Global Brand and Digital Communications, Project Manager/Principal Consultant

About this role

Global Brand and Digital Communications, Project Manager/Principal Consultant

Arlington, VA/Alexandria, VA

Job Type

Full-time

Description

Company Description

The Clearing is a management consulting firm that helps leaders solve complex challenges by turning insight into action. We specialize in diagnosing the root causes of organizational friction across people, processes, and technology, then configuring proven solutions that accelerate meaningful, measurable progress.

Our approach blends analytical rigor with human-centered design. Whether we’re enabling change, optimizing workflows, or guiding smart technology adoption, we build everything to scale, repeat, and deliver value. We work across public, private, and mission-driven sectors, partnering with clients to modernize how they lead, work, and deliver.

Our team brings deep experience across disciplines, including change management, strategic planning, organizational design, leadership development, behavioral science, and more. What unites us is a shared belief: real progress happens when we focus on what’s not working, define what’s possible, and deliver outcomes that stick.

If you're excited by purpose-driven work, energized by solving problems at their roots, and passionate about building lasting solutions, we’d love to meet you.

Position Overview

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Project Leadership and Delivery

• Lead the planning, execution, monitoring, governance, and closeout of customer-experience, brand, digital communications, organizational-change, strategic-planning, and stakeholder-engagement projects.
• Develop and manage integrated project plans defining scope, objectives, workstreams, milestones, schedules, deliverables, budgets, resource needs, dependencies, governance structures, quality controls, risks, and success measures.
• Manage multiple concurrent communications, branding, digital-content, and customer-experience workstreams, ensuring clear priorities, timely decisions, coordinated production, and consistent delivery against client expectations.
• Establish project governance and operating rhythms, including work plans, status meetings, decision forums, action-item registers, risk and issue logs, content calendars, editorial schedules, approval workflows, and executive reporting cadence.
• Coordinate internal teams, client stakeholders, creative and digital specialists, web teams, subject-matter experts, and external vendors to ensure roles, responsibilities, handoffs, deliverable requirements, and approval authorities are clear.
• Track project schedules, budgets, workload, resource utilization, vendor performance, deliverable quality, and client feedback; identify corrective actions early and communicate risks or decisions requiring leadership attention.
• Facilitate project kickoffs, planning sessions, working meetings, design reviews, executive briefings, stakeholder workshops, retrospectives, and closeout discussions.

Global Brand and Strategic Communications

• Lead initiatives that strengthen and protect brand consistency across global, regional, and local communications channels, ensuring alignment with established brand standards, visual identity, tone of voice, messaging architecture, and audience expectations.
• Develop project plans and governance processes for global brand initiatives, including brand launches, refreshes, campaigns, messaging updates, digital asset development, content migration, communications rollouts, and adoption activities.
• Partner with communications, marketing, design, web, and regional stakeholders to translate brand strategy into coordinated communications products, campaign materials, digital experiences, and audience-specific content.
• Develop and maintain communications plans that align strategic messages, target audiences, channels, timing, content requirements, approval processes, and performance measures.
• Ensure communications products are clear, accurate, accessible, audience-appropriate, culturally aware, and consistent with organizational standards, client requirements, and applicable security procedures.
• Support the development and implementation of brand-governance structures, including messaging frameworks, editorial guidance, templates, style standards, review processes, content libraries, and digital-asset management practices.
• Prepare executive-level communications products, including leadership briefings, talking points, presentations, key messages, strategic recommendations, decision materials, communications dashboards, and stakeholder-engagement materials.

Digital Communications and Content Management

• Lead digital communications projects involving websites, intranets, SharePoint environments, email campaigns, social and digital channels, content platforms, digital newsletters, virtual engagement tools, and other audience-facing communications products.
• Develop and manage integrated editorial calendars, content roadmaps, campaign schedules, publishing plans, and workflow processes that support timely and coordinated digital communications delivery.
• Work closely with web, digital, design, and technical teams to define requirements; prioritize enhancements; coordinate content updates; manage approvals; validate accessibility, usability, and quality; and support successful publication or launch.
• Maintain and administer SharePoint lists, pages, and content structures; coordinate with web teams to keep public-facing and internal websites current, accurate, relevant, and aligned with brand and communications priorities.
• Apply customer-experience and user-centered design principles to improve digital content, navigation, accessibility, usability, engagement, and service-delivery experiences.
• Use web, content, campaign, and engagement analytics to assess performance, identify audience needs and behavior patterns, measure reach and engagement, and recommend improvements to content, channels, campaigns, and digital experiences.
• Support the creation and management of multimedia, visual, written, and interactive communications products in partnership with internal teams and external creative or production vendors.

