Social Impact Manager – 12 month FTC

The role

DLA Piper are looking for a Social Impact Manager for a 12-month fixed term contract.

You will also lead the partnership management of our international partnership with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), taking responsibility for stakeholder management, colleague engagement, and reporting.

You will manage the UK Social Mobility Strategy, working with stakeholders from across the business to deliver key priorities from our social mobility action plan, including our annual submission to the Social Mobility Employer Index.

This role would suit an experienced social impact or partnerships specialist who is passionate about creating and driving high impact programmes and partnerships, as well as measuring and communicating their meaning and success to a business audience.

MAIN DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

UNHCR Partnership Management: Lead the firm’s relationship with UNHCR, managing all aspects of the partnership including:

• Stakeholder management: working with day-to-day leads for the partnership from DLA Piper and UNHCR, ensuring the partnership objectives are being met.
• Reporting: monthly and annual reporting for internal and external stakeholders, monitoring pro bono hours, engagements, and communications.
• Event management: supporting the coordination of joint engagements at key events including COP30 and UNGA. 
• Employee engagement: leading on coordination of World Refugee Day efforts internationally, alongside local Pro Bono Coordinators.
• Fundraising: supporting local offices to plan and engage with fundraising opportunities.

UK Social Mobility Strategy: Oversee the firm’s UK Social Mobility Strategy, including delivery of the refreshed social mobility action plan and leadership of the newly formed social mobility working group. This will include:

• Social Mobility Employer Index: project managing the firm’s annual submission to the SMEI, working with stakeholders from across DEI, Early Careers and Talent Acquisition to collect and analyse data.
• Data: working with the HR Data and DEI teams to input into annual pay gap reporting data, supporting a new class pay gap publication in FY25/26.
• Stakeholder management: working with fee-earners and business services colleagues at all levels across the firm, to ensure the action plan is supported and is delivering programming that is needed.
• Communications: using insights, reporting, and storytelling to communicate the impact of our social mobility work to clients and external audiences.

Social Impact Management

• Supporting, developing and running community investment campaigns and programmes and supporting other colleagues to run these effectively.
• Develop and maintain relationships with local office community leads, clients, community partners, senior leaders, other departments, Employee Groups and other stakeholders in order to develop joint programmes and initiatives and engage diverse stakeholders in DLA Piper’s community programming.

Social Impact Measurement

• Support on preparing key external social impact assessments and benchmarks, including the annual B4SI (Business for Societal Impact) submission, whilst supporting social components of other submissions (EcoVadis, Achilles, UNGC Communication on Progress, etc). Ensure learnings and gaps from assessments are fed back into the business to enable continuous improvement.
• Working with the RB team as we move to mandatory sustainability reporting and ensuring our data needs and measures are aligned to, fro example, CSRD requirements.

Support with other team priorities as needed, including:

• Support the development and roll out of DLA Piper’s social impact strategy and methodology, with a special focus on identifying metrics and developing and implementing data collection systems to track and understand the firm’s social impact across all of its business, value chain and client activities and geographies.
• Stay up to date on ESG, Responsible Business and wider sustainability developments and best practice, and support the team to improve the firm’s approach and performance by proposing and implementing new ideas, solutions, and innovations, with a focus on social impact and social responsibility.
• The Social Impact Manager may be required to undertake additional duties from time to time, such as supporting other work-streams, conducting research, and others.

KEY SKILLS

• Project management: Excellent project management skills, ability to effectively and tactfully manage many busy stakeholders of different seniorities with competing priorities. Strong probing, consultative listening skills coupled with the ability to negotiate and persuade.
• Relationship management: The ability to influence and catalyse change through excellent relationship building and collaboration skills.
• Community investment experience: Experience in developing and executing fundraising, volunteering and community investment programmes, particularly in relation to social mobility.
• Data manipulation & analysis: Proficiency in utilising Excel for data review, analysis and quality checking.
• Impact measurement and evaluation: Experience in developing, implementing, and measuring the impact of fundraising campaigns and community investment programmes for international organisations.

ABOUT YOU

This role would suit an experienced social impact or partnerships specialist who is passionate about shaping and driving impact at the organisational level, as well as measuring and communicating about its meaning and success to a business audience.

The successful candidate will be able to confidently engage DLA Piper’s employees They will be a confident communicator, emotionally intelligent and able to work with a range of stakeholders globally including senior stakeholders, clients, and peer and professional groups. They should also be comfortable with data and detail and basic data analysis, to support the management and measurement of our social impact programmes.

They will share the firm’s ambition to become best in class.