Description
WJN seeks a strategic, research-driven, and product-minded Head of Narrative Strategy to lead the organization’s research, curriculum, framework development, and strategic content workstreams.
Reporting to the Executive Director, the Head of Narrative Strategy will help steward WJN’s organizational point of view and ensure its research, insights, trainings, tools, and educational offerings are rigorous, useful, and accessible to the practitioners and partners who need them.
This role sits at the intersection of strategy, research, education, and product development. It is responsible for turning ideas into usable experiences, tools, trainings, and programs — helping audiences understand WJN’s narrative framework and apply it in their own communications, campaigns, advocacy, organizing, and public engagement.
The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in audience research, strong teaching instincts, a talent for simplifying complex ideas without flattening them, and a demonstrated ability to translate research into practical tools for real-world use.
Key Responsibilities:
Research Strategy & Learning Agenda
Lead WJN’s research and product workstreams, including the strategy and execution of qualitative and quantitative audience research efforts.
Help develop and manage a clear roadmap for WJN’s audience research agenda.
Work with external research vendors, consultants, partners, and collaborators to design, execute, interpret, and apply research projects.
Synthesize findings from audience research, message testing, field learning, partner feedback, and broader political and cultural analysis.
Ensure WJN’s research agenda remains focused on practical insights that help communicators, advocates, organizers, campaigns, and civic leaders reconnect with working-class audiences.
Narrative Frameworks & Organizational Point of View
Serve as a steward of WJN’s strategic frameworks, core narrative architecture, and organizational point of view.
Translate complex research insights into clear frameworks that help audiences understand what is working, what is not, and why.
Develop and refine WJN’s methodology for helping leaders and organizations communicate more effectively about jobs, work, the economy, dignity, fairness, opportunity, and trust.
Ensure WJN maintains a recognizable and rigorous intellectual foundation across its trainings, tools, products, communications, and programs.
Track developments in politics, public opinion, narrative change, strategic communications, working-class engagement, and economic discourse to inform WJN’s evolving strategy.
Curriculum, Tools & Product Development
Lead development of trainings, curriculum, educational resources, narrative tools, and strategic content products.
Create scalable systems for knowledge-sharing and political/strategic education.
Translate research findings into high-quality trainings and easy-to-use tools for communications practitioners, including potential AI-enabled tools that help partners apply WJN’s frameworks in real-world settings.
Design resources that help audiences leave with greater clarity, stronger skills, and actionable understanding.
Work with partners, users, and practitioners to test, refine, and improve WJN’s tools, trainings, and products over time.
Cross-Team Collaboration
Collaborate closely with the Head of Programs & Partnerships to ensure WJN’s research, curriculum, and tools are responsive to partner needs and effectively adopted by WJN’s community.
Work with the Head of Communications to translate research findings, frameworks, and strategic insights into compelling public-facing content.
Support the Executive Director in shaping WJN’s broader strategy, priorities, and impact goals.
Manage external vendors, consultants, writers, researchers, designers, curriculum developers, and other partners as needed.
Organizational Leadership
Serve as a trusted advisor and thought partner to the Executive Director.
Participate actively as a member of WJN’s senior leadership team.
Help build a collaborative, rigorous, learning-oriented organizational culture rooted in clarity, creativity, accountability, and impact.
Represent WJN externally when appropriate, including with partners, media, funders, coalitions, and at public events.
About WJN:
America faces a deep and growing disconnect. Economic insecurity and inequality have left millions of people feeling unseen and unheard. The notion that hard work leads to a decent life no longer feels true for too many, fueling frustration, polarization, and distrust in government and civic institutions. The Winning Jobs Narrative (WJN) is a narrative architecture that puts working people back at the center of the economy, and establishes a new economic paradigm—one that rewards work, restores agency, and rebuilds trust that civic systems can deliver material improvements in people’s lives. The architecture was designed with a north star of making the economy work for working people. The core architecture and its accompanying tools and products rebuild a shared economic language that reconnects people to each other, to government, and to civic participation. Its aim is economic paradigm change. WJN currently consists of two separate projects whose impact is measured by narrative adoption and utilization — shaping how others do their work via education and training, influencing, and equipping the institutions that reach the public, workers, and decision-makers.
Winning Jobs Narrative Education or WJN Education, a fiscally sponsored project of North Main Street Fund, undertakes research, narrative development, education, and training that builds shared language and improves the ability of stakeholders to communicate effectively about the economy across workers, leaders, donors, and institutions in order to drive a paradigm shift toward an economy that centers working people as the true drivers of shared prosperity, economic growth and civic stability.
Winning Jobs Narrative Action or WJN Action, a fiscally sponsored project of Forward Action Fund, supports narrative development, training, and tools focused on promoting policies and legislation, as well as engaging in communications around elections that advance policies and leaders that put working people and their concerns first. WJN is a multifaceted project with many collaborators, advisors, and contributors. Radical cooperation is our guiding principle. No single project can deliver everything that a movement for working people needs. So we set out to build on the work of colleagues and share findings and innovations widely to help inform a broader conversation. Learn more and sign up for updates here.
Requirements
Qualifications:
Deep expertise in qualitative and quantitative audience research, preferably in a political, advocacy, nonprofit, civic engagement, or communications environment.
Strong track record of translating research insights into actionable tools, trainings, frameworks, or strategic guidance for real-world use.
Excellent strategic thinking, writing, synthesis, and analytical skills.
Strong teaching, facilitation, and curriculum-development instincts.
Ability to simplify complex ideas without flattening nuance or rigor.
Experience developing frameworks, trainings, educational resources, strategic content, or practitioner-facing tools.
Product-minded and systems-oriented approach to building scalable resources and programs.
Comfort managing external vendors, consultants, researchers, and collaborators.
Comfort operating in a fast-moving environment with shifting priorities and high standards.
Strong commitment to WJN’s mission of reconnecting with working-class audiences and rebuilding trust through more effective economic narratives.
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience with public opinion research, message testing, cognitive linguistics, narrative change, strategic communications research, or working-class audience research.
Experience across both the political/advocacy and nonprofit/philanthropic spaces.
Experience designing trainings, curricula, communities of practice, learning programs, or practitioner-facing resources.
Experience working with campaigns, advocacy organizations, unions, philanthropic institutions, think tanks, research firms, or movement organizations.
Interest in leveraging AI to develop tools that equip communications practitioners to communicate more effectively.
Experience helping build the intellectual infrastructure, research agenda, or product line of a growing organization, campaign, or initiative.
