture rooted in continuous improvement and a growth mindset. In addition to demonstrating the benefits of a more strategic approach to audience insight in terms of driving growth and impact.
• Oversee the co-ordinated delivery of high-quality insight, analysis and delivery from your teams, ensuring that their outputs meet the strategic and operational needs of the Society at large, and individual marketing and engagement teams.
• Using your understanding of our audiences and audience strategies to ensure our policies, processes and systems are optimised to grow engagement in line with our ambitions.

Dementia is the UK’s biggest killer. One in three people born in the UK today will develop dementia in their lifetime.

At Alzheimer’s Society, we’re the UK’s leading dementia charity and the only one to tackle all aspects of dementia by giving help and hope to people living with dementia today and in the future. We give vital support to people facing the most frightening times of their lives, while also funding groundbreaking research and campaigning to make dementia the priority it should be.

Together with our supporters, we’re working towards a world where dementia no longer devastates lives.

Our values make sure that our focus is clear for the challenges and opportunities ahead and remind us of what we all stand for.

Our commitment to Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging

We need to ensure the voices around our table better reflect and understand the communities we exist to serve. We strongly encourage individuals to apply who have a disability, impairment or health condition or individuals who identify as Black, Asian or from another minority ethnic background, as these groups are currently under-represented at Alzheimer's Society.  

We want everyone we work with, as a colleague, volunteer, supporter, or someone we support, to feel included and that they belong at Alzheimer's Society. 

Our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy here along with our internal employee forum and Employee Lived Experience network groups help us promote inclusion and belonging, becoming an engaged and inclusive organisation for all our people. 

Our hiring process

During your recruitment process we want to make sure that you bring your whole self and can be at your best. We are working hard to ensure our recruitment process is as inclusive as possible, so please do inform us of your experience and anything you think we could do better by completing our candidate survey when you apply.  Please also contact Alzheimer’s Society Talent Acquisition Team via [email protected] for application support or any adjustments you might need.

To ensure fairness and consistency to select the best candidate for this role, all our applications are anonymised up until an interview has been confirmed. We recognise the benefits of AI, but if you're considering using it to submit your application, we encourage you to reflect on the value it truly adds. AI tools often lack the personal touch and authenticity that set candidates apart. We want to hear your unique perspective, experiences, and skills, so we encourage you to showcase them in your own voice.

We try to avoid closing roles early where possible, however if we receive a high volume of applications, we may close earlier than the advertised closing date. Should this occur, we will aim to provide you with at least 48 hours' notice.

We are committed to safer recruitment and ensuring the welfare of those we work with, due to the nature of some of our roles, we might need to carry out a DBS check at the relevant level.

Giving back to you

Our employees work hard every day to make a true difference in people's lives. We are proud to support them with a range of benefits, recognition and many options for working agilely, all contributing to a strong work life balance. We also have various learning programmes to support you in your development and help you grow to realise your potential and shape a career with Alzheimer's Society. 

You can also visit our Working for Us pages, which give you more information about what it’s like to be an employee at the Society.