Published on December 3, 2024 8:46 PM GMT
The Roots of Progress Institute is hiring a full-time, in-house event manager to run our annual Progress Conference (at Lighthaven!) and other events. See the job ad below, crossposted in full from the link above.
Event Manager
Fully remote, full-time
The Role
We’re looking for a super-organized self-starter who loves bringing people together in person around a shared set of ideas and who is great at creating magical experiences.
The Roots of Progress Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. We’re part of a larger progress and abundance movement, and one key role we play within this movement is to develop talent and to build community.
As the Event Manager, you’ll be in charge of our annual progress conference, which brings together 200-300 thinkers and doers in the progress community. Our first event in October 2024 was a huge success, with 200+ invitation-only attendees coming together at a unique venue for two days. Dozens of attendees shared that this was the best conference they ever attended, and that it was “THE network to connect with the founders, writers, academics, and activists working to build a better world.” You will be running the event next year, and of course get to attend it, too! You will also be in charge of other events, from smaller fundraising salon-type gatherings, to the in-person gathering at the end of our annual writer’s fellowship.
This role reports to Heike Larson, our Vice President of Programs. It is a full-time position that is fully remote within in the contiguous US or Canada, but ideally, you’ll be located in/near a city with a major airport as the role requires a couple of multi-day trips every quarter, and around ten days on-site during the time of the annual conference.
About You
You love organizing events that bring people together and enable them to learn and form communities. You are good at creating delightful experiences and working with a wide range of partners, remotely. You’re excited about working in a small team, where you iterate on programs, learn from feedback, and improve quickly. You are thrilled when an event you put on leads to a new project, an essay written, or a partnership formed.
- Do you enjoy events and project management? You have a minimum of three years of experience with project and/or event management or another operational role that involves coordinating lots of moving parts. If you haven’t organized events, than at least you’ve attended a range of them and have formed a view of what makes an event great or not. (We’ve partnered up with a great event management firm who helped make this year’s event awesome, and you’ll learn from and work with them again next year.) You’re energized by figuring out what it takes to deliver a delightful experience for an event, in part because you care deeply about people and love talking to them to understand how you can craft positive-sum agreements that help both parties succeed. You’re equally excited by running the step-by-step process that’s needed to deliver this experience—whether that’s designing signage for our sponsors, organizing volunteers, figuring out the best tool to help people set up 1:1 meetings, or selecting a great photographer. Your super-strength is “getting things done”—either naturally, or because you’ve put into practice the GTD productivity methodology. You take pride in moving fast, keeping many balls in the air, and getting back to people faster than they expect.Do you delight in building community? You are as curious about people as you are about the world. You’re not about small talk or superficial networking; rather, you want to understand what makes people tick so you can connect individuals in a way that helps them explore new ideas, discuss and dialogue, start new projects, or maybe find new fellow travelers or friends. You don’t need to be in the spotlight yourself or be known for your ideas; instead, you take pride in supporting others by doing the invisible work of organizing a community and building a movement. You’re the type of person that is easy to get along with, and at the same time, you’re good at giving kind and candid feedback that helps others work together well and achieve ambitious goals.Are you experienced and fast with a range of software tools? You have experience using a CRM tool (we use Hubspot), tools like Slack and Notion, and you’re not daunted by making tools talk with each other. You can describe the needs for new tools in a way that allows you to assess whether a tool would work for us, or to give feedback on ad-hoc tools to their developers. Your passion for productivity leads you to always want to find the best tool for the job, and you’ve been known to bring new tools to the organizations you work with.Are you passionate about ideas in general and human progress in particular? You believe, like us, that ideas shape history and that builders, writers, researchers, storytellers, and educators need to have a community so they can do their best work and have the most impact. You’re fascinated by the amazing progress we’ve made in the last 200 years, lifting most of humanity out of poverty, and you are eager bring together the thinkers and doers that will create an ambitious, techno-humanist future. You don’t aspire to be an intellectual yourself, yet you admire their work and want to amplify their impact.Do you have an ownership mentality? You thrive in a work environment with clear objectives and regular kind-and-candid, growth-oriented feedback. You take full ownership of your area, planning your own work and communicating proactively with your teammates. You love finding efficient ways to do things and dislike bureaucracy.
