Associate Vice President, Communications Studio

Responsibilities

• Creative and communications leadership: Set the creative vision and quality standards for RWJF communications, raising the ambition, distinctiveness, and impact of campaigns, content, and experiences.
• Integrated communications: Translate priorities established by the Voice Strategy unit into integrated plans across digital, creative, media relations, messaging, content, and experiential channels.
• Campaign leadership: Lead high-priority consequential campaigns and initiatives from planning through launch, establishing clear scope, sequencing, responsibilities, resources, and decision points.
• Studio leadership: Align Studio capabilities and capacity around the Foundation’s highest-priority work and establish effective workflows and collaboration across disciplines.
• Brand stewardship: Steward and evolve RWJF’s brand, ensuring consistency while strengthening its bias toward innovation, bold direction, and meaningful impact.
• Judgment and discernment in sensitive situations: Exercise sound judgment and discernment in crisis, internal, and other sensitive communications, bringing calm, discretion, and timely decisionmaking while working closely with senior leaders and key partners.
• People leadership: Build and lead a high-performing multidisciplinary team by setting clear expectations, coaching, and developing staff, and strengthening the capabilities needed for integrated communications.
• External partners and budgets: Select and manage agencies, vendors, and other partners and oversee Studio budgets with clear expectations for quality, scope, timing, and cost.
• Enterprise partnership: Build trusted relationships across Communications and RWJF, including senior leaders, and provide sound judgment on sensitive, crisis, and internal communications.
• Equity and inclusion: Embed equitable and inclusive practices in team leadership, decisionmaking, partner selection, audience engagement, and communications outcomes.

Requirements

• Commitment to racial and health equity and to advancing inclusive, community-centered approaches to communications and leadership, consistent with RWJF’s mission, Guiding Principles, and Truth, Repair, and Transformation (TRT) approach.
• Experience leading or operating within an integrated communications function spanning areas such as creative, digital, media relations, messaging and content, and brand.
• Served in a communications studio, agency, newsroom, or in-house center of excellence responsible for high-volume, high-visibility execution.
• Demonstrated ability to translate enterprise, advocacy, or brand strategy into coordinated communications across internal teams, channels, and external partners.
• Strong creative judgment and demonstrated ability to raise the ambition, quality, and distinctiveness of communications and inspire teams and partners to produce high-impact work.
• Experience stewarding and evolving a brand across campaigns, content, experiences, and other audience-facing communications.
• Demonstrated experience leading, coaching, and developing multidisciplinary teams, setting clear expectations, strengthening capabilities, and fostering an inclusive, high-performing culture.
• Experience selecting and managing agencies, vendors, or production partners, with accountability for scope, quality, budgets, and results.
• Demonstrated history of supporting crisis response and/or sensitive internal communications in partnership with operations, legal, or senior leadership.
• Experience navigating and leading through organizational change, including creating clarity, building trust across teams, maintaining high standards, and helping establish new ways of working.

Benefits

• RWJF offers comprehensive health and retirement benefits to employees, generous paid time off, and more.
• Transition Stipend