The Royal College of Psychiatrists is the leading medical authority on mental health in the United Kingdom and is the professional and educational organisation for doctors specialising in psychiatry. The College plays a central role in establishing and promoting the highest standards of psychiatric care and training in the United Kingdom.
Job Description
The Royal College of Psychiatrists has always worked to bring about change to improve the lives of people with mental illness but it has made a strategic decision to bring communications, influencing and policy together with a focus on our campaigning objectives; to achieve parity for the treatment of physical and mental illness; to promote the benefits of psychiatry and to recruit and retain psychiatrists. We need an experienced public policy campaigner to lead the new Policy and Campaigns team to work with our talented policy, external affairs and digital teams to achieve our ambitions.
You will:
- Formulate and implement effective campaigns to help the College shape the debate and set the agenda - using a wide range of campaigning outputs such as media stories, parliamentary briefings, posters, badges, videos, online petitions, infographics, social media posts and social media advertising;
- Lead the Policy and Campaigns team, ensuring that the College is established at, and remains at, the cutting edge of evidence-based campaigning as well as being respected for its policy work;
- Ensure that the outputs of the Policy and Campaigns team are high quality and robust and reflect the College's values of being evidence-based and credible;
- Advise on and support the parliamentary and public affairs work of the College, in co-operation with the Public Affairs Manager, Head of External Affairs and Director of Strategic Communications.
The Successful Applicant
The successful candidate will have a track record of designing and delivering public policy campaigns that have brought about real change. They will have experience of leading policy teams and have a sophisticated understanding of the policy creation process, with a body of high quality written work to their credit. They should also be comfortable writing for a general audience and be able to demonstrate excellent writing and presentation skills. The successful candidate will be actively interested in what is happening in politics and government and constantly alert to opportunities to work with colleagues to advance our mission.