Event management is work with cycles of intense engagement, alternating with slower periods. You’re a high-energy person who can handle travel, power through a couple of 16-hour days during events, and can then take a day or two off to recharge.
Day-to-Day
As the Event Manager, your initial main focus will be organizing and running the annual progress conference. This will include working closely with our event partners, from an event planning firm, to the venue, to sponsors, as well as communicating with speakers and attendees.
Here are some specific areas of work that you will handle right away:
- Guest list management and communications, including managing our open application process, guest ticketing, and ongoing email updates and surveysManagement of conference tools and online presence, including the conference website, the conference Slack, the directory, and the scheduler. Ideas on new/better tools are part of this role!Working with our partners to create a magical experience, on everything from a smooth schedule, to awesome badges, to great food, to brand-aligned swag and signage, to frictionless A/V and check-in processesManaging the operational work with our speakers, sponsors, and volunteers. This includes everything from handling sponsor contracts, creating speaker logistics memos, handling travel logistics, and recruiting volunteers and aligning them with their shiftsRunning the actual event. You’ll be on-site before, during, and after the event, working closely with our event coordinator and RPI team to make everything work smoothly
Once you’re onboarded and have successfully executed next year’s conference, we’d love for you to grow into iterating to make the conference better each year, and take on most of the conference design as well as much of the relationship management with speakers, partners, vendors, and participants. We expect you’ll also expand your work to include adding regional conferences and maybe even one in Europe within the next couple of years—all efforts you could help create and shape.
You will also be running a range of smaller regional events, such as salon dinners for donors and local community in different US cities. In 2024, we hosted events in LA, San Francisco, Boston, and New York City. You’ll also work with Emma McAleavy, our fellowship manager, on the in-person events happening as part of the fellowship program.
Since we’re a small team, expect about 30% of your time to be called upon for other projects. This could include helping Heike explore new program opportunities, managing logistics for some video production projects, assisting Jason with his book launch tour, or supporting Emma on fellowship tasks during application crunch time.
About the Roots of Progress Institute
The Roots of Progress Institute is a nonprofit dedicated to establishing a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century.
Why study progress? The progress of the last few centuries—in science, technology, industry, and the economy—is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. But progress is not automatic or inevitable. We must understand its causes so that we can keep it going, and even accelerate it.
We need a new philosophy of progress. To make progress, we must believe that it is possible and desirable. The 19th century believed in the power of technology and industry to better humanity, but in the 20th century, this belief gave way to skepticism and distrust.
We need a new way forward. We need a systematic study of progress, so we can understand what is needed to keep progress going. We also need to advocate for progress. We need a progress movement that both explains and champions these ideas and puts forth a vision that inspires us to build. Read more about the progress movement.
We currently have three main programs, with more on the horizon:
- The Roots of Progress Fellowship, a career accelerator program to empower intellectual entrepreneurs for progress. Our mission is to empower writers who want to make a career out of explaining progress to a large, general audience.The annual progress conference, a gathering of several hundred key builders, thinkers, writers, and funders for the movementThe Techno-Humanist Manifesto, the book our founder Jason Crawford is writing live on his Substack, along with Jason’s ongoing blogging, which was the root of this organization going back to 2017.
Benefits include health insurance, a 401(k) program you can contribute to, and a $500 per year education stipend so you can subscribe to your favorite progress bloggers and buy progress books. But the most important perk is joining a small team of three passionate and highly productive people where you’ll play a key role in building an organization that is central in creating a flourishing progress movement!
The application process
We believe a good application process allows us to get to know you, and you to get a feel for what it’s like working with us. We move quickly through this general process, which we expect to have roughly these steps:
- Written application. Give us some basic info about you and your current situation, and answer a handful of questions on why you’re excited about this role and qualified to do it well. You’ll also need to link to your resume.A 30-45 minute Zoom screen with hiring manager Heike LarsonAn application task. You show you can do some of the work involved, and see what it’s like to do this job. This will take 1.5-3 hours, depending on your background and speed.A final round of two hour-long Zoom interviews. You’ll meet the other two people on the team, Jason and Emma. You will also have a follow-up conversation with Heike to discuss the application task and address any open questions we or you may have.
For the finalist candidates, we will require two references that we can call before making an offer.
This position went live on November 22nd, 2024, and our goal is to have someone start by no later than March 1st, 2025.
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