Job Description
Greenville, SC
This role is responsible for leading public relations efforts for the agency’s clients, which include public companies and large healthcare and regional higher educational institutions.
Experience Required:
- 8-9 years of experience (minimum) in news media (editorial or production), agency, and/or corporate environments, with a preference shown to candidates with both journalism and agency experience
- Established regional and national media relationships
Skills Required:
- Strong Writing Skills. (much stronger than the average person) This means being able to write in clear, direct sentences that communicate “quickly” and are organized sequentially. The ability to be creative is important, but often a “Joe Friday style”(just the facts ma’am) is much better.
- Critical Thinking Skills. Intelligence is not the only thing – but it is a very important thing. The right person must be a thinker – one who thinks about and can understand the overall objective and the bigger perspective. Particularly with written content, the person needs to be naturally inquisitive about (1) what is missing, (2) what doesn’t make sense, and (3) what would an uninformed, intelligent reader not understand about a particular work product.
- Financial Acumen. Basic knowledge of balance sheets and income statements would be a serious plus. If you do not possess this acumen, that’s not the end of the world, but if your visceral reaction is “no way – never – not interested”, then this job probably won’t be a good fit.
- Creativity. Creative is a plus. However, we have observed that creativity is relatively common. Critical thinking and strong writing skills are less common.
- Table Stakes. Identifying media targets, storylines, and approaches to generate features and business coverage. Things that any person with PR/Communications experience would naturally possess.
Education:
-
Bachelor’s degree, ideally in marketing, advertising, communications or business. The quality of school and academic performance are relevant.
Personal Qualifiers/Intangibles:
- Good Judgment. This is hard to define, but like SCOTUS Justice Potter Stewart said about “obscenity” – you know it when you see it. Good judgment must permeate everything this person does.
- Legimate Confidence. This person must have the confidence to have peer-to-peer conversations with CEOs of large organizations without being defensive or awkward, and without needing to prove anything.
- Appropriate Urgency. The ideal candidate will have a natural sense of urgency around their work and ability to juggle multiple deadlines while maintaining quality. This role requires resourcefulness to effectively produce, measure, and optimize results.
- The person must want to be “the man” (gender neutral). You must want to be viewed as indispensable – the person the CEO or CMO wants to call for independent thoughts and quality work. If you mindlessly follow instructions without having a polite, constructive skepticism of everything you recieve, this job won’t be a good fit. But by the same token, a person cannot “comment just to comment”. Again, good judgment is required.
- Good Temperament. It is always important to be polite and reflect well on your family, including your work family.
- ETC. And of course, the person should enjoy collaboration, be proactive in building relationships and possess all the other platitudes you see in the myriad of job descriptions.
Functional Responsibilities:
Strategic Planning:
- Lead the development of PR strategies with objectives, strategies, tactics, and news hooks that address client business needs.
Client Relations:
- Regularly interact with clients including executive leadership.
- Support client services including preparing agendas, PR reports, email communications, and actively participate in meetings and social engagements.
- Understand key client information including business strategy, products and services, customer segments, and competitive landscape.
Media Relations:
- Lead local, regional, and national media outreach to generate meaningful results, including direct and outbound pitching and placement of coverage.
- Strong familiarity with Cision Communications Cloud, with the ability to identify target media and understand their communications needs.
Bonus:
- There are some small edits that might be appropriate for this job description. Feel free to make any comments when returning your materials. And please recall Mark Twain: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
Please send resumes, writing samples and examples of coverage placed via e-mail to careers@crawfordstrategy.com.
About Crawford:
We are a full-service marketing and branding agency in Greenville, S.C., providing a range of services including public relations, social media, advertising, SEO and SEM, video production, web design, and digital marketing.
Agency Purpose:
At Crawford, our purpose is to help leaders lead. While many agencies focus on the client as a business or an organization, we focus on clients as individual leaders who need help achieving big and meaningful goals. We help leaders lead by helping them understand the heart of decision making so they can realize their vision.
Crawford is known for providing strategic and creative communications, highly responsive customer service and significant, award-winning results for our clients.
Agency Culture Philosophy:
We are an amazing group of talented team members who are hungry, humble, and smart. Collectively and individually, we have a desire to continually improve ourselves, our craft, and the company so we can be our very best. We recognize and respect the expertise that others bring and value the opportunity to collaboratively work as a team.
We also have a culture of kind candor. We would rather shine a light on a concern and discuss it, kindly and thoughtfully, than let it fester and become a bigger issue. There is value in addressing concerns head on so we can improve and be better.
As colleagues, we value the opportunity to build one another up to maintain an upbeat and positive work environment. Finally, we love to celebrate life. We celebrate anniversaries, birthdays, babies; they celebrate work wins and team growth; we celebrate the little things that add up to mean a lot.
A Best Place to Work:
Crawford has been included in the Best Places to Work list in South Carolina for the last 6 years. We believe the best companies are comprised of people who share a set of values that guide their behavior—the way they interact with peers, with clients, with anyone.
These values matter:
- Be your absolute best: We hold ourselves to a high standard and continually strive to learn and grow and be a better version of ourselves each day.
- Be positive: While we can’t pretend that everything is perfect, we can look at problems with a glass-half-full approach and let positive energy radiate to others. When we do, we can influence outcomes in a positive way.
- Be a team player: We put we before me, and we know that none of us alone can do as much as we can together.
- Be trustworthy: We do what is right, even when no one is looking. We can be trusted with big things and small. We know trust is the foundation of any strong relationship.
- Be dependable: We do what we say we will we do. When we have agreed to a deliverable and timeline, we own it.
These values should be part of the DNA of every member of the team so the team collectively “fits.” When everyone values the same things, it creates a diverse culture of people with a shared esprit de corps.