Engagement Lead, Civil Society

Are you passionate about the role of the private sector in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and for holding them to account for their actions and commitments? Do you have experience working with or in civil society organisations? Are you a strong communicator with knowledge of how to advocate for systems level transformation? Can you build relationships in a globally inclusive way? The World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) is now recruiting an Engagement Lead, Civil Society

WBA is building a movement to measure and incentivise business impact towards a sustainable future that works for everyone. The private sector has a crucial role to play in advancing the SDGs, but to boost companies’ motivation, there needs to be real change in the way that their impact is measured. That’s why we are assessing the progress of 2000 companies through publicly available and free rankings of corporate performance. Our benchmarks are used by investors, civil society, governments and companies to accelerate progress.

WBA works across different stakeholder groups so that leading companies are incentivised and laggards are held to account for lack of progress. These stakeholders are an important way to generate leverage on corporates to change their policies. However, a recent evaluation conducted for WBA noted that the uptake of WBA’s insights among NGOs and civil society is more limited than with some other stakeholder groups. WBA is therefore looking to make its engagement with civil society more strategic.

The role of the Engagement Lead for Civil Society is to position WBA’s insights as a useful source of information in their own policy development and communication and to provide an important platform for NGOs/civil society to be part of the global conversation on the challenges of system change. The role will ensure that civil society organisations support WBA’s strategy to embed corporate accountability in the intergovernmental system and is critical in ensuring that WBA makes the most out of its ECOSOC and UNFCCC accreditation. The Engagement Lead for Civil Society will therefore have responsibility for designing and driving forward the implementation of WBA’s civil society engagement strategy which should set out how by working through others, WBA can support bringing in the voice of Global South actors to global convenings and processes. Part of the WBA’s Institutional Engagement and Communications function, this role will involve identifying and working with civil society organisations one-to-one on a day-to-day basis, as well as providing support to WBA colleagues to ensure that civil society is part of WBA’s multi-stakeholder actions. You will help grow the movement WBA is building and understand the pressure points for influencing the ecosystem to drive impact.

What will you do

• Build and nurture relationships with civil society organisations, identifying needs and opportunities to use benchmark data in their work and serving as point of contact for NGO requests and queries.
• Create and enable delivery of WBA’s first civil society engagement strategy, clarifying the role of NGOs in closing the corporate accountability gap, supporting a campaign for change.
• Engage proactively with WBA Transformation teams, bringing insights on the civil society ecosystem, advising on plans and strategies specific to different benchmarks’ goals and contexts.
• Support WBA’s Transformation teams to build WBA’s Collective Impact Coalitions by mapping the landscape of civil society coalitions and campaigns, drafting expectation documents, linking to public policy priorities and building relations with NGOs who can play a role in engagements.
• Provide support for transformation teams in creating tools for CSOs.
• Work closely with the Allies team to make the most of our NGO Allies Community, designing and implementing new ways to engage.
• Support in building key relationships to ensure WBA inputs into UN processes and outcomes through its ECOSOC and UNFCCC accreditation.
• Provide expertise to colleagues on how to engage with civil society organisations and bridge to other stakeholders, including companies in scope of assessments.