We're Hiring a Marketing Director

Location: Durham, NC
Salary: $60,000 + Full Benefits
Reports to: Executive Director
Type: Full-Time, Exempt


To apply:

Send your resume, three references, and a brief note (not a cover letter) that genuinely answers: what is it about this moment at Hayti that makes this the right role for you right now?


Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. We are moving quickly. Send materials to info@hayti.org with "Marketing Director" in the subject line.


About Hayti

Hayti Heritage Center is Durham's living cultural memory. Housed in a 135 year-old National Historic Landmark, we are the arts and culture arm of the St. Joseph's Historic Foundation, the institute that has held the line in the Hayti District for fifty years.


We center Black artists. We pay artists for their work, every time. We produce programming that honors Black life as memory, imagination, critique, and joy. We are building toward an endowment, a transformed Fayetteville Street corridor, and a 2029 World University Games moment that will bring an international audience to our doorstep.


This is not a building that used to matter. This is an institution that matters now more than ever.


The Role

We have built a comprehensive, integrated marketing and communications strategy and measurement framework. What we need is the director who takes ownership of it, runs it with discipline, and makes sure every piece of content, from a single Instagram post to a full season launch, ladders up to a bigger story.


The Marketing Director owns Hayti's external presence: brand integrity, earned media, PR strategy, and the communications systems that get the right message to the right audience at the right time. You are not a campaign executor. You are a strategist, a brand steward, and an organizational storyteller, someone who can take a season announcement, a recurring poetry night, a gospel classic, and a gaming initiative and weave them into one coherent institutional narrative rather than a string of disconnected posts. The day to day social media is handled by a contracted local team. Your lane is the bigger picture: institutional storytelling, press and media relationships, and the communications architecture that makes everything else land.


You will inherit infrastructure. A brand guide, an audience journey map, a story asset inventory, a channel strategy, and an editorial cadence have already been built. You are not starting from zero. You are taking the wheel of something already moving and deciding where it goes next, and being accountable for getting it there.

What you will own

Brand & Organizational Storytelling

  • Guardian of  the Hayti brand: voice, tone, visual standards, and the Cultural Anchor persona that makes Hayti unmistakable
  • Final approval authority on brand application across all channels and materials
  • Weave one-off content and campaigns, including recurring events, exhibits, donor moments, and program milestones, into Hayti's larger narrative threads.
  • Day-to-day brand oversight of the contracted social media team, with content standards and approval workflow you define


PR & Earned Media

  • Own Hayti's media relationships: press, local and national journalists, cultural critics, podcast hosts, and community platforms
  • Implement existing press calendar and its monthly targets
  • Develop and execute PR strategy for each season, the gala, the 1975 Sustainer membership launch, the Eagle-Aggie Gospel Classic, Hayti exhibits, and organizational milestones
  • Write and issue press releases, pitches, and media advisories


Communications Planning & Channel Strategy

  • Own and execute the master communications calendar, in coordination with Development and Programming, ensuring outbound communications across social media, the website, newsletters are sequenced intentional and non-competing
  • Maintain each channel's defined job rather than letting content drift across channels without purpose
  • Own the post-event conversion sequence
  • Manage the website as a communications and institutional asset
  • Manage list and channel decisions inside Neon CRM for marketing communications


Membership & Program Marketing Lanes

  • Own marketing for the 1975 Sustainers membership program
  • Build and run the artist membership marketing lane, turning artist member stories into the content that moves prospective artists from awareness to application
  • Own space rental discovery strategy: securing Hayti's listing on the venue platforms corporate event planners actually use, and organizing an open house that lets prospective renters walk the space directly


Measurement & Accoountability

  • Build the reporting infrastructure the marketing function currently lacks, including a Neon CRM report connecting ticket buyers to membership conversion, and applicant-source tracking for artist membership
  • Once infrastructure is in place, set and be accountable to real, data-grounded targets across every channel, not just press
  • Bring a track record of consistently meeting or exceeding the substantial majority of stated marketing and communications goals. This is a KPI-accountable role, not purely a creative one


Team Leadership

  • Supervise the marketing interns; finalize their job description and own their onboarding
  • Manage the relationship with the contracted social media team
  • Build the marketing function as the organization scales. This is a department you will shape

How you work with others

Hayti runs on peer collaboration between directors. Here is how the role works with its closest counterparts:


The Development Director

The Development Director determines the cadence and content of donor communications. You ensure every donor-facing communication reflects Hayti's voice and visual standards before it goes out. When timing and brand integrity are in tension, it escalates to the Executive Director. You are peers with a shared investment in making Hayti's external presence strong.


The Artistic Director

The Artistic Director has final approval authority on programming, copy, artist messaging, and season promotional assets. You create the copy and assets, manage the review workflow, and ensure everything reaching the AD for approval is already brand-aligned. The two of you co-own the programming communications calendar: you drive schedule and channel strategy, and the AD drives the artistic framing.



What we're looking for

  • Meaningful experience in PR, communications, or brand strategy, enough that you know how to build a communications function, not just execute within one
  • A demonstrated ability to turn disparate, one-off content and campaigns into a single, coherent institutional narrative. Organizational storytelling is core to this role.
  • A track record of meeting or exceeding the substantial majority (~80%) of stated marketing or communications goals in a past role, and comfort operating in a KPI-accountable environment
  • Comfort building measurement infrastructure. You know how to get a CRM or platform to produce the data you need
  • Experience in or exposure to brand strategy
  • The ability to hold institutional complexity. Hayti's story spans 135 years of history, disruption, resilience, and long-horizon vision, and you carry that story and deploy it with precision for different audiences
  • Strong writing across registers: press releases, institutional narrative, event copy, and the kind of caption that actually sounds like a person
  • Comfort operating as a peer at the director level, knowing when to collaborate, when to hold your ground, and when to escalate
  • Mission alignment: you understand what it means to center Black artists and Black community, and you are not looking for a role that requires you to explain that to your employer



Compensation & Benefits

Compensation is $60,000 annually. Full benefits package including health insurance and PTO.