Apply Today

Location: Remote (United States)
Reports to: Executive Director, Enterprise Services
Compensation: $132,000 – 148,000

BlueLena seeks a Director, Solutions Lab to lead the design, coordination, and execution of the Solutions Lab, its primary insights and innovation program for helping participating publishers achieve measurable audience, membership, reader-revenue, and organizational outcomes through its partnership with the American Journalism Project (AJP), and part of the Knight Resiliency Lab focused on technology, capacity-building, experimentation and hands-on support. 

Reporting to the Executive Director, Enterprise Services, the Director will turn publisher goals, performance data, and organizational needs into structured programs combining strategy, capability building, experimentation, and hands-on implementation. This role calls for a leader with publisher experience, strong operational judgment, and the ability to work across strategy and execution.

This role requires deep, practical expertise in membership and reader-revenue strategy and a sophisticated understanding of the full audience funnel, from anonymous visitor acquisition and registration through engagement, conversion, membership, retention, recurring giving, mid-level donor development, and major-gift cultivation. The Director must understand how these stages work together, identify where publishers lose momentum or revenue, and turn those findings into practical strategies, workflows, and interventions that improve performance. The ideal candidate will bring a hands-on, systems-minded approach to diagnosing and improving this funnel.

Reporting to the Executive Director, Enterprise Services and working closely with the Director of Publisher Strategy, Publisher Success Managers, and specialists across BlueLena, the Director will ensure every engagement begins with a defined need, objective, timeline, owner, participation requirements, and measurable outcomes, and ends with documented findings and next steps.

This is a strategic support role for a leader who can move comfortably between program design, publisher consultation, technical and strategic diagnosis, project management, facilitation, data interpretation, and direct execution. The Director will convert lessons from publisher work into playbooks, benchmarks, case studies, training, product recommendations, and repeatable operating practices that strengthen the full portfolio. The right candidate will be collaborative, disciplined, and comfortable turning complex work into repeatable practice.

Principal Responsibilities:

Lead the Solutions Lab Operating Model

  • Own the day-to-day design, coordination, execution, and continuous improvement of the Solutions Lab under the Executive Director, Enterprise Services.
  • Oversee the design, delivery, and ongoing improvement of the Solutions Lab. Translate publisher needs and performance data into targeted individual or small-cohort engagements.
  • Define objectives, participants, ownership, specialist resources, timelines, and measurable outcomes for each engagement. Maintain an annual program calendar.
  • Coordinate cross-functional teams, including strategy, publisher success, product, CRM, implementation, fundraising, marketing, analytics, and technical support. Ensure commitments are delivered with quality and responsiveness.
  • Collaborate with Insights, Product, and Strategy teams to convert publisher learnings into playbooks, benchmarks, training, case studies, and product recommendations to enhance future outcomes.

Lead Publisher Improvement, Innovation and Capacity Building

  • Collaborate with the Executive Director and publisher leadership to review audience and revenue performance, translate priorities into annual goals for reader revenue and audience growth, assess capacity, identify risks and opportunities and design six-month implementation roadmaps.
  • Develop and maintain each publisher’s Strategy Playbook, aligning goals with Solutions Lab support and portfolio OKRs.
  • Design and manage 30- to 90-day interventions for publishers facing underperformance, staffing disruptions, technology issues, or other operational risks, with defined success measures and exit criteria.

Design Membership Innovation and Growth Experiments

  • Identify publishers with strong fundamentals that are ready to test new approaches to audience relationships, membership, voluntary contribution and donor development.
  • Build experiments involving membership experiences around a defined hypothesis, baseline data, required infrastructure, an implementation plan, a project owner, a testing period, and measurable success criteria leveraging qualitative research, propensity scoring and other tactics supported by the BlueLena solution offering.
  • Translate successful work into practical implementation playbooks, benchmarks, case studies, training modules, product recommendations, and replicable best practices.
  • Lead and/or partner with advisory consultants in delivering the Reader Revenue Master Class for emerging publishers, combining practical curriculum, applied projects, and individualized roadmaps to help organizations build repeatable audience and membership programs.

Direct Annual Audience and Reader-Revenue Systems Audits

  • Lead annual assessments of the audience funnel, covering visitor acquisition, registration, engagement, conversion, membership, retention, recurring giving, and donor development; evaluate acquisition practices, newsletter and automation architecture, segmentation, membership and donation journeys.
  • Produce a prioritized BlueLena Systems Audit for publishers that identifies effective systems, infrastructure gaps, immediate remediation needs, optimization opportunities, recommended sequencing, and readiness for advanced experimentation and improved results.

Qualifications and Leadership Traits

Strong candidates will combine deep membership and reader-revenue expertise with disciplined program leadership, excellent consulting judgment and the ability to turn strategy into hands-on implementation that drives measurable results and meaningful insights. The ideal candidate understands both the mechanics and the human dimensions of sustainable audience and revenue growth and can work credibly with publisher executives, functional specialists and frontline staff.

