Senior Social Scientist

Position Summary

Organizational Overview

Do you want to ensure that progressive organizations have access to the best possible data, technology, and technical expertise? We know movement organizing and advocacy are more urgent than ever and many organizations and activists cannot easily access the tools to scale their work.

Launched in 2018, The Movement Cooperative (TMC) is a nonprofit founded with the aim of creating a cooperative community addressing these structural challenges. Currently, our membership stands at nearly 75 national member organizations, 13 state-based member organizations, and over 800 affiliate member organizations covered under our licenses. We leverage the collective purchasing power of our membership to secure cooperatively held data and technology licenses shared across membership and invest in common infrastructure like technical staff to support our members in their work. TMC is a member cooperative — our board is primarily elected by and made up of representatives from our member organizations.

Position Overview

The Senior Social Scientist will play a critical role in advancing the goals of the TMC Research team, with key responsibilities outlined below. TMC Research, a department of The Movement Cooperative, exists to equip TMC members and progressive organizations with an arsenal of research-supported strategies that build and steward power. We are a mixed-methods research team with experience applying experimental, survey, and qualitative methods to support the work of progressive organizations. We collaborate closely with our members to identify research questions, design and implement studies, analyze data, write results reports, and present findings to technical and non-technical audiences.

We are a close-knit, highly collaborative, five-person team that enjoys working with each other and our members. We believe deeply in producing actionable results useful to both the organizations we work with and the progressive community more widely. We are committed to working with and on behalf of marginalized communities. We think a high-quality evidence base is essential to the ability of progressive organizations and activists to build political power and win change.

Responsibilities

• Cultivating strategic research partnerships and relationships with member organizations, progressive organizations, and key stakeholders
• Executing experimental research projects from beginning to end, involving project scoping, identifying research questions, research design, randomization, fielding, analysis, results write-ups, and presenting
• Ensuring that our research translates into actionable insights and clear programmatic recommendations for our member organizations
• Communicating findings to technical and non-technical audiences and stakeholders
• Paying particular attention to underexplored topics with an equity lens
• Facilitating conversations and meetings among member organizations, research partners, and other key stakeholders in support of our team’s various efforts
• Working alongside other members of the team to continue to articulate the team’s vision and priorities, and to help generate ideas for new avenues for research or ways to deepen existing research.

Qualifications

Experience & Education:

• At least two years of experience designing, implementing, analyzing, and writing up experimental research projects — ideally including field experiments
• At least two years of experience in applied research
• At least one year of experience building relationships and strategic partnerships with diverse organizations and clients

Skills:

• Ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical audiences and translate research findings into clear programmatic recommendations
• Fluency in statistical programming using R or Python (our team primarily works in R!)
• Interest in working collaboratively as part of a small team and trying new things
• Strong project management skills and the ability to juggle multiple complex projects at once
• Strong communication skills and emotional intelligence
• Commitment to scientific rigor and economic, social, and racial justice

We especially encourage applications from people who have any of these additional qualifications:

• Having a wide range of pre-existing relationships within the progressive political space
• Experience working in a research role in the progressive political space (e.g., polling, experiments, modeling)
• Extensive knowledge of causal inference, survey methodology, and/or statistics
• Experience or interest in qualitative research
• Experience and/or interest in managing staff
• Experience working with voter file data and data associated with common political tech tools (e.g., VAN, peer-to-peer texting, dialers)
• Familiarity with Google BigQuery, Amazon S3, GitHub, Alchemer, Unix, SQL, or equivalent tools
• An advanced degree in the social sciences (e.g., political science, sociology), statistics, or an equivalent
• Significant campaign, organizing, and/or advocacy experience (such as experience involving base building, power analysis or mapping, leadership development, protest)
• Strong writing skills

Physical Requirements

• Prolonged periods of working on a computer

Benefits

The Movement Cooperative is dedicated to providing all employees a competitive salary, world-class healthcare, dental and vision benefits, retirement, paid vacation and sick days, flexible holidays, and all-staff holidays, remote virtual office, paid parental and adoption family leaves, and health and wellness benefits. The salary for this position is $97,871- $108,174. This is a full-time exempt position.

This position is within a union-represented collective bargaining unit, and specific terms and conditions of employment may be subject to a future collective bargaining agreement between TMC and the Union.

Next Steps

Please submit your anonymized resume in PDF format before 6pm ET on December 11, 2023 via our job board at https://boards.greenhouse.io/tmc/jobs/7032860002

TMC understands that unconscious bias can influence the resume review process. As such we are intentionally combating this by requesting anonymized resumes. We ask that you please redact or remove your name, contact information, and address before submitting your resume to aid us in this equity initiative.

Here’s what you can expect from our interview process:

• Application Review
• At-home Technical Exercise, ~2-3 hours
• Panel Interview, ~60 minutes
• Final Interview, ~45 minutes

We are looking to fill this position by February 2024.

Note: TMC will be operating at limited capacity between December 19, 2023–January 5, 2024, with the exception of Dec 23–1, during which TMC will be fully offline.

The Movement Cooperative is an equal opportunity employer.

The Movement Cooperative recruits, employs, trains, compensates and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, citizenship status, disability, age, veteran status, and other protected status as required by applicable law.

At The Movement Cooperative, we have a clear vision: to be the organization where a diverse mix of talented people want to be, to stay and do their best work. We pride ourselves on bringing the best to our members, and we know our organization runs on the hard work and dedication of our passionate and creative employees.