Head of Marketing

divh2Marketing Leadership Opportunity At AwardSpring/h2pAwardSpring is the scholarship management platform used by hundreds of colleges, universities, and community foundations to run their scholarship, financial aid, and donor engagement programs. We help higher education institutions and foundations get more of their funding into students hands

and were expanding into adjacent Donor Management and Advancement software categories./ppWe are growing fast recently recapitalized for our next phase of growth. Our product portfolio is expanding meaningfully this year

a category-defining platform story were excited to share more about in the interview./ppWe move fast, ship constantly, and operate with an aggressively AI-native posture across engineering, revenue, and now marketing./ph3Role Overview/h3pThis is the founding full-time marketing leadership hire at AwardSpring. Today, marketing is run by a fractional lead and a paid media agency. You will own the function./ppYoull arrive with a forcing function: a major platform story launching this quarter that needs a product marketing engine behind it

positioning, sales enablement, a launch campaign, demand activation, and customer proof. Multiple product lines are ramping in parallel, and a light rebrand is in flight. Your first 90 days will be dense./ppYoull already operate AI-native in your personal craft (Claude, ChatGPT, Clay, Gong AI, content and image tooling, agent workflows). Thats table stakes. The opportunity were offering is the chance to design and run an AI-native marketing function at the org level

compressing the output of a traditional 3-person marketing team into a leader + agencies + AI. That part is new territory for most marketers. Were betting you can figure it out with us./ph3What Youll Own/h3pstrongProduct Marketing/strong/ppOwn our most important product and platform launches

positioning, messaging framework, launch campaign, webinar and press activation, sales enablement/pulliOngoing PMM across our growing product portfolio/liliCompetitive intelligence across our category/li/ulpstrongCustomer Marketing/strong/pulliBuild a case study and reference engine from scratch at meaningful, sustained volume/liliOwn and grow our Customer Advisory Board, now entering Year 2/liliLifecycle communications: onboarding ? release awareness ? feature adoption ? expansion ? renewal/li/ulpstrongBrand

Thought Leadership/strong/pulliStand up AwardSprings point-of-view on higher ed, AI, and the fund lifecycle/liliDrive CEO thought leadership cadence (LinkedIn, podcast, speaking)/liliShepherd the in-flight rebrand to completion/li/ulpstrongDemand Generation/strong (in partnership with a retained agency and RevOps)/pulliDirect the retained CPC agency and paid media budget/liliPartner with our RevOps analyst on source attribution, funnel metrics, and pipeline contribution reporting/liliBuild an organic search and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) capability

we need to show up on AI search surfaces (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini) as intentionally as we do on Google/li/ulpstrongSales Enablement/strong/pulliBattlecards, demo scripts, discovery kits, ROI calculators, one-pagers/liliA collateral system the AE team actually uses/li/ulpstrongEvents/strong/pulliDirect a significant annual events budget with an ROI discipline

sponsor vs. attend vs. skip/liliStand up a private-dinner program at priority events/li/ulh3Who You Are/h3ullistrong48 years of B2B SaaS marketing experience/strong, ideally including time in product marketing. Vertical SaaS, EdTech, or higher-education-adjacent background is a strong plus./lilistrongLeadership Experience not necessary/strong - you can be a strong individual contributor looking to take the next step, or an experienced leader. Were interested to explore the right candidate across the career spectrum/lilistrongAlready operating AI-native/strong in your personal craft. You default to Claude Code or Codex, use Clay or similar enrichment tools, explore agent workflows, and treat AI as a force multiplier

not a gimmick. This is not something well teach you./lilistrongProduct marketing fluency./strong You have written positioning, led a launch, built a messaging framework, and know the difference between a brief and a battlecard./lilistrongWriter-operator./strong You can draft a case study, a website headline, a launch email, and a Slack post to the AE team

all on the same day./lilistrongComfortable with ambiguity./strong Youll walk into a function with no playbook, minimal systems, and a forcing-function launch. You see that as the opportunity, not the risk./lilistrongChicago-based/strong and willing to be in our office 23 days a week./lilistrongBonus points:/strong prior founding-marketer experience, higher ed or non-profit tech background, demonstrated results running paid media against measurable pipeline outcomes./li/ulh3What We Offer/h3ullistrongCompensation commensurate with experience including equity/strong/lilistrongHybrid work:/strong Chicago-based, 23 days in office/lilistrongFull benefits:/strong medical, dental, vision, 401(k)/lilistrongDirect CEO relationship:/strong you report to Alex. No layers. No politics. Direct access to product, engineering, sales, and customer leadership./lilistrongAI-native operating environment:/strong youll join a company where Claude, Claude Code, Gong AI, and a full suite of AI tooling is already part of how we work. We dont want you to fight for budget to use AI

we want you to lead us deeper into it on the marketing side./li/ul/div