Relevant experience may include:

  • 8+ years of progressively responsible experience in audience development, membership, reader revenue, fundraising, journalism, media, nonprofit management, consulting or a related field.
  • Demonstrated success designing or leading membership, subscription, donor or reader-revenue programs for mission-driven media or comparable organizations.
  • Demonstrated ability to design and manage interventions, experiments, cohorts, training or consulting engagements with clear measures and deadlines.
  • Strong quantitative and analytical skills, including comfort interpreting performance dashboards, funnel metrics, campaign results, retention data and donor pipelines.
  • Deep knowledge of the full audience funnel, including acquisition, registration, email engagement, lifecycle automation, segmentation, conversion, onboarding, retention, upgrades and donor development.
  • Experience evaluating and improving membership positioning, cases for support, campaign strategy, contribution levels, benefits, stewardship and renewal programs.
  • Working knowledge of CRM, email, payment, website and analytics systems and the ability to diagnose integration, workflow, automation and data-quality problems.
  • Experience conducting organizational or systems audits and translating findings into prioritized, sequenced implementation plans.
  • Excellent project-management skills and the ability to coordinate multidisciplinary teams without relying exclusively on direct reporting authority.
  • Experience facilitating groups, coaching practitioners and communicating recommendations to CEOs, Executive Directors and senior leadership teams.
  • Strong writing and documentation skills, including the ability to create concise playbooks, case studies, curricula, executive updates and actionable recommendations.
  • Experience with nonprofit journalism, independent media or philanthropic portfolio programs is strongly preferred.
  • Comfort working in a fast-paced, entrepreneurial, remote-first environment committed to continuous improvement.
Apply Today

Company Benefits

We believe that supporting great work starts with supporting great people. Here’s what you can expect as a full-time team member at BlueLena:

  • Health coverage: we offer a company sponsored plan (medical, vision and dental) and contribute up to $500 per month toward health insurance for you and your family. Or you can opt out and receive this as additional taxable income.
  • Generous 401k match: we match 100% of your contribution up to 3% of your salary, and 50% of the next 2%.
  • Take time when you need it: we provide 20 days of paid leave each year, plus 8 paid company holidays.
  • Company laptop: we provide you with a choice of MacBook or equivalent PC and it becomes yours to keep at the end of two years.
  • Evolving benefits for a growing team: as we grow, our benefits do too. We’re always working to make BlueLena a great place to build your career and future.

Not you but think you have something to offer? Job descriptions are tough to write and rarely comprehensive. The above is only one way we’ve envisioned this role. We welcome people of all backgrounds and experiences to apply; come with a passion for supporting the independent news ecosystem and an ability to learn and tell us how you think you can make an impact with BlueLena.

To apply, please send a short email to join@bluelena.io outlining how you would make an impact at BlueLena. Include a resume or LinkedIn link. 

How to apply:

Please submit your resume and a brief cover letter (1-2 pages) that includes:

  1. Why you’re interested in this role and in BlueLena’s mission.
  2. Your relevant experience supporting publishers, audience growth or fundraising.

We look forward to reviewing your application.

About BlueLena:

BlueLena was founded by an experienced team of publishers, journalists and media executives to help independent journalism organizations build sustainable audience and revenue growth through technology, strategic guidance, capacity-building and hands-on support. Today, our platform and services power the audience and revenue development efforts of more than 250 independent news organizations across North America.

Since 2024, we have partnered with the American Journalism Project as part of the Knight Resiliency Lab and our specialized support that helps local news organizations build long-term operational durability.

We view strategy consulting as fundamental to our unique licensing and hands-on professional services, not as an additional cost. When you work with BlueLena, you benefit from a dedicated team of experienced journalists, strategists, project managers, campaign designers, copywriters, engineers, data analysts, and problem solvers.

Our success is built on long-term relationships with both publisher partners and team members. BlueLena is recognized for excellent client service, high publisher retention, and a workplace culture that values initiative, learning, and growth. Many team members have advanced into leadership roles as the company has grown.

Our member publishing consortium represents a diverse mix of non-profit and for-profit newsrooms, digital and native print publications, as well as established and new media brands. Our clients include LION Publishers (LION), the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), Local Media Association (LMA), the Black Press Association (NNPA), the National Association of Hispanic Press (NAHP), and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN).

We share best practices through a weekly newsletter, a community Slack channel, and monthly video meetings where we spotlight success stories from across the BlueLena publisher consortium.

BlueLena is founder-funded and supported by investment from Automattic (owner of Newspack) and Old Town Media, a New York-based firm that has backed the American Journalism Project, The Colorado Sun, Block Club Chicago, Chalkbeat, and other successful media projects.

We are committed to diversity and are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.