Head of Marketing

Company Overview

Award Spring is the scholarship management platform used by hundreds of colleges, universities, and community foundations to run their scholarship, financial aid, and donor engagement programs. We help higher education institutions and foundations get more of their funding into students' hands — and we're expanding into adjacent Donor Management and Advancement software categories.

We are growing fast recently recapitalized for our next phase of growth. Our product portfolio is expanding meaningfully this year — a category-defining platform story we're excited to share more about in the interview.

We move fast, ship constantly, and operate with an aggressively AI-native posture across engineering, revenue, and now marketing.

This is the founding full‑time marketing leadership hire ay, marketing is run by a fractional lead and a paid media agency. You will own the function.

You’ll arrive with a forcing function: a major platform story launching this quarter that needs a product marketing engine behind it — positioning, sales enablement, a launch campaign, demand activation, and customer proof. Multiple product lines are ramping in parallel, and a light rebrand is in flight. Your first 90 days will be dense.

You’ll already operate AI-native in your personal craft (Claude, ChatGPT, Clay, Gong AI, content and image tooling, agent workflows). That's table stakes. The opportunity we're offering is the chance to design and run an AI-native marketing function at the org level — compressing the output of a traditional 3‑person marketing team into a leader + agencies + AI. That part is new territory for most marketers.

We're betting you can figure it out with us.

Own our most important product and platform launches — positioning, messaging framework, launch campaign, webinar and press activation, sales enablement

• Ongoing PMM across our growing product portfolio
• Competitive intelligence across our category

• Build a case study and reference engine from scratch at meaningful, sustained volume
• Own and grow our Customer Advisory Board, now entering Year 2
• Lifecycle communications: onboarding → release awareness → feature adoption → expansion → renewal

• Stand up Award Spring's point-of-view on higher ed, AI, and the fund lifecycle
• Drive CEO thought leadership cadence (Linked In, podcast, speaking)
• Shepherd the in‑flight rebrand to completion

• Direct the retained CPC agency and paid media budget
• Partner with our Rev Ops analyst on source attribution, funnel metrics, and pipeline contribution reporting
• Build an organic search and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) capability — we need to show up on AI search surfaces (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini) as intentionally as we do on Google

• Battlecards, demo scripts, discovery kits, ROI calculators, one-pagers
• A collateral system the AE team actually uses

• Direct a significant annual events budget with an ROI discipline — sponsor vs. attend vs. skip
• Stand up a private-dinner program at priority events

• 4–8 years of B2B SaaS marketing experience
  , ideally including time in product marketing. Vertical SaaS, EdTech, or higher-education-adjacent background is a strong plus.
• Leadership Experience not necessary - you can be a strong individual contributor looking to take the next step, or an experienced leader. We're interested to explore the right candidate across the career spectrum.
• Already operating AI-native in your personal craft. You default to Claude Code or Codex, use Clay or similar enrichment tools, explore agent workflows, and treat AI as a force multiplier — not a gimmick. This is not something we'll teach you.
• Product marketing fluency. You have written positioning, led a launch, built a messaging framework, and know the difference between a brief and a battle card.
• Writer-operator. You can draft a case study, a website headline, a launch email, and a Slack post to the AE team — all on the same day.
• Comfortable with ambiguity. You'll walk into a function with no playbook, minimal…