Chief Community Officer
A full time position
Fully remote: working with a USA-based team at Ark Media.
Salary range: $160,000 to $180,000 (yearly rate) - subject to experience
About Ark Media Ark Media is a mission-driven podcast network exploring the big questions shaping Jewish life, Israel's future, and our rapidly changing world. Through high-impact original programming and conversations with thought leaders and decision-makers, Ark Media aims to build a global community driven by curiosity and meaningful dialogue.
Home to the Call Me Back podcast and a growing slate of original shows and editorial initiatives, Ark Media moves fast, sweats the details, and cares deeply about the audience experience.
Position Overview Ark Media is seeking a Chief Community Officer (CCO) to lead the vision and execution of our digital community strategy, transforming passive listeners into active, engaged community members through a robust online platform, newsletter engagement, and strategic live experiences.
This is a senior leadership role focused on building and scaling a digital-first community platform that creates belonging, drives engagement, and generates sustainable revenue. The CCO will design and launch our digital community infrastructure, develop engagement frameworks that move people from casual listeners to active participants to community advocates, and build a thriving ecosystem of daily online interaction supported by strategic live events.
The ideal candidate brings deep experience in digital community building, newsletter growth and engagement, platform strategy, and an entrepreneurial mindset to build new programs from the ground up. They should also understand how live events can serve as powerful amplifiers of podcast and digital community engagement.
Strategic Priorities Primary Focus (70-80% of role):
- Digital Community Platform: Build and scale online community infrastructure with daily engagement
- Newsletter Strategy: Drive newsletter as the primary community engagement and conversion tool
- Subscription Growth: Partner with COO to drive community-led subscription conversion and retention
- Member Engagement: Create frameworks for progression from casual listener to active community advocate
- Grassroots Networks: Local ambassadors who bridge digital community to real-world connections
Secondary Focus (20-30% of role):
- Live Events: Strategic in-person experiences serving the podcast community as an independent touchpoint and opportunity to drive platform growth (6-8 annually)
Key Responsibilities Digital Community Platform & Infrastructure
- Design and launch a digital community platform, selecting optimal existing infrastructure (Circle, Discord, Substack, etc.) while exploring long-term custom build options
- Build engagement frameworks that create daily interaction, meaningful conversations, and peer-to-peer connections beyond content consumption.
- Create community norms, moderation guidelines, and engagement rituals that foster genuine belonging and psychological safety
- Develop subscriber recruitment funnels to convert podcast listeners and newsletter readers into engaged platform participants.
- Own product roadmap for community features, discussion formats, and engagement tools that drive retention and depth
- Implement data infrastructure for tracking engagement depth, community health, member progression, and behavioral outcomes
Newsletter Strategy & Engagement
- Transform the newsletter from a broadcast tool to an interactive community hub with two-way engagement, member spotlights, polls, and discussion prompts.
- Design newsletter-to-platform conversion funnels with clear calls-to-action that drive community participation
- Develop a segmentation strategy for different member tiers, interests, and engagement levels.
- Optimize newsletter cadence, content mix, and engagement metrics (open rates, click-throughs, platform conversions)
- Use the newsletter as the primary recruitment and re-engagement tool for the platform community.
- Oversee social media strategy and manage social media manager to ensure platforms drive awareness, engagement, and conversion to newsletter and community platform
Community-Driven Subscription Growth
- Partner with the COO to align community engagement with subscription tier strategy and value proposition
- Build engagement ladders that convert free community members to paying subscribers through demonstrated value
- Design exclusive community experiences and access levels for paid tiers that justify subscription value
- Use community insights and member feedback to inform the COO's subscription product decisions and pricing strategy.
- Track community-driven subscription metrics: conversion rates, retention by engagement level, referral-driven growth
Content & Creator Ecosystem
- Develop digital programming that drives ongoing platform engagement: AMAs, expert Q&As, discussion threads, member-led conversations
- Identify and onboard guest experts, thought leaders, and community voices to enrich platform discussions beyond core Ark Media hosts
- Create frameworks for member-generated content that transform passive consumers into active contributors
- Design regular content cadence (weekly themes, discussion prompts, featured conversations) that creates rhythm and habit
Live Events & Real-World Activation
- Plan and execute 6-8 live Call Me Back events annually, delivering valuable, standalone experiences for the podcast community.
