Head of Marketing

Company Overview

AwardSpring 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 were 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 were 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.

Role Overview

This is the founding full-time marketing leadership hire at AwardSpring. Today marketing is run by a fractional lead and a paid media agency. You will own the function.

Youll 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.

Youll already operate AI-native in your personal craft (Claude ChatGPT Clay Gong AI content and image tooling agent workflows). Thats table stakes. The opportunity were 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. Were betting you can figure it out with us.

What Youll Own

Product Marketing

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

Customer Marketing

• 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

Brand & Thought Leadership

• Stand up AwardSprings point-of-view on higher ed AI and the fund lifecycle
• Drive CEO thought leadership cadence (LinkedIn podcast speaking)
• Shepherd the in-flight rebrand to completion

Demand Generation (in partnership with a retained agency and RevOps)

• Direct the retained CPC agency and paid media budget
• Partner with our RevOps 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

Sales Enablement

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

Events

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

Who You Are

• 48 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. Were 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 well 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 battlecard.
• 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. Youll walk into a function with no playbook minimal systems and a forcing-function launch. You see that as the opportunity not the risk.
• Chicago-based and willing to be in our office 23 days a week.
• Bonus points: prior founding-marketer experience higher ed or non-profit tech background demonstrated results running paid media against measurable pipeline outcomes.

What We Offer

• Compensation Commensurate with Experience including Equity
• Hybrid work: Chicago-based 23 days in office
• Full benefits: medical dental vision 401(k)
• Direct CEO relationship: you report to Alex. No layers. No politics. Direct access to product engineering sales and customer leadership.
• AI-native operating environment: youll join a company where Claude Claude Code Gong AI and a full suite of AI tooling is already part of how we work. We dont want you to fight for budget to use AI we want you to lead us deeper into it on the marketing side.