Customer Experience and Organizational Change

• Apply customer-experience principles to identify stakeholder needs, pain points, expectations, service gaps, and opportunities to improve customer interactions, communications experiences, digital services, and organizational outcomes.
• Lead customer and stakeholder discovery activities, including interviews, workshops, focus groups, journey-mapping sessions, feedback reviews, usability discussions, and collaborative planning meetings.
• Develop and implement organizational-change approaches that promote awareness, readiness, stakeholder alignment, adoption, and sustained use of new communications platforms, brand standards, processes, services, technologies, policies, or operating models.
• Develop change-management deliverables, including stakeholder analyses, change-impact assessments, communications plans, engagement plans, training-support strategies, resistance-management approaches, and adoption-measurement frameworks.
• Develop and execute stakeholder-engagement plans for internal and external audiences, including senior leaders, program offices, operational personnel, customers, partner organizations, employees, geographically dispersed teams, and other key stakeholders.
• Advise senior leaders on customer-experience trends, stakeholder feedback, organizational readiness, brand and communications implications, digital engagement performance, change impacts, and recommended courses of action.
• Track and assess project performance, stakeholder engagement, customer-experience outcomes, brand adoption, digital-content performance, and change-adoption indicators; use findings to refine activities, communications, and recommendations.

Quality, Risk, and Security

• Ensure all project products are accurate, timely, professional, accessible, and consistent with client requirements, brand standards, organizational policies, and applicable security procedures.
• Identify project risks, stakeholder concerns, implementation barriers, reputational risks, content issues, technology constraints, and change-adoption challenges; develop mitigation strategies and elevate critical matters to appropriate leadership.
• Maintain appropriate handling of sensitive information and comply with all personnel-security, information-security, records-management, privacy, accessibility, and facility-access requirements.

Key Responsibilities

Project Leadership and Delivery

• Develop and manage integrated project plans defining scope, objectives, workstreams, milestones, schedules, deliverables, budgets, resource needs, dependencies, governance structures, quality controls, risks, and success measures.
• Manage multiple concurrent communications, branding, digital-content, and customer-experience workstreams, ensuring clear priorities, timely decisions, coordinated production, and consistent delivery against client expectations.
• Establish project governance and operating rhythms, including work plans, status meetings, decision forums, action-item registers, risk and issue logs, content calendars, editorial schedules, approval workflows, and executive reporting cadence.
• Coordinate internal teams, client stakeholders, creative and digital specialists, web teams, subject-matter experts, and external vendors to clarify roles, responsibilities, handoffs, deliverable requirements, and approval authorities.
• Track project schedules, budgets, workload, resource utilization, vendor performance, deliverable quality, and client feedback; identify corrective actions early and communicate risks or decisions requiring leadership attention.
• Facilitate project kickoffs, planning sessions, working meetings, design reviews, executive briefings, stakeholder workshops, retrospectives, and closeout discussions.

Global Brand and Strategic Communications

• Lead initiatives that strengthen and protect brand consistency across global, regional, and local communications channels, ensuring alignment with established brand standards, visual identity, tone of voice, messaging architecture, and audience expectations.
• Develop project plans and governance processes for global brand initiatives, including brand launches, refreshes, campaigns, messaging updates, digital asset development, content migration, communications rollouts, and adoption activities.
• Partner with communications, marketing, design, web, and regional stakeholders to translate brand strategy into coordinated communications products, campaign materials, digital experiences, and audience-specific content.
• Develop and maintain communications plans that align strategic messages, target audiences, channels, timing, content requirements, approval processes, and performance measures.
• Ensure communications products are clear, accurate, accessible, audience-appropriate, culturally aware, and consistent with organizational standards, client requirements, and applicable security procedures.
• Support the development and implementation of brand-governance structures, including messaging frameworks, editorial guidance, templates, style standards, review processes, content libraries, and digital-asset management practices.
• Prepare executive-level communications products, including leadership briefings, talking points, presentations, key messages, strategic recommendations, decision materials, communications dashboards, and stakeholder-engagement materials.

