Senior Manager - Content & Creative (Social Sector)

Company Description

DESIGN HOUSE is India's first Social Impact Communication agency built to make the social sector impossible to ignore for the 1.4 billion people who have never heard of it.

A hybrid communication agency + advocacy platform that translates the social sector into the language of the internet entertaining, shareable, culturally rooted content that makes the common Indian give a damn. We take the most important work happening in this country and make it matter to the person scrolling at 11pm in Nagpur, Lucknow, Jodhpur or Mysuru.

Why this Role Exists

In India, the social sector and the entertainment industry have spent two decades politely ignoring each other. NGOs make 5-15 minute impact films no one watches. Comedians and creators make brilliant work for fairness creams and crypto apps. Somewhere in the middle, a billion-rupee CSR mandate is being spent on PowerPoints with compromised-photo handshakes.

DESIGN HOUSE exists to fix that. We make work for foundations, CSR teams, NGOs, and impact-led brands that is actually good the kind people watch on their own time, share without being asked, and remember a year later. Think Ki & Ka energy applied to menstrual health. AIB-circa-2015 craft applied to climate behaviour change. The wit of Amul applied to a Skill India campaign.

We are looking for the person who will hold this craft bar across everything we ship.

What you will actually do !

• You'll walk into an ideation session with a Tata Trusts brief on adolescent nutrition and walk out with three concepts that don't make anyone want to nap. Then you'll make sure the writer, designer, and video team execute them without losing the spark on the way to render.

• Translate between two dialects - fluently. CSR heads, ESG consultants, and programme officers speak in theory of change, SDG alignment, outcome indicators, and BRSR disclosures. Creators, editors, and DOPs speak in hooks, cuts, grade, and runtime. You speak both, without rolling your eyes at either.

• Own the craft. Every script, deck, reel, OOH layout, social carousel, and 90-second film carries your fingerprint before it leaves the building. You raise the floor even our internal status update should sound like DESIGN HOUSE wrote it.

• Build the team. Hire more people in coming months. Set the QC rituals. Decide what we say no to.

• Partner with the founder on pitches. The pitch deck for a foundation grant looks different from the pitch deck for a Nifty50 CSR head. You'll co-author both.

You Will Love this role if !

You think behaviour change communication is one of the most exciting design problems in the country and you also think most BCC work is unwatchable. You have opinions about why Aamir Khan's Satyamev Jayate worked and why most of what came after didn't.

You're somewhere on the spectrum between Newslaundry's writing room, Schbang's studio floor, and a Sattva Consulting field visit and you'd be bored sitting permanently in any one of them.

What we need you to have done before!

• 6 to 10 years across some combination of: creative agency / content studio / social-sector communications / foundation comms / impact-led D2C brand / mainstream media. Bonus if you've worked on a CSR account from the agency side or sat inside a foundation's communications team.
• Demonstrable craft show us a reel, a portfolio, a Notion page, a Substack, doesn't matter. We need to see the work, not the resume.
• Working fluency with the Indian ESG/CSR ecosystem: who the big foundations are (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation India, Azim Premji, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, Tata Trusts, Reliance Foundation, etc.), what Section 135 actually requires, what BRSR is and isn't, how a Sattva or Dasra engages a corporate, why outcome measurement is the word that opens grant doors.
• Comfort directing video team, design team, social media team, content team.
• People-leadership instincts. You have managed at least two direct reports and you actually liked it.

Nice to have : Hindi-English bilingual writing. A working knowledge of one more Indian language (we work pan-India). A point of view on AI in the creative process we are using it, you should be too. A sense of humour that survives Mondays.

Hard Pass If :You see social sector and think let me dial down the craft, this isn't a real brand. You think humour is unprofessional in development comms. You can't take feedback. You need a 14-stage approval workflow to make a tweet.

HOW TO APPLY : Send to [Confidential Information]

1. A link to three pieces of work you wish you'd made (don't have to be yours), with one line on why each one works.
2. Two pieces of your own work and what was hard about them.
3. A two line answer to: What is a CSR campaign from the last three years that almost got it right, and what would you have changed

No cover letter required. The above is the cover letter.