Communications and Digital Campaigns Manager
Location: Austin, TX
Setting: In-Person
Reports to: Senior Director of Strategic Communications
Status: Full-time, exempt
About Us:
Raise Your Hand Texas is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to advocating for high-quality public education in Texas. We work to educate, engage, and activate Texans through public education policy and advocacy initiatives.
About the Role:
Raise Your Hand Texas is seeking a communications professional with a genuine understanding and appreciation of the importance of Texas public schools. The ideal candidate excels at modern mass-marketing automation strategy, digital conversion journeys, and public relations across major Texas media markets. This position works closely with and reports to the Senior Director of Strategic Communications to advance Raise Your Hand Texas's mission and reputation.
In this role, you will develop and implement integrated advocacy campaigns that drive public engagement, media visibility, and organizational impact. You will lead digital conversion strategies, marketing automation initiatives, and data-driven campaign optimization while supporting cross-functional strategic alignment across communications, marketing, advocacy, and policy teams. This role will translate complex policy issues into compelling, high-performing content, leveraging analytics, storytelling, and AI-enabled workflows to advance advocacy goals and measurable civic engagement.This position also supports the efforts of Regional Advocacy Directors who are responsible for building a robust pro-public education constituency across Texas.
Success in this role requires a highly collaborative professional with deep situational awareness, sharp political intuition, and the ability to read the room and adapt when interfacing with both internal colleagues and external coalitions. This role also requires an ROI-focused approach viewed through an advocacy lens, combining deep data fluency, critical thinking, data synthesis, and analytics with advanced storytelling capabilities. This position demands high-equity relationship management and time investment commensurate with the demands of a legislative session.
Role and Responsibilities:
Digital Marketing
- Design, build, and optimize digital conversion journeys to grow the organization’s grassroots and leadership networks and turn casual followers and event attendees into long-term advocates through targeted landing pages, on-site event activations, CRM segmenting, Google/digital ads, and automated email drip campaigns.
- Lead and coordinate strategic support across owned media, earned media, social media, paid media, and advertising.
- Develop and analyze reports to further optimize regional issue campaigns.
- Analyze post-event performance metrics and event-marketing ROI through an advocacy lens, providing actionable data synthesis to optimize cross-functional campaign workflows.
- Act as the communication lead for the Raise Your Hand Texas mobile app, overseeing user acquisition strategies, content development and management, and digital user-journey mapping.
- Collaborate laterally as a cross-functional partner alongside the Social Media and Content Manager to package paid asset deliverables for organic amplification across active networks. Serve as a partner who can review social media content before it is scheduled.
- Track, monitor, and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) to recommend improvements.
- Produce materials to support regional events, trade shows, and event production activities.
Public Relations
- Write and edit press kit materials, media materials, op-eds, bylined news opportunities, and proactive news pitches that support current communication priorities when pitching news story ideas to print, broadcast, and digital outlets.
- Partner with Regional Advocacy Directors (RADs) on event marketing strategy for local community-based initiatives, including digital promotion tracks and earned media opportunities that maximize attendance and engagement.
- Help identify strategic content opportunities and work with internal team members to create and write multimedia content for regional advocacy directors, as well as for the organization’s website, blog, podcast, social media channels, email marketing, and other communication channels.
- Manage signed portions of communications contracts, overseeing technical platform environments, list formatting, and deliverables.
- Support media outreach efforts to advance the organization’s legislative interests and statewide media relations, promoting the organization’s work and the importance and impact of public education.
Minimum Qualifications:
- A Bachelor’s degree required—preferably in marketing, communications, public relations, journalism, or a related field.
- Minimum of seven years of full-time experience in strategic communications, digital marketing campaigns, or public relations—ideally within an association, non-profit, or legislative advocacy environment.
- At least three years of experience leading independent communications projects, cross-functional campaign initiatives, or managing external agency vendors.
- Demonstrated hands-on technical proficiency with CRMs (list segmentation, tagging, and communication workflows), Google Analytics, project management experience, mass email automation service software, and in-house video creation platforms.
- Ability to recognize, value, and include different perspectives, experiences, approaches, and cultures in achieving organizational goals.
- Commitment to working hours as needed during the legislative session to maximize the organization’s campaign presence and response.
Required Skills:
- Experience implementing large-scale integrated digital marketing campaigns, mass automation architectures, brand awareness, digital ads, and media strategy with a relevant portfolio of proven outcomes.
- Advanced critical thinking, data fluency, data synthesis, and analytics analysis capabilities to translate performance metrics into strategic campaign decisions.
- ROI-focused mindset through an advocacy lens, ensuring marketing initiatives directly result in measurable civic engagement and database growth.
- Exceptional project manager, writer, and editor skills with the professional maturity and interpersonal confidence required to act as an influential peer alongside a highly experienced creative team and manage complex campaigns in a fast-paced organization with multiple stakeholders and competing audiences.
- Proficiency with email marketing platforms, landing page construction, database segmenting logic, and digital impact metrics.
- Exceptional educational or political landscape literacy, with a documented ability to accurately communicate complex policy points across multi-platform networks without oversight.
- Availability to travel in the service area (regional and statewide).
Preferred Skills:
- Experience with media database platforms and Asana.
- Experience with the PESO Communications Model and AP Style.
- Sophisticated use of marketing automation tools, web analytics, digital media, and public relations strategies to support the organization's mission, values, and priorities.
- AI literacy balanced with exceptional editorial judgment and a sharp, hands-on ability to manually refine copy to match organizational voice and policy nuances.
- Familiarity with Texas media markets and established relationships with state policy and education media, paired with knowledge of the Texas political, legislative, and educational landscape.
What We Offer:
- We offer a comprehensive benefits package including, health insurance, a 401(k) Retirement plan, disability insurance, paid time off, and paid parental leave.
- Perks at Work Program
- RYHT offers limited opportunities for hybrid work, dependent on employees’ continued ability to execute on projects and responsibilities.
Portfolio Required
To apply please submit your resume and cover letter. Applicants should submit a portfolio or examples of their work, including writing examples, digital campaigns, or other relevant digital content. Please upload your documents under "additional files”.
