Senior Corporate Communications Officer - Strategic Planning, Insight

Are you a great communicator? Can you spot both opportunity and risk? Do you have experience and passion for planning, research and evaluation? Are you craving a meaningful role where you can go home at night and know you made a difference and changed lives?
If so you could be a match for us and we'd love to hear from you.

The Role

We're looking for someone who will help us ensure our campaigns and content is strategic and planned, informed by evidence and aligned to our force priorities. The role will involve research and developing insight, then leading on data analysis and evaluation - both for individual pieces of work but also for whether as a department we are being effective.
We don't just need you be organised, although that is key, we need someone who has a 'nose' for a proactive story and has exceptional judgement.

They'll be the opportunity to lead on key projects and become omni-competent across all our communication disciplines. We'll invest and develop you.

Policing is a fast paced and demanding environment so we need someone who can keep up and understands that communications is an operational tactic that we use to catch criminals as well as change the public's behaviour so that they help keep themselves safe.

Key Responsibilities

This is a full time permanent role based at our Surrey Police HQ, Mount Browne, Guildford. Starting salary between GBP29,800 and GBP35,602 depending on experience.

Working in a department that supports frontline policing means that two days are rarely the same. You'll be busy and challenged on a daily basis in your efforts to ensure we produce high quality, accurate and timely communications that support Force priorities.

Our senior positions are expected to be omni-competent and able to operate across all audiences and channels but this role is primarily focussed on strategic planning, insight and evaluation.

-You'll work with the manager to identify opportunities and strategically plan the internal and external communications output of the department, aligning it to our priorities, ensuring it is timed, coordinated and targeted to maximise achieving desired outcomes.

- You'll be involved in communicating to the public about the Force's priorities, and will need to know how best to reach target audiences for maximum reach and impact.

- You'll regularly be advising and influencing senior stakeholders so your skills at building successful working relationships will be key, as will your ability to support and advise the Communications Officers in the department as required.

- You'll take the lead on the department's horizon scanning to track longer term communications activity, identify opportunities including maximising internal and external news agendas to further amplify our messages and link it to key audiences and priorities.

- You'll manage, develop and administer communications planning tools.

-You develop audience insight and data analysis to ensure messages are delivered with purpose.

- You'll lead on evaluation of bespoke pieces of communication as well as overall departmental performance to identify areas for continual improvement and to ensure we can demonstrate our effectiveness and true value.

-The department is innovative and we've won a number of awards that prove the rest of the industry agrees. We have the backing of our senior officers to really push creative boundaries and if you've got a great idea it will be listened to.

Skills & Experience

Whether your background is in a dedicated strategic planning role, internal comms, change comms, campaigning, media relations or another comms specialism, you need to have credible previous experience in a communications role at a similar level.

You already know what makes great communications and have multiple examples demonstrating your success and your skills as a communicator and in particular in relation to planning, insight and evaluation.

A related degree would be great but don't be put off if that isn't the path you have taken - we're much more interested in you as a person and the contribution you could make.

You need to have good technical skills and be proficient at using a range of channels and understanding how to research and develop insight. You'll need to have confidence using data and analytics and be able to interpret these and present them simply to drive our effectiveness.

The job involves a lot of contact with stakeholders at various levels inside and outside the organisation so you should be comfortable operating at different levels and providing professional advice and service.

You are flexible, positive, willing to get stuck in and support your colleagues and take pride in being organised, detailed and tenacious. It's a busy department so your ability to use your initiative to hit the ground running and juggle a varied workload would definitely set you up for success here.

The job is mainly based at our headquarters however there may be occasional travel around Surrey and sometimes to sites in Sussex and other places too so you need to have access to a car and be able to drive.

Contact Details

If this sounds like the opportunity you've been waiting for, we want to hear from you so please apply through our website by the closing date. To stand the best chance of getting an interview please make sure your application explicitly gives detailed examples for all eleven of the requirements in the Knowledge, Skills and Experience section of the job profile - sweeping generalisations like, "I'm a good team player" will not cut it!

If you don't apply for this role but are interested in future opportunities please follow Surrey Police on LinkedIn to see our latest vacancies.

Diversity Statement

We are committed to creating a diverse police service, which reflects the community we serve. We value diversity and inclusion and want to attract the best people for the roles available, regardless of age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, disability, social status or religious beliefs.

Additional Information

Working for us offers you a unique opportunity to make a difference and really contribute to the safe policing of our community. We're a smaller Force than many but it means we have a personal feel and we take the wellbeing and development of our staff seriously. We celebrate the diversity of our staff and are committed to a work environment where you can be your true self and operate at your best.

You'll have access to continuous professional development, the opportunity to specialise and develop in your career as well as some of the more traditional benefits such as flexible working, generous annual leave entitlement, free parking and a highly competitive contributory pension scheme.