Movement Strategy will work you to the bone and then discard you for their incompetency. Upper management is so far removed from the day-to-day that your work will not get recognized.
I worked for Movement Strategy as their community manager on the DC team (digital content) and was an integral part to the account's success that I was put on.
However I quickly realized internally that this account was underscoped for the aggressive follower growth goal needed. In the span of 8 months, I would witness this account go into internal turmoil as managers and directors would get repeatedly fired and then not replaced. My manager was fired which meant I had no direct report. The manager managing my manager was later fired after a few months too. Movement Strategy did not proactively hire any managers or assign me a new direct report and because this was my first time working in an agency environment, I felt completely stranded. The creative director of this account was fired as well, and so a freelance copywriter was the creative director for a month before she got fired and another creative director got hired.
So you can imagine, it was an absolute sheet show internally with so many people getting fired. Because I had previous industry experience for the account I was managing, I stepped up to assist my team in where tasks were unfilled. I was also the ONLY employee on this team scoped at 100%, while everyone else had 2-3 accounts which meant my coworkers were often overworked and managing multiple unrelated tasks.
I soon became a 10-in-1 employee overseeing content scheduling, social media strategy, even personally doing graphic design because our graphic designer kept turning in assets late (again, no creative director and she was over scoped with too many accounts), assisting with copywriting, writing client-facing briefs and pitches, and video editing... To give you context, I was not responsible for those things because the way the agency is structured is that those are all separate teams. I was doing tasks at a management level way beyond my pay grade without getting the bump in salary.
All of the successes of the account were then attributed to another manager who wasn't even aware of the day-to-day of our team. She was scoped with at least 2-3 different accounts. I was supposed to meet with her once a month to check in, but she would continuously reschedule me because she was way over scoped. So I went 3 months without anyone managing or checking on me because I ran this account like a well-oiled machine. My work was not celebrated despite the fact my strategy and campaigns gained them over 300k followers within that time frame. Thanks to my work and efforts to glue this team together, Movement Strategy renewed the account with the client for an account they would have lost otherwise because no one had a pulse on this industry. They also won renewals with the same client for two other accounts because of the overall success.
The other problem is that because the account was so poorly scoped, there was no one else who could cover for me even on the days I requested off. As a community manager, you know that you're never truly offline and sometimes you might have to do some community management on weekends- that's fine. I rarely took days off but on the days that I did, I still did not have anyone to cover me and would need to work partial days. Even on my birthday, the one day I wanted and had requested in advance to be fully offline, I still had to log in and launch the campaign. This is a testament to how poorly the internal management is for this agency.
In the end, I felt severely betrayed as they fired me for something that I had flagged for MONTHS and they failed to address. At the end of the year, they finally hired more people for the team. I was tasked of managing the account as is on top of onboarding the ENTIRE TEAM on processes, internal data, etc while it was Q3 and Q4 for the client, a very important time to push out sales and capture promotions. I was overworked putting in 10-12 hours daily because I had so many meetings on my calendar with little time to actually get work done. I was making small mistakes in typos here and there, when copywriting was not my responsibility but I was just expected to do so. They ended up firing me for a problem I had flagged repeatedly internally MONTHS ago that never got addressed. The mistake wasn't even my fault but at the fault of the paid team. But because I became essentially the lead managing the account, I was the one who got cut after they had used me and onboarded the team.
I honestly hated the higher level management here for overworking me with no support and no recognition for the hard work I put into this account. I loved my account and the team I had. The working experience is great, but the way this agency is run will have you so feeling so drained. Most of my coworkers were afraid to take risks- the only way to stay on the account and not get fired was to stay small, compliant, hardworking, or honestly... be caucasian and kiss up to upper management by idolizing Jason.
My only pleasure was that after I was fired, Movement Strategy lost the account and clearly didn't get it renewed. The new team had no pulse on the industry and kept creating mediocre content that wasn't growth oriented. The community I had helped built and was so proud of growing just tanked.
If you want to be overworked and under appreciated, this is the role for you.
