Consultant (12 months, home-based): Digital Skills Accelerator, Division of Private Fundraising and Partnerships (PFP)
Contract
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UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.
Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.
And we never give up.
For every child, hope
The Individual Giving (IG) team in Geneva, within the Division of Private Fundraising and Partnerships (PFP), seeks to hire a Digital Skills Accelerator Consultant to support the project management of the IG Skills Accelerator, a talent initiative created by Individual Giving, designed to cultivate digital expertise, and drive impactful outcomes amongst fundraising global practitioners. This program offers a unique opportunity for participants to accelerate their digital capabilities and make a meaningful difference in fundraising efforts across the digital ecosystem, with one objective: to improve donor and income performance for each of the participant offices. The first IG Skills Accelerator will deliver a cohort of 10 digitally trained experts from different offices, both from National Committees and Country Offices. The program comprises a structured blend of formal learning, social learning or shadowing, and experiential learning or reverse shadowing, happening directly in participant’s offices. This program will allow us to work together with offices on key digital expertise areas to boost performance, foster innovation, identify possible gaps and opportunities for further growth, and overall, unlock markets’ potential and fast-track success to fundraising results.
How can you make a difference?
Scope of Work:
The Digital Skills Accelerator Consultant will act as a project manager for the cohorts 1 and 2 of the IG Skills Accelerator.
The tasks associated will be as follows:
• Stakeholder Engagement: Spearhead the coordination of stakeholders, ensuring a cohesive approach to the project’s objectives and the proper flow of information.
• Calendar and Project Plan: Define a project plan to meet the calendar requirements and keep track of all deadlines. Identify potential roadblock and risks to make sure they are sorted in a timely manner.
• Candidate Selection: Facilitate the selection process and formalities, via the functional leads, of the selected members to participate. Establish a potential process that can be replicated across cohorts to support the ideal selection of candidates and its characteristics.
• Candidate Onboarding: Create the journey and materials to onboard selected candidates. Curate all the materials that functional leads provide, in order to create a clear, simple and consistent journey.
• Learning Objectives: In partnership with functional experts, articulate the primary learning goals and desired outcomes for each cohort. Phase them according to our established structure and calendar (formal, social, experiential). With functional leads, transform those objectives into specific learning materials, resources, toolkits, and learning activities.
• Resource Development: Craft and curate a suite of learning and training materials that bolster the formal education process. Create a space in our learning platforms that hosts all materials. Repeat this same process for the specific topics of the various cohorts, collaborating closely with each of the leads in functional teams to identify the agenda and objectives. Curate and reuse all the possible materials from existing activities.
• Learning Platform Usability: Coordinate with the learning team in UNICEF to offer a user-friendly and easy experience to access and consume materials, in line with the UNICEF workplace guidelines and recommendations.
• Package technical contents for future editions: package all the contents created in order to facilitate the replicability of the initiative in additional offices with the minimum effort implied.
• Knowledge & Learnings Capture and application: Systematically document the insights and learnings during the span of the project and following the conclusion of each cohort’s activities, to make each new cohort more impactful and meaningful.
• Create a Dashboard to assess program results: support the team assess on the project success by defining a comprehensive Dashboard across cohorts that can assess the critical KPIs to review program performance. Work with functional teams to define different stages of success: 1. Formal, social, experiential, and 2. Mid/long term success, to understand how the initiative has impacted the business in the market.
• Reverse Shadowing: put a special plan in place to assess how to boost the impact of the reverse shadowing activities, specially to identify gaps and opportunities in offices, to spot potential innovations, and to maintain a rich a fruitful collaboration in market.
• Community Engagement: Create a vibrant and interactive community among participants of all cohorts, fostering a network of continuous engagement and support that can continue after the completion of the program. Develop a specific strategy and platform, with a regular cadence for meetings and online activities. Include the buddies that have participated in the program in this Community of Practice. Transform this project in a lifelong learning event.
• Program Consistency and Objectives: constantly review the full process and development, to make sure that the program is fulfilling its objectives and philosophy, making sure that the learning pathway is in harmony with the overarching global Individual Giving strategy, promoting a unified direction.
• Deep dive into how this can foster the IG DEI approach: Understand how those exchanges with market experiences can enrich diversity in the way we work as a team, getting closer to new approaches, perspectives, ideas, backgrounds... and much more!
