Recruiting: Impact and Evaluation Director / Senior Project Lead
We are looking for a Director or Senior Project Lead focused on impact and evaluation to join our dynamic team in either Melbourne or Perth.
The details
FTE: 0.5 - 1.0 FTE (Negotiable)
Location: Perth or Melbourne-based
Reports to: Director reports to CEO or COO; Senior Project Lead reports to Director
Salary:
Director: $150-175K + super
Senior Project Lead: $105-120k + super
Who we are
At ThirdStory, we want to see a world where communities are strong, and people achieve the lives they aspire to.
Our multidisciplinary team of social innovators, researchers, designers and human services practitioners focus not on problems and symptoms but on the ambitions, needs and potential that communities hold. We use collaborative and participatory approaches that bring different kinds of knowledge and expertise together around a challenge or opportunity, and involve everyone who needs to be part of the change.
You might have known us as Innovation Unit Australia New Zealand. After a decade operating in Australia and Aotearoa as well as internationally, we have recently updated our name and our brand to better reflect the story we want to tell about our work into the future. Our passion for enabling change in human and social systems continues unchanged, and is deeply shared in all the places we work.
What does our work look like?
Our clients come to us with a range of opportunities relating to improving education, health, and human services systems.
They might come to us for support in rethinking or redesigning an existing homelessness service, or to explore how to create a new service or relationship from the ground up. They may want an evaluation to better understand where their efforts to support young people’s educational aspirations are having the greatest impact—or whether they’re focusing on the most effective areas. Sometimes, they ask us to help build learning communities that bring together people and organisations working with women and children experiencing domestic violence—sparking the momentum and collaboration needed to drive real, system-level change.
Sometimes we offer a piece of the puzzle - information, insights or different perspectives that we co-generate with them over months. Sometimes, we become deeply immersed in work together over years, walking alongside our partners and their clients through the messy process of change.
We are a not-for-profit organisation, and our work is funded by the projects we do - mainly for other NFPs, governments and philanthropists. This work is sourced through a mix of proactive business development - building productive collaborations with partner agencies with common goals and visions - and responding to advertised tenders.
What’s the opportunity?
The rebranding of our organisation, together with some staff movements, has led us to reflect on our ambitions for our organisation, our clients’ needs and expectations, and the mix of skills and experience that we have and think we might need. As a result, we have identified some areas in which we would like to grow our capacity.
This includes a number of existing long-term contracts for evaluation and impact measurement work. We are now looking for senior support to continue these projects and take on new evaluation and impact work that continues to support our existing and new clients.
At the Senior Project Lead level, this looks like:
Taking a lead role in designing evaluation approaches and methodologies to fit client needs, including in areas of high complexity where a high degree of agility is needed to design approaches that fit with client budgets and expectations and our team’s capacity.
Managing relationships with funders, overseeing the work of team members and growing their evaluation skills, undertaking some of the more complex and/or sensitive tasks, and taking overall responsibility for the quality and presentation of deliverables.
As we would like to consolidate and grow our work in this area, an interest in and aptitude for growing our business through promoting our offerings to new clients would be an advantage.
At the Director level, this looks like the above, and additionally:
Experience and a track record of generating new and repeat business in the evaluation and impact management space in an area related to education, health or human services.
In addition to these specific job expectations, most or all of the following will probably resonate with you:
You have an affinity for outcomes: We are looking for someone who can draw from a broad toolkit of methodologies and approaches, thinking flexibly and inclusively about where a project is going and what is required to get there. You are always looking to the outcome, making sure we are solving a real problem in a useful way. Where this means a novel or innovative approach is necessary, you can propose something practical and tangible.
You cherish and elevate relationships in your work: You love connecting with people and maintaining relationships. You listen to people, understand their challenges and needs, and enjoy turning that into opportunities to collaborate.
You have an entrepreneurial mindset: You are excited by the challenge of continuing to build a sustainable social enterprise that is creating meaningful social impact. You bring a history of growing partnerships that have contributed to business success and can talk about what works in this area from your own experience.
You offer energy and enthusiasm, grounded in real-world understanding: You bring energy and optimism to imagining future scenarios that reinvent (sometimes radically) how we think about solutions and change, while understanding the real, practical struggles that get in the way. You are able to hold both of these perspectives for our partners as they find the ‘aha’ moments that shift their perspective and enable their bravery to try new things. Our staff have mostly worked in roles and agencies that are like the organisations we collaborate with, leading to our credibility and authenticity as a trusted partner.
You are a story teller: You find the common threads, unifying themes and underlying narrative that makes sense of people’s contributions and insights. You create shared understanding by identifying relationships, trends and opportunities and quickly bring clarity to complex challenges. When it comes to reports, your go-tos are: comprehensive, accessible, useful, and concise.
You actively support and advocate for rights, well-being and self-determination for and with First Nations people: We believe people have the right to actively choose the direction of their lives, the lives of their family and their communities, and we as an organisation and individuals actively and deliberately work to these ends. This requires challenging systems and structures that cause harm and limit potential, particularly and most acutely for First Nations people, and we think and engage deeply to understand what is wanted of us in this space and how we can best respond.
You see the systems and connect the dots: You see beyond the silos and are able to make sense of how things fit together - across people, organisations and places. You are excited by the challenges of lifting our impact from the program or organisation level to the system level, and engage with this in your practice.
More about the role
There is a degree of flexibility in how we could structure work roles, and for this reason we are advertising at our Senior Project Lead and Director levels.
The roles will be based in either our Melbourne or Perth offices. Each offers slightly different opportunities: In WA, you would step into a leadership and development role with a larger team. In Victoria, you would be helping us grow the networks, relationships and partnerships that will contribute to future sustainability.
Travel may be required from time to time, but most of the work will be carried out from a base in either location. We offer a flexible blend of home and office-based working, with the expectation that you’ll spend the majority of your time in the office.
We offer a fixed term contract for one year at the outset, before considering permanent appointments. Our intention is for these roles to be continuing, business conditions allowing.
Outside of these requirements, ThirdStory empowers its team members to steer their work towards the kind of impact they are best suited to making. We get to try out new ideas, and make things happen. For example, we are in our third year of the successful Social Design Academy (SoDA), which is training future social innovators to make new changes in their work to increase impact.
If after reading more about us you believe you have something to contribute, we encourage you to pitch us your offer.
To apply
We want to make this easy for all of us. If, after reading this and taking a look at our organisation, you think you’d be a good fit, please get in touch by 30 April 2025, providing:
Your LinkedIn profile (or CV if you’d prefer)
a short cover letter; stating what excites you about this role, and why you believe you would be a good fit
a short video telling us more about you (2 minutes max – we’re not interested in technical quality, we’re interested in you and what you say)
To discuss or ask questions contact us via email at team@thirdstory.org