From Bernie Sanders to Greenpeace UK, progressive organisations are using digital mobilisation to activate hundreds of thousands of campaigners and raise millions of pounds online. Forward Action believes that a digital mobilisation model - where organisations use digital channels to drive hundreds of thousands of supporters to take advocacy, fundraising and volunteering actions - can revolutionise campaigning and fundraising in the NGO sector. However, its potential is still largely untapped in the UK. We help progressive organisations build digital mobilisation programmes and, as a Web Developer at Forward Action, you will build and support the technology that powers those programmes.
You will work in our three-person development team, collaborating with our strategists to create advocacy action pages and fundraising pages. You’ll also build A/B optimisation tests to make sure those pages drive as many people as possible to take action. . If you’re passionate about using your technical skills to help make the world a better place and have a couple years of experience working as a web developer, this is the job for you.
This is a permanent role, with the freedom to work both in our London office and remotely anywhere in the UK. You can work either four or five days per week.
We are committed to making sure Forward Action is an inclusive, diverse and anti-racist organisation. People from communities that experience discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity or immigration status;sexuality or gender identity;age;socio-economic status;or disability are actively and especially encouraged to apply.
Applications close on 24th October 2021.
Who we are
Forward Action is a digital mobilisation agency for progressive causes. We help our partner organisations reach new supporters, then mobilise them to become activists and donors. We have been in the engine room of some of the most successful election and charity digital campaigns of the last few years, helping our partners add millions of new supporters to their email lists, raise more money online (from more donors) and create campaigns that have led to real-world change.
Our values are critical to us: we will only work with causes that make the world a better place. You will get to work with some of the most inspiring and impactful organisations in the sector - such as Greenpeace, Cancer Research UK, and Refuge - and spend your days helping win progress on everything from climate change to homelessness.
You will be working at the cutting edge of digital mobilisation. We trust in data rather than our gut instincts, so we are constantly testing and iterating in our work in order to challenge assumptions and drive better results. We are an agile, fast-moving team, and you will have the opportunity to rapidly develop and expand your skills and experience.
One of our fundamental values is that all our work should drive real-world, measurable results. But we also believe that the greatest progressive impact we can have is to give our partner organisations the skills, knowledge and culture they need to do what we do themselves. We want to spread our skills and way of working across the progressive sector, not make our partners dependent on us.
What you’ll do as part of our team
- Create and maintain advocacy and fundraising pages using HTML, CSS and JavaScript for our partner’s campaigns
- Write code to set up A/B conversion rate optimisation tests to improve those pages, collecting analytics for our strategy team to analyse
- Occasionally develop custom tools to support our partner’s work, such as this Union Finder or this map
- Assist in the development of our internal tools, such as Blueprint, our petition and fundraising platform.
- Collaborate closely with our strategy teams to ensure technical solutions achieve the project’s strategic goals
Benefits and location
Pro Rata Salary: £40,255 if you live inside London, £35,942 (plus £3,000 travel expense allowance) if you live outside London.
Contract Term: This is a permanent contract. The role can be either full time or four days a week.
Location: We offer remote working or you can work from our Hoxton office. Ensuring our team is open to people who live outside London and enabling staff to work flexibly are important values to us. Most of our meetings are held via video conferencing and all our workflow is built to be remote-first.
Holiday: 25 days/year (pro rata), plus bank holidays and the week between Christmas and New Year.
Extra holiday for travelling sustainably: We’re a member of the Climate Perks scheme, so you’ll have an extra two days of holiday a year if you use them to travel by land or sea instead of taking a flight.
Maternity and Paternity/Long-term partner parental leave:For a small organisation,we’re proud to have a generous and progressive parental leave policy. Maternity leave is 12 weeks at full pay, 14 weeks at 50% pay. Paternity/Long-term partner parental leave is 6 weeks at full pay.
Working culture and hours: Our team is open, inclusive, friendly, respectful and kind.
We work eight hour days (including a 30 minute lunch break), with core hours of 9:30am-4:30pm. We put a lot of importance on ensuring everyone finishes on time: while there are some times when you’ll need to stay a little later to finish work, people in the team rarely work more than 45-60 minutes late. No one ever works on weekends or their holidays.
Abilities and experience you’ll need to have
- 2+ years experience working professionally as a web developer
- Excellent working knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and the ability to write these in a well structured, clear and maintainable manner
- Experience working with Vue.js (or another modern JavaScript framework such as ReactJS, and a desire to pick up Vue.js)
- The ability to work independently, collaborating directly with non-technical colleagues and stakeholders
- Ability to clearly communicate technical issues with non-technical people.
- Excellent organisation skills and attention to detail
- Dedication to helping build a fairer, more progressive society
- Fluency in spoken and written English
Abilities and experience that are nice to have
We know it’s not possible for any applicants to have all these skills - ideally you’ll be able to bring 2-3 of the following to our team:
- Experience with PHP (specifically Laravel framework) and MySQL databases
- Experience working with SASS and utilising module bundlers such as Webpack or Parcel
- Experience creating and working on applications that consume external APIs
- Knowledge of Git and Github
- Experience with automated testing using Jest and/or PHPUnit
- Good understanding of UX best practises and accessibility guidelines
- Experience running A/B tests
- Experience working at an agency or as a freelancer.
How to apply
To apply for this job, please complete the form here: https://airtable.com/shraakq93oHtVACXP
To ensure our hiring process is as fair as possible, we run an anonymised application procedure. So please remove your name and contact information from your CV before uploading it, and only enter these details in the online form.
To apply, you will need to include:
- your CV (with name and contact details removed)
- up to 250 words explaining how you’re suited to the role and why you want this job
- A short description of a recent project you worked on, what your role was on the project and a challenge you encountered working on it and how you solved it.
Applications close on 24th October 2021.
Shortlisted candidates will be asked to complete a short technical task that we expect to not take more than 90 minutes. Based on the task, a small number of candidates will be asked to attend an interview via a video call on the week commencing 15th November.
Questions?
If you’re unclear about anything to do with the role, you can contact our team on hiring@forwardaction.uk