Digital Communications and Content Management

• Lead digital communications projects involving websites, intranets, SharePoint environments, email campaigns, social and digital channels, content platforms, digital newsletters, virtual engagement tools, and other audience-facing communications products.
• Develop and manage integrated editorial calendars, content roadmaps, campaign schedules, publishing plans, and workflows that support timely, coordinated delivery of digital communications.
• Work closely with web, digital, design, and technical teams to define requirements; prioritize enhancements; coordinate content updates; manage approvals; validate accessibility, usability, and quality; and support successful publication or launch.
• Maintain and administer SharePoint lists, pages, and content structures; coordinate with web teams to keep public-facing and internal websites current, accurate, relevant, and aligned with brand and communications priorities.
• Apply customer-experience and user-centered design principles to improve digital content, navigation, accessibility, usability, engagement, and service-delivery experiences.
• Use web, content, campaign, and engagement analytics to assess performance, identify audience needs and behavior patterns, measure reach and engagement, and recommend improvements to content, channels, campaigns, and digital experiences.
• Support the creation and management of multimedia, visual, written, and interactive communications products in partnership with internal teams and external creative or production vendors.

Customer Experience and Organizational Change

• Apply customer-experience principles to identify stakeholder needs, pain points, expectations, service gaps, and opportunities to improve customer interactions, communications experiences, digital services, and organizational outcomes.
• Lead customer and stakeholder discovery activities, including interviews, workshops, focus groups, journey-mapping sessions, feedback reviews, usability discussions, and collaborative planning meetings.
• Develop and implement organizational-change approaches that promote awareness, readiness, stakeholder alignment, adoption, and sustained use of new communications platforms, brand standards, processes, services, technologies, policies, or operating models.
• Develop change-management deliverables, including stakeholder analyses, change-impact assessments, communications plans, engagement plans, training-support strategies, resistance-management approaches, and adoption-measurement frameworks.
• Develop and execute stakeholder-engagement plans for internal and external audiences, including senior leaders, program offices, operational personnel, customers, partner organizations, employees, geographically dispersed teams, and other key stakeholders.
• Advise senior leaders on customer-experience trends, stakeholder feedback, organizational readiness, brand and communications implications, digital engagement performance, change impacts, and recommended courses of action.
• Track and assess project performance, stakeholder engagement, customer-experience outcomes, brand adoption, digital-content performance, and change-adoption indicators; use findings to refine activities, communications, and recommendations.

