Vice President Creative & Content

About the opportunity
From January 1, 2027, donors can give up to $1,700 to scholarship organizations and receive the full amount back as a federal tax credit. AFC is building the national platform that turns this policy into scholarships for hundreds of thousands of children. We launch with significant monthly media budgets and a modern data stack. Alongside the launch we are building one marketing organization for the whole of AFC: marketing departments covering Growth, Lifecycle, Creative & Content, and Data, MarTech & Analytics, serving every part of the movement. Each entity keeps its own strategy, priorities and voice. The marketing team owns the craft and does the work, at a level no single entity could build alone. We are hiring the leader of Creative & Content.
The role
You will lead the Creative & Content department: an emerging creative studio (creative direction, design, video and multimedia production) and an editorial function (copywriting and content production), around 8 people today inc contractors and growing. The team’s aim is to serve every AFC entity, so your internal clients state implementation and the Scholarship Fund with government affairs and advocacy to follow. They own their voice and their priorities. You own the craft, the standards and the output. The team is talented and it ships. What it needs is a leader who brings strategic judgement, an operating system, a performance mindset, and room to grow. This is a strategic role and an operational one. You will set standards. Intake, priorities, headcount and vendors are yours to own alongside the CMO.
One honest note on how we work. Agility is our best feature and our most expensive bug. We say yes, we move fast and we are hungry, and that has carried us a long way. It also means work arrives from every direction at once and expectations get set in passing. We are not asking you to make the team say no more often. We are asking you to build the intake, the workflows and the governance that let us keep saying yes to the right things, and be straight with everyone about the rest.
What you'll do
• Set the strategy and the priorities. Decide what the team makes, what it declines, and in what order, so effort goes to the work that moves donors and scholarships, as well as state level implementation. Partnering with other marketing capabilities how content is packaged and presented across audiences and channels, not just that it ships on time.
• Partner with the CMO. You work directly with the CMO on priorities, standards and the shape of the department, and with the expanded marketing team on the creative carrying seven-figure monthly media spend: concepts, formats, landing pages and the test roadmap. You are comfortable being held to conversion results and test velocity.
• Lead and grow the department. Coach leaders and makers across design, video, multimedia and editorial copy, and add talent as demand grows.
• Build the operating system. One intake and prioritization process serving every AFC entity, with clear workflows, governance and decision rights, capacity planning, published service standards, and a protected rapid-response lane for communications and advocacy work.
• Build design systems that scale. The ad design system, landing page and template systems, and the components behind them, so the team ships at high volume without rebuilding every asset from scratch or losing the brand along the way.
• Deliver against SEO and AI content strategy. AFC content should be the answer in search and in AI assistants when people ask how the Education Freedom Tax Credit works. The editorial team lead the delivery of this growth lever.
• Lead the editorial function. Content strategy and production across fundraising copy and family storytelling used by fundraising, advocacy and press.
• Steward the brand. Own the brand system across multiple organizations, and run the message standards process (claims, red lines) with the Communications team.
• Partner with Communications. Marketing and Communications are being built as two centers on one system. You will work with Communications leadership on message standards, on the fast lane that protects rapid response, and on where campaign work and press work divide.
• Work with Digital Platform and UX. Landing pages, the donation flow, the calculator and the Partner Portal are where creative meets product. You partner with the digital platform and web experience team on shared design systems, page templates and conversion work.
• Build AI into the studio. Put AI to work across copy, design operations and video post-production so the team can handle much higher volume.
• Manage vendors and budget. Own the video agency relationship covering our explainer series and documentary work, plus the contractor roster and the build-versus-buy calls as in-house capability grows.
• Help lead the marketing organization. You are one of four department heads in a new enterprise marketing organization, alongside Growth, Lifecycle, and Data, MarTech & Analytics, and will help shape how it operates.
Who you are
• 10+ years in creative or content leadership, including leading teams across design, video and copy, and managing other leaders.
• Strategic, not just productive. You can look at a quarter of demand and say what matters, what waits, and what does not get made, and defend that call to the people who asked. You think about how work is presented, not only what is produced.
• You have run creative or content as a service to internal clients who own their own strategy and voice. You can hold a standard without owning the message, and say no to a stakeholder without losing them.
• You have built, scaled or turned around an in-house studio or content operation, and can explain the system you built: intake, traffic, service levels, capacity.
• You have replaced informal ways of working with a system without killing the pace. You know the difference between governance that protects the work and process that smothers it.
• You have made creative for direct response at meaningful spend, and you are comfortable being measured on conversion and test velocity.
• Strong editorially. You can raise the level of copy and content strategy yourself, and you will be building out the editorial bench as you go.
• Experienced using AI in production work. You can show how it changed your team's output and workflows.
• You have owned a brand and design system across several products or entities and kept it consistent at volume, with the templates and components to make that real.
• A genuine player-coach. You make the leaders under you better, and you are still willing to get into the work yourself.
• Helpful but not required: fundraising, nonprofit or advocacy experience; agency leadership background; video production depth.
Why this role
• Scope: one creative and content engine for the whole of AFC, not one entity’s marketing team.
• Scale: creative feeding seven-figure monthly media spend from launch, plus advocacy and storytelling for a national movement.
• A real team from day one, with hiring underway to grow it.
• Test results, donor intelligence and analytics inform the creative work.
• The work funds scholarships. Better performance means more children served.
Logistics
Remote within the US (Austin, TX a plus). Competitive compensation and benefits. Title will be leveled VP based on experience. Reports to the CMO.

Work arrangement
Yes