Now Hiring Communications Assistant

Reports to: Communications Officer

Main purpose of position

Provide general communication support, with an emphasis on social media, for ICARDA’s communications and outreach activities.

About ICARDA

The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) is a treaty-based international non-profit research organization supported by CGIAR.

ICARDA’s mission is to reduce poverty, enhance food, water, and nutritional security, as well as environmental health in the face of global challenges including climate change. We do this through innovative science, strategic partnerships, linking research to development and capacity development that take into account gender equality and the role of youth in transforming the dry areas. ICARDA works in partnership with governments, universities, civil society, national agricultural research organization, other CGIAR Research Centers, and the private sector. With its temporary Headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, ICARDA operates in regional and country offices across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. For more information: www.icarda.org

All CGIAR Centers are currently engaged into a reform process (“One CGIAR’”) that will help ICARDA and CGIAR achieve better impact through more strategically integrated research, unified governance, an integrated structure and new research modalities across participating Research Centers. This transformation is supported by CGIAR donors who have committed to increased funding as a result of these reforms.

Main responsibilities

SOCIAL MEDIA

• Assist with the planning, drafting, and posting of social media posts and campaigns in English and Arabic.
• Assist with the social media calendar and scheduling.
• Respond to social media messages, and monitoring reactions on our social media platforms/Forwarding them to the relevant unit.
• Help collect and analyse metrics across ICARDA digital marketing activities.
• Manage the ICARDA Flickr and YouTube channels.
• Help facilitate paid advertising on social media platforms.
• Identify relevant handles, hashtags, and tags for social media posts.
• Advise the team on new social media techniques, tools, and model digital campaigns.

NEWSLETTERS/EMAIL MARKETING

• Help to develop compelling email alerts and newsletters and supporting the team in their use of the email marketing tool (MailChimp).
• Draft, test, and tweak email content as needed.
• Manage email lists.
• Gather insights on the audience and compile email impact reports.

GENERAL AD HOC TASKS

• Create basic drafts in English and Arabic for short news alerts and event pages on the website.
• Help to support Arabic-English-Arabic content translations as needed.
• Upload content to the ICARDA website.
• Perform research on current benchmark trends and audience preferences.
• Perform twice-daily sweep of watch-lists, news, alerts, trends, top stories, etc. across our tools to produce content suggestions for social media outputs.
• Help source and develop visuals for general communications purposes.
• Support the team to organize and publicize live and online events.
• Upload communications products on the internal intranet.
• Upload and organize ICARDA images while adding relevant keywords /tagging to ensure photos are saved in an image library and labelled correctly.

Education, qualifications, requirements, and experience

• University degree in Communication, Public Relations Journalism, Marketing, International Relations, or relevant fields.
• High level of Arabic and English (oral and written).
• 1-2 years of experience in social media and platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
• Proficiency in MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
• Fluency in social media.

Candidates must be living in countries in which ICARDA has an office and be nationals of any of the eligible countries: Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, UAE, Afghanistan, Central Asia/Caucuses.

Desirable qualifications and competencies

• Social Media managing software and email marketing platforms (preferably Hootsuite and Mailchimp)
• Facebook Live and similar on other channels.
• Alert software (news/google alerts/tags/mentions).
• Paid advertising – FB Manager/AdWords/Twitter Ads
• Google analytics.
• Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign.
• Microsoft Office.

Terms of appointment

The successful candidate will be offered a one-year consultancy contract on a full-time basis and will be provided with a monthly honorarium, vacation, medical leave provisions and medical insurance.