Director, Brand & Creative

Director, Brand & Creative 

Flexible Location 

TNTP seeks a full-time Director for our Brand & Creative needs, supporting our long-term growth and impact. This position reports to the Partner, Brand & Marketing and is based in a home office anywhere in the U.S. Travel for team and organizational meetings is required a few times a year.  

Who We Are 

TNTP is a national nonprofit founded by teachers that believes our nation’s public schools can offer all children an excellent education. Today we’re a diverse team from a wide range of fields, united by a fierce commitment to helping school systems end educational inequity and achieve their goals for students. We work at every level of the public education system to attract and train talented teachers and school leaders, ensure rigorous and engaging classrooms, and create environments that prioritize great teaching and accelerate student learning. 

Our Brand & Marketing Department works to position TNTP as the nation’s most authoritative voice on effective teaching and providing all students with the quality education they deserve. We are a collaborative, creative team leading TNTP's brand, marketing, publications, and external communications  efforts. Our team is virtual, working remotely from home offices across the country. 

What You’ll Do 

As the Director, Brand and Creative, you will lead people to develop, execute, and continuously improve TNTP’s overall brand and creative strategy. You’ll set and implement the vision for how projects, visual strategies, and design can accelerate impact for TNTP’s strategic priorities. We’re looking for people who embrace a fast-moving organization, are adept at change management, and thrive on constant learning.  

Specific responsibilities include: 

• Develop the vision for implementing our brand identity, educating and engaging TNTP stakeholders, and ensuring brand consistency across individual projects. Translate this vision into brand-aligned marketing collateral from pitch decks to case studies to ad campaigns, that tell the story of TNTP’s work and impact. 
• Lead creative ideation, challenge the status quo, and think strategically about visual innovation for TNTP. 
• Use feedback and data to understand and improve user experience. Lead select design projects and actively mentor in-house graphic designer.  
• Oversee strategically selected creative projects from concept to completion and goal/metric monitoring and reporting. This includes photography, videography, graphic design, and illustration, as well as brand identity as applied to collateral, websites, presentations, blog, and social graphics, etc.  
• Establish new processes to ensure communications visual and multimedia assets tell action-oriented, innovative, cohesive, and compelling stories about TNTP. 
• Propose and implement new ways of communicating complex ideas in print and digital media, including, but not limited to, infographics, theories of action, videos, campaigns, and marketing collateral. 
• Manage creative vendor selection and engagement to execute and improve design processes, standards, and productivity.  
• Actively collaborate with colleagues across the Public Affairs division to drive Brand and Marketing goals and support External Communications, Business Development, and Fundraising goals. Help create and contribute to a team culture that propels excellent work and celebrates TNTP’s values.  
• Lead internal trainings to help TNTP staff: understand, engage with, and articulate our brand; create brand-aligned materials with minimal support from the Communications team; and incorporate design-thinking into their work. 
• Collaboratively develop, direct, and oversee implementation of a model for fulfilling requests for communications and branding support across the organization. 
• Contribute to other projects across the team as necessary, including occasional writing, editing, and design support for various prospect-and client-facing marketing products. 
• Surface best practices in design. 
• Lead and manage a small team of communications professionals in achieving individual and shared goals, including temporary staff and consultants on an as-needed basis.

What You’ll Bring 

First and foremost, we are looking for amazing people who have diverse backgrounds and experiences, are inspired by our mission, and are highly motivated to change children's lives through education.  We value diversity of ethnicity, race, socioeconomic status, sexual identity, gender, religion, language, ability, and experience and exemplify this through the makeup of our team at all levels. You'll be right at home here if you cultivate strong relationships and push yourself, your work, and the people around you to the next level. We encourage those with the following identities to apply: Black, Latinx, Asian American, and Pacific Islander, Indigenous people, LGBTQIA+ and non-binary people, veterans, people living with disabilities, and others with lived experience being part of marginalized communities.  

We expect our Director to: 

• Be an expert in design. You have extensive experience in setting creative assets that drive engagement and action among specific audiences. You’re fluent in major design tools and design-thinking processes and keep abreast of their ever-changing best practices. You understand the role design and creative thinking plays in a broader communications or campaigns strategy.   
• Be an outstanding communicator. You love telling stories through design. You are an expert designer with a clear and compelling vision, a knack for finding simplicity in complexity, and good instincts for using design to amplify words—especially in brand and marketing collateral. 
• Be a strong strategic thinker. You are a natural problem-solver who can efficiently assess the big picture, analyze the root causes, and define new ways forward. You are intellectually curious and thrive on working with multidisciplinary teams, often across multiple projects at once. 
• Invest and influence others. You bring out the best in your team, inspire your colleagues, and help foster an inclusive and collaborative team culture. You know how to build relationships with a variety of stakeholders and value the diverse perspectives they bring.  
• Model cross-cultural agility.  Authentic self-reflection, self-awareness, and high emotional intelligence are central to who you are, and you utilize these skills to shape a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion, that influences how you think about your work.  You have an adept cultural understanding of yourself and use your understanding of yourself and others to build trusting relationships. 
• Be dedicated to equity. You think about and are attuned to the experiences and concerns of your audiences. You are dedicated to creating and promoting equity-centered communications that lift the voices and experiences of the communities in which we work. 
• Champion Your People. One of your greatest responsibilities and privileges will be to grow and develop incredible people toward ambitious goals. You’re an inclusive leader, that honors diverse perspectives and makes the most of your team’s and individual’s unique strengths.   
• Build relationships. You’ll regularly partner with internal team members and external vendors. You have an ability to connect and build relationships with diverse communities. Bilingual Spanish abilities are a plus.   

Qualifications 

• Demonstrated experience leading the implementation of a multi-faceted marketing or brand design program, including at least five years of experience setting—and upholding—design standards across a variety of print and digital communications channels.  Prior experience leading brand design/redesign initiatives a plus. 
• Track record of translating strategic thinking into action plans and output, with the ability to balance the development of a strategic vision with the daily execution of marketing initiatives.   
• Fluency in design thinking best practices, and a passion for continually deepening personal design expertise, in order to innovate and lead design thinking within the organization.   
• Expert fluency in design software such as Adobe Creative Suite. 
• Strong interpersonal communication skills with a proven ability to invest others and influence outcomes, while also inviting and respecting diverse perspectives and fostering an inclusive and collaborative team culture.  
• Ability to generate innovative ideas and foster an environment of creativity that also prioritizes marketing objectives and brand guidelines. 
• At least two years of experience managing creative vendors to achieve brand objectives and managing vendor procurement processes and budgets.  
• At least 1-2 years of people management experience, with a demonstrated ability to develop junior staff. 
• Bilingual Spanish abilities and/or experience designing in Spanish a plus.  
• High emotional intelligence, strong listening skills, and a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. 
• Portfolio of approximately five work samples that showcase the challenge, your role in the project, your approach, and the final product. Portfolio should demonstrate a range of skillset across print and digital applications.