Freelance Festival Admin Support – job opportunity

We are recruiting!

JOB TITLE: Freelance Festival Admin Support

Do you love words, books and literature? Are you an organised, reliable and enthusiastic team player, with a proactive approach and the ability to work autonomously to deadlines? Then we have the role for you.

Huddersfield Literature Festival is looking for an experienced administrator to help us organise and manage many of the tasks that running a festival entails. If you are interested in becoming part of this award-winning team, read on.

ABOUT HUDDERSFIELD LITERATURE FESTIVAL

Established in 2006, the Huddersfield Literature Festival (HLF) takes place annually at the end of March (and sometimes early April) in venues across the town and online. A respected event on the annual arts calendar, the Festival won the Examiner Community Award for Arts (2017) and has been shortlisted as a finalist in the prestigious Welcome to Yorkshire White Rose Awards three times (2016, 2017 & 2020).

The Festival welcomes around 150 performers and audiences of 4,000+ each year. We host approximately 50 events every year, in around 20 venues across the town. Our approval rating ranges from 98% – 100% every year (where audiences surveyed rate the events they attended as Excellent or Good). The Festival operates as a not-for-profit limited company, supported by grants, ticket sales and sponsorship.

Alongside major names, HLF offers a diverse range of innovative and creative events, including workshops and performance opportunities for emerging talent and the wider public. Inclusivity and accessibility is at the heart of everything we do. Many events are free or low cost and we actively reach out to and welcome approaches from local communities and organisations.

WHAT WE NEED YOU TO DO

The role will require you to:

Update the Festival website with event details/images and general information, as provided by the Festival Director
Deal with occasional customer queries via email and telephone, including providing information about events, processing refunds and forwarding queries to the appropriate team member
Create attention-grabbing newsletters and send them out to our MailChimp subscribers to promote our events and activities and drive bookings
Create Facebook events for each Festival event
Support the Festival Director and Festival Manager with general event organisational duties, such as booking transport and accommodation for authors/performers
Managing and posting regular updates on Cultural Connections: our UK-wide portal for other arts practitioners and festival organisers
Other admin support where agreed

WHAT WE NEED YOU TO BE

We are looking for someone aged 18+ with:

Relevant admin support experience for a company/organisation
Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal
Customer service experience
Impeccable attention to detail
Experience of using WordPress an advantage
Knowledge of or an interest in the arts and cultural sector an advantage
While this will be a year-round supportive role, duties are likely to be more intensive from November – March in the lead up to the annual 10-day spring Festival.

We are seeking a reliable and proactive individual who can support our Festival Team and who will follow and adhere to Huddersfield Literature Festival’s values.

REPRESENTATION

We are an equal opportunities organisation and welcome interest from all individuals who are under-represented in the arts; we are open to making accommodations wherever possible to support a successful applicant.

The role is location-independent and will be carried out primarily from a home office, but would best suit a candidate from the local area who could be welcomed into the team.

RENUMERATION

The rate of pay will be £20 an hour.

The successful candidate will be expected to produce an Excel spreadsheet or similar at the end of each month detailing hours under relevant headings. As a freelance operator, you will be responsible for your own National Insurance and tax contributions.

We are open to providing additional training to the right candidate and to help you upskill for CPD.

WHAT TO DO NEXT

Please submit a C.V. (no more than two sides of A4) along with a supporting statement of up to 500 words detailing your relevant skills and why you would like to work with us to: office@huddlitfest.org.uk

Deadline for applications is 5pm on Friday 12 November 2021.

Interviews will take place between Wednesday 17 and Wednesday 24 November. We will reimburse travel expenses up to £30 for candidates invited to attend an in-person interview and we are happy to offer Zoom interviews for those who are unable to or prefer not to travel.

The successful candidate will be informed by Friday 26 November, with a mutually agreed start date in December or early January.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

In addition to the Admin Support role, we are seeking someone to help with our marketing activities as follows:

Drafting and distributing press releases, following up and organising media interviews and coverage
Social media posts, including posting during live events, to support the social media activities of our digital agency
If you have marketing and social media experience and think you can also contribute to all or part of this role to help us gain media coverage, grow our followers and likes and make our audience more interactive, please include additional details in your application. Please note, this is not a requirement for the Admin Support role.

UPDATE: We’ve had some queries about the number of hours the job will entail a week/month. While it’s difficult to give an answer in exact figures, we can tell you that from April to October the job will involve creating one or two newsletters a month, posting at least twice on the forum and replying to answers, and handling a few customer queries (we don’t get many outside the Festival period), plus a few additional hours of work that might arise, such as updating the website. From around November to January (apart from the Christmas break), there will additionally be some intensive work on logging events on the website and as FB events, and from around January to March there will additionally be some admin work relating specifically to that year’s Festival e.g. booking performer travel. Please note: a willingness/ability to be flexible with your availability will be an asset when applying for this post.

For more information visit https://www.huddlitfest.org.uk/admin_role/