Digital Manager NEW

Chefs in Schools
Who we are

Chefs in Schools is a young, ambitious charity that’s rapidly growing. Our mission is to improve kids’ health, through improving school food & food education.

We focus our efforts in areas of high socio-economic deprivation, where more than a third of children are entitled to free school meals, and diet-related disease is driving further inequality.

We support and train school kitchen teams to serve the best, freshest and tastiest food possible, alongside meaningful food education. We share learning and resources, aiming to inspire and enable others to follow our lead.

We’re backed by some of the biggest names in food and have ambitious targets to ensure every child has access to incredible school food and food education, setting them up for life with the skills and knowledge to feed themselves well.

About you and the role

As our Digital Manager, you will be the strategic anchor, quality guardian, and operational driving force behind our online presence. You will fully own the performance of our two primary websites: the main Chefs in Schools (CIS) platform and the complex, public-facing School Food Project (SFP) national resource and coalition hub. You will be directly accountable for driving traffic, mastering SEO, maintaining exceptional content quality, and ensuring a seamless, highly secure user experience against clear, measurable targets.

This is a leadership role that bridges technical execution and creative strategy. You will act as the crucial, confident link between our external technical agencies (who build and maintain the infrastructure of the sites) and our internal content creators and programme teams. Crucially, you will be an empowering manager, leading a dedicated digital sub-team of 1-2 direct reports, supporting them to manage day-to-day content workflows, e-learning administration, and community moderation.

We are looking for someone solutions-focused, collaborative, and deeply analytical who takes pride in helping a high-profile, mission-driven organization run at its absolute best.

Key responsibilities:

1. Website Ownership & Performance Management

• Own the overarching strategy and performance of our two flagship websites (CIS and SFP), optimizing UX and UI for user journeys, design, and maximum accessibility standards across both sites.
• Own and maintain a forward-looking, prioritized digital platform roadmap, striking a strategic balance between long-term feature development and agile, day-to-day reactive requests
• Ensure both platforms-particularly the highly visible, national School Food Project website-maintain the highest standards of data security, uptime, quality assurance, and accessibility, proactively managing risks associated with public scrutiny.
• Take end-to-end ownership of web analytics and data integrity-from configuring custom event tracking to reporting on performance-utilizing Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for quantitative metrics and Microsoft Clarity for behavioral insights.
• Set, monitor, and report against clear performance targets spanning web traffic, user engagement, resource downloads, and search rankings.
• Lead content and platform feature reviews through a risk mitigation lens-ensuring strict compliance with safeguarding, privacy, and coalition guidelines-while running targeted A/B tests to optimize user experience.
• Lead on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy to maximize organic reach and connect school leaders, chefs, and partners to our resources.
• Establish and manage digital incident response protocols, defining clear workflows for first responders, triage steps, and escalation pathways in the event of site outages, technical bugs, or security breaches.

2. Agency & Supplier Management

• Act as the primary, confident technical interface with our external web development agencies and tech suppliers, holding them accountable to high-quality delivery.
• Translate internal program, comms, and membership goals into clear technical design briefs, managing timelines and tracking project budgets.
• Coordinate rigorous testing of new features, bug logging, and site maintenance to guarantee absolute platform stability before public deployments.

3. Team Leadership & Collaboration

• Line manage, mentor, and support 1-2 direct reports (including roles focused on systems, community moderation, and resource uploads).
• Work closely with the Communications team, External Relations team and Programme Leads to align digital development with broader organization campaigns and resource rollouts.
• Oversee the content calendar and governance for both sites, ensuring all published assets strictly adhere to brand tone of voice and quality standards, working closely with the senior social media officer, engagement team to ensure cross org planning .

4. Data, CRM & Systems Integration

• Oversee the data integrity and smooth technical flow between our website frontends, e-learning platform (LMS), and internal CRM systems.
• Ensure all digital systems, data tracking, user permissions, and marketing platforms comply fully with GDPR and organizational data protection policies.
• Construct and present scannable dashboards and reports (using Google Analytics and CRM data) for the Senior Leadership Team and stakeholders to demonstrate impact.

Essential Skills and Experience

• Digital Product & Platform Leadership: Proven experience managing digital products, websites, or online platforms-ideally at a Manager level within a charity, agency, or fast-paced setting.
• Complex Systems Integration: Strong confidence managing (or partnering with a technical agency to manage) integrated digital environments where the CMS, CRM, and LMS operate as a unified platform. You must be comfortable understanding and troubleshooting multi-layered user access permissions (e.g., tailored journeys for different school types and member tiers).
• Foundational literacy in HTML and CSS to troubleshoot layout issues, understand site structure, and effectively translate technical requirements to developers.
• Agency & Project Management: Confident experience collaborating with, briefing, and managing external technical partners, developers, or freelance technical staff to deliver complex features on time and on budget.
• People Management: Demonstrable experience managing, mentoring, and developing direct reports, fostering a supportive and high-performing team environment.
• Data Fluency & Quality Control: Ability to analyze, clean, and visualize data (using Google Analytics, CRM reporting, or spreadsheets) to monitor site performance, ensure data integrity across system integrations, and drive user experience improvements.
• Communication & Collaboration: Outstanding written and verbal communication skills; able to translate complex “technical speak” for non-expert internal staff, write brand-aligned content, and build strong cross-team relationships.
• Mission Alignment: A deep personal commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion, alongside a genuine interest in our mission to transform child health through school food.

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Familiarity with online community/forum moderation and user engagement strategies.
• Prior experience working within the wider charity sector.

Benefits

You would be joining a friendly, supportive team who works hard but believe in a healthy work/life balance. We were voted one of CODE Hospitality’s happiest places to work in 2024. We seek a diverse range of perspectives, skills, experience and knowledge. Joining a small, collaborative team means you’ll be able to contribute to and draw on various projects and strategic insights.

We offer 33 days of holiday per year including bank holidays, 3 additional office closure days over the Christmas period as well as wellbeing days over the summer school holidays. We also have a Cycle to Work scheme, hybrid working, enhanced parental leave, and free access to the CODE app for discounted restaurants & hospitality venues. We are committed to developing our team and will support you with relevant training opportunities including £250 towards elective training and development of your choice.

We also offer Bupa Dental Insurance, Income Protection Insurance, as well as access to the Aviva Smart Health Platform which offers health benefits including free rapid access online GP appointments, free counselling and wellbeing support.

Application process

In line with our commitment to ensuring a fair and unbiased recruitment process, we invite candidates to answer a series of questions related to their day-to-day job. Please follow this link to answer the questions and submit your application along with your CV.

We recommend that you develop your answers offline and copy them in when you’re ready to ensure you don’t lose your work if interrupted.

Your answers will go through our sifting process: all answers will be anonymised, randomised and then reviewed by a panel of reviewers. A long list of candidates will then additionally have their CVs reviewed. Shortlisted candidates will be invited to a 30 mins online interview. Successful candidates will be invited to attend a second, in-person interview at our office in Brixton, London.

Expected duration of this application process: 4-6 weeks

In line with our commitment to ensuring a fair and unbiased recruitment process . click apply for full job details