Work Assignments Overview
Deliverables/Outputs
Timeline
IG Skills Accelerator Project Preparation
• Stakeholder alignment is guaranteed via several engagement strategies (RACI model, Comms strategy and flows definition, key milestones).
• Project Plan is created and implemented.
• Coordination of key communication steps via market focal points and/or strategists is conducted.
• Support on candidate selection via leads in each functional area. Total of 10 candidates are selected.
• Definition of learning objectives. Final product: personalized learning programs for each participant.
• Resource selection and development to guarantee the participant preparedness. Provide Program Syllabus and detail con contents with links to existing materials. Populate materials in the Agora Platform, prepare all pre-readings.
• Select Buddies who will be providing peer support.
• Program preparedness in general.
by end of December 2024
IG Skills Accelerator Project Kick Off
• Candidate onboarding completed via formal learning platform and following a proposed pathway.
• Learning platform development
• Usability assessment check for the learning platform.
• Learning resources curation and uploading. Redesign of resources and reedition as needed.
• Stakeholder engagement during the process via regular catchups and calls, as established in project plan.
• Project management follow up to guarantee full deliverability.
by end of February 2025
IG Skills Accelerator Project Ramp up
• Coordination with strategists and functional leads to deliver the shadowing phase. Coordinate buddies and candidates, starting with an initial shared assessment, and providing consistent weekly meetings for follow up. Support functional leads in the identification of challenges to resolve and the planning towards delivering solutions.
• Coordination with strategists and functional leads to deliver the reverse shadowing phase. Coordinate buddies and participants on the implementation of the identified solutions in markets. Track performance and effectiveness
by end of June 2025
IG Skills Accelerator Project Sustainability
• Propose strategies and platforms to boost Community engagement. Create the agreed platform.
• Propose an engagement plan for the upcoming months, with the detail on activities and meeting cadence.
• Develop and implement a Dashboard for analysis and insights.
• Collection of on-the-fly learnings and improvements via reports.
• Review of program deliverability against selected KPIs.
• Review program consistency against overall strategy.
• Review Project Plan completion and pending tasks.
by end of August 2025
IG Skills Accelerator Project Closing and Wrap up
• Launch the Accelerator Community of Practice
• Preparedness for subsequent editions of the program (following the steps stated in the Preparation pack stated above)
• Package of contents to be reutilized and reedited in future editions.
• Closing reports to collect all program summaries and results.
• Learnings and key insights report delivered and presented to key stakeholders.
by end of September 2025
To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…
Education:
• First-level university degree (bachelor’s degree or higher), in Business Administration, Marketing, Communications, or another relevant technical field is required. Additional training in Project Management, Agile, Learning, Instructional Design, or Knowledge Management is an asset.
Experience:
• A minimum of three years of work experience in Digital Marketing in digital agencies or digital environments and/or work experience in Project Management, with a proven track record of successful initiatives and projects is required.
• Experience in the deployment of Learning Programs, including Instructional Design and content curation is required.
• Expertise in Knowledge Management is required, deploying activities across the full cycle of knowledge (document, capture, curate, socialize, measure...) Experience in developing or contributing to Internal Communications strategies is required.
• International professional experience is an advantage.
• Fundraising/NFP knowledge is an advantage.
Key Skills required:
• Marketing and Digital Media: Experience to be able to collaborate with cross-functional and be able to offer the best contents for each case.
• Digital Platforms and Tools development: Proficiency in developing digital platforms and tools, for best-in-class user experience (UX).
• Design Understanding: Ability to simplify and clarify complex training documents, tools and platforms with a strong design sense.
• Learning, Development and Knowledge Management. Ability to create user-friendly learning pathways and resources to support teams learning strategies.
Languages:
• Fluency in English is required.
• Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish) is considered as an asset.
For every Child, you demonstrate…
UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability (CRITAS).
To view our competency framework, please visit here.
Remarks:
Please indicate your all-inclusive (lump sum) fees in USD against the deliverables listed above. If there is a need for business travel, the travel costs will be covered by UNICEF separately. The office selects the individual based on the best value for money.
Payment of professional fees will be based on submission of agreed deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant.
Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.
Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures, and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws.
The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully-vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts.
UNICEF is here to serve the world’s most disadvantaged children and our global workforce must reflect the diversity of those children. The UNICEF family is committed to include everyone, irrespective of their race/ethnicity, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socio-economic background, or any other personal characteristic.
UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants/individual contractors with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment.
UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.