Participation Manager

Participation Manager
Contract type: Fixed term contract (12 months) 
Full time: 34.5 hours per week, we are open to a conversation about how you work these hours
Location: Hybrid between home and our London, Glasgow or Shipley offices (approx. once a quarter in the office)
Salary Range: £47,000 - £52,000

About us

At Macmillan you'll find talented people working together to do whatever it takes to support people living with cancer. We're going all out to find even better ways to help even more people who need our support. Our values are at the heart of who we are and everything we do, inspiring our thinking and guiding our actions.

Our new organisational strategy sets out how we’ll fight even harder to make every pound raised count for even more. With your help, we’ll transform cancer care for good.

About the role

Are you passionate about designing meaningful participation programmes and embedding lived experience into partnerships, investments, and innovation? Do you thrive when leading co‑design work that shapes solutions for diverse groups and strengthens organisational impact? If so, this role could be a great fit for you.

As a Participation Manager, you will partner with colleagues to ensure our products, services and innovations are shaped by people living with cancer and responsive to their needs. You will champion equity by design, ensuring participation opportunities are inclusive, accessible, and representative of diverse lived experience.

This fixed‑term role will support our work on impact investments. You will be responsible for clearly defining Macmillan’s co‑design offer for impact investment portfolio companies. This includes building the foundations, tools and repeatable processes required to deliver outcomes-focused participation activity at scale. You will also scope and shape key projects with portfolio companies - moving into delivery where possible.

Working closely within the Communities and Participation team, you will leverage existing lived experience networks, insights and community partnerships. You will design and facilitate participatory activity to support us in achieving our strategic ambition of centring lived experience in all we do. This will include developing participatory networks and supporting portfolio companies to refine and strengthen their work. This is a strategic and hands‑on role, building new frameworks while also delivering practical participation support.

Above all, you will embody Macmillan’s values by acting with heart, strength, and ambition as you support Macmillan’s journey towards sharing more power with communities and people living with cancer.

About you

The successful candidate will demonstrate the following skills and experience:

• Excellent understanding of participation tools and approaches.
• Excellent understanding of equity by design.
• Expert facilitation skills.
• Deep understanding and experience of applying co-production and co-design methodologies with people and across organisations.
• Understanding of impact investments (desirable)
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills with the capacity to draw insight and make recommendations based on the needs, challenges and opportunities within different business functions.
• Experience of business partnering and building strong, collaborative stakeholder relationships.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills and the confidence to influence decisions.
• Experience of working on a portfolio of projects.
• Experience of working within a change context and supporting a learning culture. 

In return, we offer a range of benefits including:

• 25 days holiday plus flexible bank holiday options, increasing by 1 day every year of service up to 30 days
• Pension matched up to 7.5%
• 120+ learning and development offers, with access to external professional qualifications
• Flexible working patterns, such as compressed hours, flexibility to work earlier or later around our core working hours of 10am-4pm
• Holiday buying and selling scheme, life insurance, free wills, retail discounts and much more

Recruitment process

Application deadline: 23:59 on Wednesday 1st April
Interview dates: Virtual interviews will be held on 15th and 16th April

To ensure fairness and consistency to select the best candidate for this role, all our applications are anonymised up until an interview has been confirmed.

So we can support you to be at your best during the application or interview process, please contact Macmillan TA Team TATeam@macmillan.org.uk for advice and reasonable adjustments.

We welcome applications from everyone who meet the criteria and strongly encourage individuals to apply who have a disability, impairment or health condition or individuals who identify as Black, Asian or from another minority ethnic background, as these groups are currently under-represented at Macmillan. Our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy here along with our internal employee representation body, ‘Our Voice’ and 8 Employee Network groups help us promote fairness and belonging, becoming an engaged and inclusive organisation for all our people.