Brand & Marketing Strategist

Volunteer for a startup protecting the heartbeat of European arts and culture! ???

Relevé helps small cultural organizations automatically capture sustainability data and generate compliance-ready reports for funders, ensuring the arts remain funded and sustainable.

Europe's €84 billion cultural sector is facing a critical compliance crisis driven by tightening EU sustainability regulations (such as CSRD and VSME). Over 73% of small arts organizations—including community theaters, independent galleries, and local festivals—completely lack the administrative capacity to handle reporting that typically demands over 200 hours per event. Without an affordable way to document their environmental and social impact, these creative spaces face a high risk of losing vital grant funding as sustainability metrics become mandatory. This creates a destructive gap where grant-makers cannot track portfolio-level impact, and grass-roots organizations are starved of the resources they need to survive.

Relevé resolves this administrative burden by embedding an AI-powered sustainability assessment engine directly into everyday, low-cost project and financial management tools. As cultural organizations plan budgets and execute events, the platform automatically captures operational data in the background and cross-references it against highly complex, jurisdiction-specific regulatory frameworks. Rather than treating compliance as a rigid pass/fail metric, Relevé uses a step-based approach that highlights progress, giving arts organizations a clear roadmap for improvement while cutting reporting costs by up to 90%. For grant-makers, the platform provides a standardized portfolio dashboard to evaluate funding efficiency, while simultaneously aggregating anonymized data to build Europe’s first centralized sustainability database for the creative industries.

Role (Volunteer, unpaid): Brand & Marketing Strategist

Role Description: We're a 2-person founding team based between Amsterdam and North America. We're piloting with arts organizations across the Netherlands and preparing parallel market entry in North America. Our product is still in development and growing every day, our conversations land, and we have a distinctive brand foundation. What we need is a strategic outside eye to pull it into a coherent marketing plan we can execute.

What you'll deliver

A one-time brand and go-to-market plan covering EU and North America. By the end of the engagement, we'll have:

1. A sharpened positioning document. Our core message ("you're already doing the work, now amplify it") is working in conversations. We need it tightened into a positioning framework with proof points, audience-specific value propositions, and clear differentiation from adjacent tools.
2. A market-segmented GTM plan. Two priority markets with different dynamics: EU (regulation-aware, public-funding-heavy, beachhead in the Netherlands) and North America (no regulatory driver, operations-led messaging). The plan should respect the difference rather than copy-paste messaging across borders.
3. A channel and content strategy. Where we should be showing up, what we should be saying there, and a realistic cadence a two-person team can sustain.
4. A 6-month execution roadmap. Prioritized, sequenced, with rough effort estimates. Something we can actually run from.

This is a thinking and structuring engagement, not an execution one. The deliverable is the plan itself.

Who we're looking for

A senior marketer or brand strategist, ideally with 8+ years of experience. You've built marketing strategies for B2B SaaS, mission-driven organizations, or both. You don't need cultural sector experience, but you should be comfortable with a niche audience and a two-sided platform story.

Specifically, someone who:

• Has built go-to-market plans for early-stage companies and can scope them realistically for small teams
• Understands the difference between brand strategy and tactical execution
• Has worked across geographic markets and respects that messaging adapts rather than translates
• Can ask sharp questions, push back on our assumptions, and tell us what we're getting wrong
• Welcomes founders with strong opinions about voice and tone, and challenges us on positioning and structure

Plus, not required: cultural sector, sustainability/ESG, foundation or grant-making space, RegTech, two-sided platforms.

How we'll work together

• Kickoff session to align on context, audiences, and constraints
• Access to existing materials: pilot conversations, brand guidelines, website content, market analysis, pricing scenarios
• Two or three working sessions across the engagement to test thinking
• A final walk-through of the plan together
• Light async communication in between

We respect volunteer time. We'll come prepared to every session, respond quickly, and won't expand scope mid-engagement.

Why this matters to us

We're good at building impactful technology. We're less good at telling people about it.

Clay and I have spent years building tools for the climate tech and cultural sectors. We know the problem space cold, we know our users, and we know the product works. What we haven't cracked is how to consistently put Relevé in front of the people who need it, in language that lands.

We've gotten this far on conversations, warm intros, and stubbornness. That's a fine way to start a company. It's not a way to grow one.

Your help setting up this plan would mean we stop guessing at marketing and start running from something solid.

Time Commitment: Volunteer 4-6 hours per week for a one-off project remotely ?

If you want to make change happen, apply to volunteer with Relevé now!