The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN, formerly the Investigative News Network), a network of 100+ nonprofit news organizations, has an opening for a full-time manager of support, documentation and training on our technology and product team.
The ideal candidate for this position is a detail-oriented self starter who wants to help us provide exemplary service to INN members and our paid consulting clients. This person should have experience making things for the web, a passion for sharing what they know with others and be excited about being a leader in creating documentation and training resources to assist people in their adoption and use of the products we build.
Specifically, they will own our support process (and, we hope, make it even more awesome), including:
- Communicating with members and clients
- Refining our support and project management workflow
- Resolving bugs and issues (collaborating with other team members when needed)
- Writing great documentation to help people maximize their use of the products we build and reduce our support volume in the long-run
Who are we?
As a team, we exist to support the work of our member organizations, many of which are small nonprofits with limited technology resources. We focus primarily on problems that we are uniquely suited to tackle at a network level, for example:
- Hosting and supporting over 40 member websites using a WordPress-powered platform/framework we've built and maintain - http://largoproject.org
- Building open source tools to support members' editorial work and presentation needs with the goal of making their work look as great as any of the largest for-profit newsrooms
- Providing technology consulting, training and resources to help increase the overall level of tech knowledge and ability across the network
You can read more about us on our team blog or check out our projects and team docs on GitHub.
Responsibilities:
- Lead front-line support for member organizations and paid consulting clients (respond to member/client questions, troubleshoot and document issues, route requests and provide quality control to ensure that our process is well-designed, efficient and that our fixes meet client expectations and are delivered on time.
- Perform bug fixes, design/theme changes, etc. in response to member/client requests.
- Identify, communicate, help prioritize and contribute to new feature requests for the products we build
- Create documentation to assist publishers in the adoption and use of the Largo platform and other tools (this may take the form of technical documentation, walkthroughs of key features, FAQs, case studies, screencasts, etc.)
- Manage and continuously improve our support workflow and project management process.
- Write content for newsletters, the team blog, social media, etc. to promote our projects and help organizations maximize their use of our products.
- Occasionally assist in the planning and implementation of group and/or individualized training (mostly virtual via webinars or asynchronous online courses but also possibly in-person)
Requirements:
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, experience with direct client interaction and front-line support strongly preferred
- Previous experience writing documentation (some technical writing experience and familiarity with developer documentation would be helpful)
- Experience explaining technical concepts to non-technical users
- Strong attention to detail. Highly organized self-starter able to develop project plans and work to implement them with limited oversight and supervision. Previous project management experience highly preferred
- Familiarity with help desk, knowledgebase and project management tools and workflows (we use Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence)
While much of this role is writing, customer service and project management, we also need this person so be able to jump in, fully own the resolution of support requests and perform some technical tasks. To be successful in this role, the ideal candidate should have:
- Intermediate front-end design/development skills (HTML/CSS and some JavaScript)
- Experience developing for WordPress (particularly theme development in a multisite environment) and some knowledge of PHP/MySQL
- Familiarity with basic principles of user-centered design, ideally in a news environment
- Familiarity with version control tools (we use git)
Don't have every skill on the list? We'd like to hear from you anyway. We're looking for great people who are invested in our mission and excited to learn.
This is a full-time position with benefits. Our compensation package is commensurate with experience and extremely competitive. We are also committed to giving our employees the tools they need to do their job and supporting their professional growth so you'll get an allowance for hardware, software, travel to conferences, etc.
Our team is distributed so remote candidates are fine as long as you're comfortable with that. Previous experience working remotely would be helpful. If you'd rather work with us (in the same room) we have team members in Columbus (Ohio), Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City or you could work out of INN's home office in Encino, CA.
INN is an equal opportunity employer and we are committed to creating a workplace where diversity is valued. In addition to federal law requirements, INN complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities.
To Apply:
Please send the following to [email protected]:
- Brief cover letter (email is fine) explaining why you’re the perfect person for the job
- Resume/portfolio highlighting your relevant experience, projects you’ve worked on, support or training you’ve delivered, documentation you've written, etc.
- Salary expectations (ballpark is fine)