Vice President of Marketing Strategy + Sponsorships

Position Summary
MOPOP is seeking an innovative Vice President, Marketing Strategy + Sponsorships to join the Museum at a critical and exciting time in the institution’s journey reaching and engaging audiences. The VP will be instrumental in shaping MOPOP’s future, driving increased attendance, deepening audience connection, and cultivating long term sponsorships. This position manages a highly creative and cross functional team encompassing marketing and communications, multimedia production, branding, and sponsorships. The successful candidate will blend creativity, strategic thinking, and strong leadership to position MOPOP as a premier cultural institution both regionally and beyond.  The VP, Marketing Strategy + Sponsorships will partner closely with CEO, Michele Y. Smith to amplify diverse identities, experiences, and their impact in popular culture.

Essential Job Duties (other duties as assigned)
Strategic Growth + Brand Leadership:

• Innovate and execute a comprehensive plan to increase attendance, revenue, and brand strength through sponsorships, marketing, and communications channels (digital, PR, video, and more).
• Build and manage the annual marketing and sponsorship budget, ensuring responsible resource allocation and alignment with organizational financial goals. Monitor expenditures, analyze ROI, and adjust strategies as necessary to maximize impact and efficiency.
• Develop and implement a comprehensive marketing plan and strategy on an annual basis, including key goals, measurable objectives and application of data and analysis.
• Develop and implement a comprehensive brand equity strategy that elevates MOPOP’s cultural significance, strengthens emotional connections with diverse audiences, and enhances the museum’s perceived value among visitors, sponsors, and the local community.
• Oversee internal and external brand strategy related initiatives - including promotion, organizational identity, advertising materials, strategic partnerships, special events, etc.
• Oversee and expand MOPOP’s sponsorship program by translating the museum’s unique brand position and cultural relevance into compelling partnership opportunities that align with corporate sponsors' values and objectives; cultivate, acquire, and secure multi-year engagements locally and globally while ensuring brand integrity and strategic alignment.  Shape engaging owned media leveraging the MOPOP website, video content, blog, and social media channels.
• Build and cultivate relationships externally with other organizations, and coordinate internally with other departments to promote MOPOP, its goals and programs. Work to leverage MOPOP exhibitions, special events, education, and public programming, etc. for publicity opportunities.

Impactful Audience Engagement + Institutional Storytelling:

• Deepen the organization’s brand and build meaningful relationships between MOPOP and its diverse audiences, seeking to consistently elevate ethical storytelling and a broad look at pop culture’s more impactful artists.
• Understand, collect, and share the stories of MOPOP’s history and its future trajectory as an organization dedicated to making creative expression a life changing force by offering experiences that inspire and connect our communities while adapting to an ever-changing media landscape.
• In collaboration with the Marketing team create personas, segment and clarify audiences, and chart customer pathways utilizing CRM constituent data and local market trends.

Executive Leadership + MOPOP Community:

• Lead and manage the Marketing, Communications + Digital teams with expertise in user experience, advertising, community engagement, public relations, sponsorships, brand marketing, social marketing, graphic design, and video production while providing mentorship, coaching, and skills development to a layered team.
• Drive the overall marketing strategy with a clear focus on:
  • Positioning MOPOP as a flagship organization demonstrating the power of pop culture in fashion, film, gaming, and music.
  • Elevating MOPOP’s world class educational programs as a key pillar of community engagement and creative exploration.
  • Reinforcing MOPOP’s deep commitment to community, ensuring inclusive outreach and ongoing relationship building.
  • Cultivating and expanding partnerships with marquee sponsors and sister institutions that align with the museum’s mission and strategic objectives.
• Directly supervise staff, including leading recurring one on one meetings, performance conversations and reviews, and ongoing professional development and coaching; ensuring internal and external staff collaboration is in alignment with departmental and organizational objectives.
• Direct an internal and external communication plan, and all staff communication calendar and schedule with the key stakeholders, from People + Culture, and the CEO.
• Establish credibility throughout the organization as an effective listener and problem solver for diverse people.
• Provide on-site support on high visibility days and evenings for openings, late night programming, select events and fundraisers as identified by the CEO.
• Serve as Manager on Duty on assigned weekends to provide senior leadership support for on-site operations team.
• Support our internal culture, which inspires and empowers our staff to live our mission to its highest standards.
• Contribute to a consistent customer service standard across all departments.
• Work to ensure customer service is ingrained at the core of the team and is reflected outward to our guests and other staff.