Quality, Risk, and Security

• Ensure all project products are accurate, timely, professional, accessible, and consistent with client requirements, brand standards, organizational policies, and applicable security procedures.
• Identify project risks, stakeholder concerns, implementation barriers, reputational risks, content issues, technology constraints, and change-adoption challenges; develop mitigation strategies and elevate critical matters to appropriate leadership.
• Maintain appropriate handling of sensitive information and comply with all personnel-security, information-security, records-management, privacy, accessibility, and facility-access requirements.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution.
• At least eight years of progressively responsible professional experience in project management, communications, marketing, customer experience, organizational change, or a related consulting environment.
• At least eight years of experience managing complex, multi-stakeholder projects from initiation through implementation, including scope definition, work planning, schedule management, resource coordination, budget tracking, risk management, quality control, executive reporting, and delivery of client-ready products.
• Demonstrated experience leading projects involving one or more of the following areas:
• Global or enterprise brand management.
• Strategic communications or integrated communications planning.
• Digital communications, web content, intranet, SharePoint, or digital-channel management.
• Customer experience or customer-centered service design.
• Organizational change management.
• Strategic planning or stakeholder engagement.
• Demonstrated experience managing communications, branding, digital-content, website, intranet, campaign, or audience-engagement projects involving multiple internal and external stakeholders.
• Demonstrated experience developing communications plans, stakeholder-engagement plans, content strategies, editorial calendars, campaign plans, executive communications, or related strategic communications products.
• Demonstrated experience working with creative, web, digital, content, technical, and/or external-vendor teams to deliver communications or brand products against defined schedules, quality standards, and approval requirements.
• Demonstrated experience applying customer-experience methods to identify audience needs, map customer or user journeys, assess service-delivery or digital-experience challenges, and recommend improvements.
• Demonstrated experience developing or implementing organizational-change strategies that support stakeholder readiness, communications adoption, brand adoption, technology adoption, and sustained organizational outcomes.
• Strong written, verbal, presentation, facilitation, and interpersonal communication skills, including the ability to translate complex information into concise, audience-appropriate communications.
• Demonstrated ability to develop executive-level briefings, project-status reports, strategic recommendations, campaign or content performance reports, dashboards, and stakeholder-engagement materials.
• Demonstrated ability to build effective relationships with senior leaders, clients, technical personnel, creative teams, web teams, operational staff, external vendors, and geographically dispersed stakeholders.
• Experience maintaining or administering SharePoint pages and lists and coordinating with web teams to keep internal and public-facing websites current, accurate, accessible, and aligned with communications priorities.
• Active Top Secret security clearance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting a Department of War, intelligence community, civilian federal agency, multinational, or other national-security organization.
• Experience managing global, enterprise, or multi-region brand and digital communications initiatives involving geographically dispersed stakeholders, audience segments, or operating environments.
• Experience supporting a major brand launch, brand refresh, communications modernization initiative, digital transformation, enterprise website or intranet modernization, content migration, or large-scale digital campaign.
• Experience applying brand-governance practices, including visual-identity standards, messaging architecture, editorial standards, brand templates, content governance, digital asset management, or review and approval workflows.
• Experience developing and measuring multichannel digital communications campaigns using web, email, social, content, audience, or campaign analytics.
• Experience with human-centered design, service design, design thinking, voice-of-the-customer research, journey mapping, usability testing, digital-experience measurement, or customer-experience measurement.
• Experience supporting large-scale organizational transformation, workforce modernization, process redesign, headquarters relocation, workplace transformation, enterprise system implementation, or adoption of new digital platforms.
• Familiarity with federal governance processes, acquisition environments, program-management practices, communications approval processes, and executive-level decision-making structures.
• Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM), Agile, Scrum, SAFe, Lean Six Sigma, Prosci, Certified Change Management Professional (CCMP), Certified ScrumMaster, or comparable certification.
• Experience with Microsoft Project, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Planner, Jira, Smartsheet, Asana, Monday.com, Adobe Experience Manager, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, content-management systems, digital-asset-management systems, or comparable project, web, content, and analytics platforms.

Core Competencies

• Complex project and program management
• Global brand stewardship and brand-governance coordination
• Digital communications strategy, planning, and delivery
• Web, intranet, SharePoint, and content-platform management
• Customer experience and digital-experience improvement
• Strategic communications and integrated campaign planning
• Organizational change management and adoption
• Stakeholder engagement and relationship management
• Executive communications and briefing development
• Editorial planning, content governance, and quality assurance
• Workshop design and facilitation
• Risk, issue, dependency, and vendor management
• Cross-functional and geographically dispersed team leadership
• Analytics, performance measurement, and continuous improvement
• Client advisory and consulting skills
• Organizational awareness, professional judgment, discretion, and security awareness

Work Environment and Security Requirements

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This position may require work in a secure federal, Department of War, intelligence-community, or other national-security environment. The incumbent must possess and maintain an active Top Secret security clearance and comply with all applicable personnel-security, information-security, operational-security, and facility-access requirements.

Work will be performed on-site, in a hybrid arrangement, or at client locations, depending on contract and mission requirements. The position may require collaboration across multiple time zones, periodic domestic or international travel, participation in senior-leader engagements, and responsiveness to urgent or time-sensitive Front Office communications requirements. Expected travel may be up to one week per month.

Salary Description

$113K-$160K, annually