- Design event-to-platform conversion strategies to capture interested attendees for the digital community, recognizing significant but not guaranteed overlap between podcast listeners and platform members
- Build a network of local ambassadors who host smaller community gatherings and bridge online-to-offline connections.
- Test new event formats that serve specific community segments or growth objectives.
- Ensure events generate content and momentum that feeds back into the digital platform (recordings, discussion threads, follow-up engagement)
Impact Measurement & Optimization
- Establish baseline metrics and KPIs that measure engagement depth, community health, and member transformation (not just vanity metrics)
- Implement pre/post surveys measuring knowledge growth, perspective shifts, sense of belonging, and civic engagement behaviors
- Build feedback loops and A/B testing frameworks for continuous platform and engagement optimization
- Track network effects: member referrals, peer-to-peer interactions, community advocacy, content amplification
- Translate data into compelling impact narratives for leadership, development stakeholders, and community members
Leadership & Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Serve as a member of the leadership team, advocating for community needs and insights across all departments.
- Collaborate with the Content team to integrate community CTAs and engagement hooks across all podcast and editorial touchpoints
- Partner with the COO on subscription strategy, ensuring community engagement drives conversion and retention
- Work with Marketing/Growth to align acquisition strategy with community recruitment and platform growth goals
- Manage dedicated community budget and build a team over time.
What You Bring Required Skills and Experience
- Proven digital community builder: You have built and scaled participatory online communities to 20,000+ actively engaged members (not just email lists or social media followings—actual communities with ongoing peer-to-peer interaction and high engagement depth)
- Platform and product thinking: Experience selecting, implementing, and optimizing community platform technology. Comfort with data-driven decision making, conversion funnels, engagement metrics, and feature prioritization
- Newsletter strategy and growth: Track record of growing and optimizing newsletter engagement with demonstrable results in open rates, click-throughs, and conversion to deeper engagement
- Subscription/membership model expertise: Understanding of freemium models, conversion optimization, and how community engagement drives subscription growth and retention
- Community transformation frameworks: Experience designing engagement progressions that move people from lurkers to contributors to advocates, with clear metrics at each stage
- Impact measurement beyond vanity metrics: Experience implementing qualitative and quantitative frameworks for measuring community health, member transformation, and behavioral outcomes
- Cross-functional leadership: 8+ years of experience collaborating across creative, product, operations, and marketing teams in media, cultural, tech, or civic organizations
- Startup mentality: You thrive in ambiguity, build systems from scratch, move fluidly from strategy to execution, and work with urgency. Entrepreneurial mindset required
- Mission alignment: Genuine passion for civic and cultural dialogue. Deep understanding of how community fosters belonging, intellectual growth, and civic engagement
Preferred Skills
- Background in media, journalism, podcasting, or cultural programming
- Familiarity with CRM tools, community analytics platforms, and marketing automation systems
- Experience building and managing creator or expert networks within platforms
- Track record in planning and executing live events '
- Comfort with agile, MVP approach, and rapid iteration based on data and feedback
- Familiarity with AI tools for community management, content creation, and workflow optimization
- Experience building communities focused on identity formation, civic engagement, or cultural discourse
- Experience overseeing social media strategy and managing social media teams, with an understanding of how content distribution and community engagement drive audience expansion across channels
Personal Attributes
- Entrepreneurial and collaborative; thrives in a start-up environment with an evolving strategy.
- Mission-driven with a genuine interest in civic, cultural, and intellectual discourse
- Equally comfortable shaping long-term strategy and executing tactical details
- Deep empathy for community members and understanding of audience psychology
- Data-informed but not data-obsessed; balances quantitative metrics with qualitative community health
- Creative problem-solver who sees opportunities to turn community engagement into sustainable business outcomes
Who You're Not
- Someone whose only experience is hands-on social media management without broader community platform leadership
- Someone who has only run brand communities or marketing-focused engagement (we need participatory communities)
- Primarily an events professional who sees digital as secondary (we need digital-first thinking with events as amplification)
- Looking for a defined role with clear templates and established systems to manage (we need someone who builds from zero)
- Primarily a content creator yourself, though you must deeply understand how creators think and work
Please mention podnews.net in your application.
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