Head of Communications, Roots of Progress Institute

Fully remote, full-time, North America–based position

Apply for our Head of Communications position.

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The role

The Roots of Progress Institute (RPI) is seeking a Head of Communications, to grow our online audience and tell them about everything we're saying and doing.

You will start with a great brand. RPI is known as a central organization in the progress movement. Our founder and president, Jason Crawford, is recognized as a leader in the movement, and has been interviewed as a spokesman for progress by BBC and Vox. Our annual Progress Conference is the main event for the community, with headliners including billionaire founders and Nobel laureates; it is sold out every year with hundreds on the waitlist. Our Substack has 60,000 subscribers, and Jason has over 43,000 Twitter followers.

You will also have a lot of great material to work with: regular essays and threads from Jason and our fellows; dozens of hours of recorded talks coming out of every conference; and announcements from our fellowship, conference, and university and high school programs. Biggest of all, next year, we'll be launching Jason's book, The Progress Manifesto.

You'll report directly to Jason, and will work closely with him and with the program leads. We're a small team with Silicon Valley DNA; we operate with high autonomy and minimal process. You will amplify the work of this fantastic team.

You will uphold the highest standards for taste and quality. No slop, no clickbait, no feeding the outrage machine. We write the kind of posts we want to read. We don't pollute the epistemic commons—we clean it up.

And all of this in service of one of the most important missions in the world today: building a culture of progress and restoring a bold, ambitious vision of the future.

What you will own and do

You will own our audiences on Substack and social media, and all communications about our programs. You will also own the launch of The Progress Manifesto, forthcoming from MIT Press in Spring 2027. Your key metrics will be audience growth, engagement, and book sales.

You will have broad latitude to devise comms strategies and tactics. At the same time, you must own execution: you will have a budget for contractors like video production, but otherwise you will be a one-person comms team.

This is not a PR role: it's about managing our own audience, not about getting external media mentions or interviews. However, when we have a major media campaign, like the book launch, you will work with an external PR firm who does those things.

Day-to-day

Examples of day-to-day tasks you might perform include:

Creating a launch plan for The Progress Manifesto, each year’s Progress Conference, each cohort of the Blog-Building Intensive, etc.
Drafting announcements, updates, and retrospectives for all our programs (or editing drafts written by the program leads) and publishing them
Drafting and publishing the links digest (which we would like to put out more regularly!)
Publishing essays and turning them into social posts and threads
Managing production for promotional videos, like this one for our fellowship