Salary: Competitive per annum

Hours: 37.5 per week, Monday - Friday. Please note for 1 week in 6 you'll be on 24/7 call

Location: Crawley, West Sussex - with flexible remote working days

Contract: Permanent

Closing Date: 22nd April 2021

Many of our staff at Virgin work flexibly and in many different ways, including different core hours or remote working. Please talk to us at your application or interview stage about the flexibility you need. We can't promise to give you exactly what you want, but we are happy to explore what's possible for the role.

In a nutshell

In this exciting role as PR manager you'll be accountable for managing the consumer and corporate public relations across all areas for Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Atlantic Holidays. This diverse role includes leading on pro-active story generation and developing campaigns across both consumer and corporate issues as well as driving news and content to secure positive sentiment in the media and with external stakeholders. Virgin Atlantic is famous for its bold PR campaigns and in this role you could be working on the next Pride Flight, the launch of a new route or the unveiling of our latest state of the art aircraft.

Working closely with colleagues across Marketing, Internal Communications and Social media, this role will plan, deliver and evaluate cross-functional campaigns, aligned with company’s commercial goals, to drive brand preference and successfully position Virgin Atlantic as the most loved travel company. With an intrinsic understanding of the brand DNA and our Values, you'll create engaging content that inspires, excites and engages opinion formers and influencers, and helps to build our reputation as a full service, omnichannel network carrier. Creating campaigns and developing stories to promote our brand promise to deliver thoughtful experiences that are brilliantly different.

You'll play an important role in advising senior stakeholders on media strategy, in order to minimise negative press coverage and protect and defend the reputation of the brand, whilst also being responsible for managing the media response to issues and crisis situations. Reporting into the Senior PR Manager, and being the guardian of true Virgin flair, you'll be accountable for shaping the wider editorial strategy to ensure all of our external content inspires, excites and engages media, customers and key opinion formers

Day to Day

- Develop consumer and corporate-facing PR strategy, working in partnership with the Senior PR Manager to proactively seek opportunities and develop campaigns, aligning with our commercial priorities to position Virgin Atlantic as the most loved travel company to our customers and external stakeholders.

- Work closely with the Social and Marketing team to drive brand preference, by aligning on powerful projects and campaigns, targeting audiences through original, creative content which can be amplified across multiple platforms.

- Lead on external media opportunities and interviews with stakeholders across the business, to tell our story. Share best practice and ideas with the wider Communications team to fuel company-wide ideation.

- Contribute to the definition and delivery of the overarching strategy for comms, by bringing creative thinking and accelerating the delivery of our company strategy.

- Set press coverage targets for the team and participate in a monthly/quarterly/annual cadence of review and re-set.

- Identify key barriers to message interpretation and co-create strategies to develop them, thus ensuring the core tenets of the comms plan are deeply embedded and well understood outside of the business.

- Act as the guardian of the company’s reputation, managing reactive press queries to limit damage.

- Create and communicate a narrative that articulate our position on reactive critical business and industry updates.

- Partner with the Snr PR Manager and Snr Manager Crisis & Customer to lead on media response within the crisis communications plan.

- Work alongside colleagues in Commercial, Customer and Operations within the business to ensure any crisis situations are handled effectively and in a collaborative manner, to protect brand reputation.

- Leverage data and insights (brand tracking, Kantar, social, agency reporting) to frame and develop the future PR plan, ensuring everything produced engages the target audience and drives brand preference

- Generate regular press coverage reports for Marketing & Comms and functions around the business to report back on the successful execution of the media strategy and where learnings can be applied.

About you

Do you have proven experience working within PR across consumer or agency? Are you experienced running campaigns & events? Do you have experience influencing senior stakeholders? Then this could be the role for you.

Alongside the above we’re looking for the following:

-Outstanding written and verbal communications skills

-A highly nuanced communicator who is able to translate complex information into content for consumption by customers and media.

-Impeccable networking and interpersonal skills, leading to productive, fruitful business partnerships

-Excellent project management skills, delivering to tight deadlines in pressured environments and on budget.

-An understanding or experience of working on DE&I and sustainability campaigns, two key focus areas of the business.

-A creative thinker who can develop ideas and execute them for maximum impact.

If the above sounds like you and you want to work in a fast paced role where you’ll live and breathe the Virgin Atlantic brand then we want to hear from you!

Be yourself - Our differences make us stronger

Virgin Atlantic are committed equal opportunities employers and positively encourage applications from suitably qualified and eligible applicants regardless of sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion or belief, marital status, pregnancy and maternity. Diversity brings strength which is why we strive to provide an inclusive environment where individuality is celebrated, and we can ignite the potential of our forward-thinking mix of people.

Please be aware as part of our recruitment process we may look to use a variety of resourcing tools to help us understand your skills and experience in relation to the role you have applied for. These may include application questions, video interviews or online testing. Please feel free to contact us at [email protected] if there are any reasonable adjustments to our process that you would like us to consider, for example use of hearing loops, sign language interpreter etc. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if there are any issues preventing you from being at your best during your application or assessment process. Any issues raised after your assessment is completed or once a decision has been made will be too late for us to consider within our process.