Type: Communications
Role: Story-telling Associate
Venture: Kumasi Hive
Location: Kumasi, Ghana
Deadline: July 14 2019
About Kumasi Hive
Kumasi Hive is a Tech Innovation Hub for rapid prototyping of ideas, budding local innovations, impact start-up support & promoting youth entrepreneurship as a way of addressing critical social, economic and developmental challenges.
As a social enterprise, Kumasi Hive exists to support entrepreneurs and innovators of all types, and particularly to encourage social impact businesses and the development of innovative physical products and processing methods. On yearly basis, Kumasi Hive train over 1000 youth to acquire competent and employable skills in both business and technical skills. We help build and support, on the average, 50 social impact focused start-ups and businesses with business supporting services. Using technology as an enabler, the Hive also work across various sectors (health, agriculture, education, financial inclusion etc) to research, develop and scale appropriate solutions aiming creating sustainable development for local communities (Africans) and the world as a whole.
In partnership with Kumasi Hive, as a Fellow with Engineers Without Borders Canada , you will be placed as a Story-telling Associate with Kumasi Hive team with their team in Ghana.. Throughout your Fellowship with EWB, you will receive guidance, mentorship and financial support from the community in Canada and in East and West Africa.
About Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB)
EWB is a free-thinking charitable organization that brings people and ideas together to tackle the most crucial causes of poverty and inequality. We nurture talent and leadership, enable social entrepreneurship and advocate for policy innovations to cross-breed systems-changing innovations to ensure economic and public opportunity reaches everyone, including the most underserved and marginalized populations, especially women and girls.
Through our leadership curriculum and Fellowships Program, we offer experiential learning opportunities in Canada and sub-Saharan Africa to launch future shapers equipped to understand and re-engineer complex social systems. For more information, visit ewb.ca.
About You
Our mission is to raise a critical mass of active (youth) economic agents, leveraging on digital technology to build Strategic/Competent Skills, Create Jobs, and Develop Innovative Solutions/Enterprises towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
To help achieve this mission, as a social enterprise, communication, internally and externally, on our activities, results and impact is key. Despite our success and achievement over the past 3 years, strategic and effective communication of our business strategy, activities, results and impact has been lacking or generally poor.
We are therefore looking for a Story-teller/communicator to work with the media team to develop brave and ambitious narratives that run as a “red line” from source to receiver. You will support organizational evolution and growth through culture change both internally and externally. Daily responsibilities will include responsibility for capturing, encoding, building and disseminating stories that inspire and excite employees, stakeholders, students and customers.
This role requires a deep collaboration with project leaders, media team members, startups and technical team to harvest and integrate messaging and strategy into storytelling assets. You will contribute to growth hacking by channeling inbound customer stories to support the evolution of impact stories and refining communication for our target market(s).
You are able to bridge the past, present, and future by harmonizing the required elements of history and culture into the forward-looking strategic path that the company seeks to take.
You tailor messaging, narratives, stories and content for different audiences that result in action.
Responsibilities
As a Story-telling Associate for Kumasi Hive, your responsibilities will include:
- Develop, support and promote company goals, including message development, social media content creation and media outreach;
- Capture, distil and communicate projects/initiatives direction and disseminate amongst employees and customers in narrative form. Landing via email, web, video, podcasts, events and social channels;
- Capture, distill and communicate the specific impact services have on young women and marginalized groups. Landing via email, web, video, podcasts, events and social channels;
- Connect narratives in a way that speaks to funding stakeholders including speaking to how our initiatives support SDGs, Canada’s Feminist International Assistance policy;
- Orchestrate and land company narrative across communications and marketing channels to the customer in a way that articulates new, desirable realities for the customer;
- Build the narratives that transverses paid advertising into social amplification maximizing conversions and engagement rates;
- Collaborate with teams inside the organization and across the company to gather data and content for communications and presentations;
- Build and maintain relationships with journalists, bloggers, investors and customer audiences that will help advance our work;
- Identify target audiences and create strategies to effectively engage them;
- Partner with leadership team to empower employees through storytelling;
- Develop strong measurement goals and use data to determine efficacy of vehicles for engagement;
- Evangelize the use of and be the source of storytelling frameworks, approaches, and best practices.
Sound exciting? Here’s who we are looking for.
Skills & Qualifications
- Passion for communication, technology and social impact;
- Excellent writing and communications skills;
- Demonstrated ability to understand the big picture;
- Awareness of cross-cultural communication and ability to maintain constructive relationships with a diverse set of key stakeholders;
- Deep understanding of story structure, history of storytelling and use of storytelling across cultures;
- Familiarity with modern mediums & channels; Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook Blogging, Youtube, Instagram, Reddit, Podcast;
- Ability to deal with ambiguity, manage multiple priorities and juggle schedules;
- Demonstrated production of narrative-based content;
- Ability to work and influence cross group (with stories);
- Proven ability to convert value propositions into narratives.
Wish List
- BA/BS in Journalism, Marketing, or Communications (or equivalent);
- Storyboarding experience; understanding the effectiveness and appropriateness of story assets (text, images, audio, video) and how to combine them;
- Visual, audio and video content creation experience; well-developed eye/ear for best practices in each;
- Working knowledge of intermediate- to advanced-level equipment (DSLR camera, video, audio recorder, microphones);
- Comfort and experience using editing software (image, audio and video, post production);
- Ability to design and maintain a story bank (using database or other software/hardware solutions);
- Familiarity with the SDGs and Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy;
- Background in gender inclusion, diversity and mainstreaming;
- Expertise with online platforms: content management systems for web, e-newsletter services, podcast, infographics and social media.
Application Inquiries
- For inquiries about the EWB Fellowship experience, please contact: fellowrecruitment@ewb.ca
- For inquiries about the role with Kumasi Hive, please contact: Jorge Appiah
Application Instructions
For further details, please refer to our website.