Preferred/Desired Qualifications

• Minimum of twelve (12) years of progressive, hands-on experience in relevant areas (brand strategy, digital marketing, communications), including proven experience managing complex budgets.
• At least five (5) years of proven success in managing and developing layered teams.
• Demonstrated understanding of industry trends, with the ability to anticipate changes and pivot strategies accordingly.
• Able to juggle multiple high-level priorities, meet deadlines, and lead complex projects from planning to post-mortem.
• Strong team leadership skills, with high emotional intelligence, and a passion for coaching and developing leaders.
• A highly collaborative and transparent leader who is able to balance being inclusive and decisive, with keen skills in change management.
• Comfortable in dynamic settings, maintaining a vision-oriented approach to align teams on marketing and revenue goals.
• Proven verbal and written communication skills are essential for media relations, internal advocacy, and partnership outreach.
• Track record of building strong relationships with community partners, sponsors, and diverse internal teams.
• Demonstrated ability to craft and execute innovative campaigns, with concrete metrics to show brand awareness improvement.
• Strong grasp of analytics tools (Google Analytics, Tag Manager) and A/B testing.

Benefits
This regular full-time position includes Medical/Vision insurance, Dental insurance, Life/AD&D/LTD insurance, 4.62 hours of accrued Vacation per bi-weekly pay period (equaling 15 days per year), Seattle Sick/Safe, 7 Floating Holidays, 8 Company Holidays paid throughout the year, EAP, 401k plan with vested match schedule once eligible, and subsidized transportation benefits for Orca Pass or parking.

Why MOPOP?
We’re really glad you’re thinking about joining the team at MOPOP! We believe pop culture is a universal language capable of building connections across a range of people, no matter our differences in race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, ability, education, socio economic status, ethnicity, country of origin, or any other characteristic that makes us who we are. For more than twenty years, we have been showcasing how music, film, fashion, video games, sports, and more spark those connections and create a lasting cultural impact.

MOPOP provides both a physical space and an emotional and intellectual opportunity for people from any background to explore, find and build community, and recognize their own creative potential. This applies not only to our guests, but also to our staff — be it in designing an educational program to engage the next generation of creators, trying to reach a new audience with a marketing initiative, preserving an artifact in our collection, or providing excellent customer service to a visitor. If this sounds like something you’d be into, we’d love to hear from you!

MOPOP’s Mission and Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility 
Our mission is to activate the world shaping power of pop culture through participative experiences, discovery, and play. We believe pop culture connects us, and that it is powerful, complex, alive and who we are. MOPOP is actively committed to ongoing learning in the areas of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). In partnership with our community, we hope to also develop safe spaces for their application. This includes taking steps to continue increasing our awareness of institutional “-isms,” as well as uncovering and undoing the ways they show up in museum culture. We recognize this is a process that requires intentionality, energy, and resources, and we are developing a DEIA framework that can cultivate a work environment and museum experience that is truly welcoming for all.

We are committed to creating an inclusive and equitable workplace, and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We believe that having staff, interns, and volunteers with diverse backgrounds enables us to better meet our mission and encourage BIPOC, women, and LGBTQIA2S+ individuals to apply. We acknowledge that our work to build safe spaces and better systems for traditionally marginalized groups is ongoing and will require constant vigilance and expect all MOPOP employees to be part of our DEIA journey.

Please email jobs@mopop.org if you need reasonable accommodations during the application or hiring process.