by Flying Geese Consultant, John Holmes
Introduction
Our work with Culture in Common demonstrates how Flying Geese offers both strategic consultancy and hands on, day to day, marketing support. Culture in Common is the Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme in the New Forest.
Audience research and strategic consultancy
Using a variety of external analysis techniques, combined with market research, audience insight and stakeholder interviews, we first of all helped Culture in Common understand who their audiences could be, how they behave & engage with the arts and the best way of making connections with them.
This led to the creation of an Audience Development Strategy and a series of recommendations which later fed through to inform the new programme and cultural strategy for Culture in Common and the New Forest. Read more here
Marketing support and delivery
We worked closely with the team to support, manage and deliver the implementation of our short, medium and longer term recommendations. As a brand new organisation, Culture in Common were at the very starting point in their journey.
A key part of this work was overseeing the development of the visual identity and the creation of the Culture in Common website, (more information here). We also set up social media accounts & an email marketing system and developed many brand assets such as templates for printed materials and social media assets.
To ensure that the new community inspired branding remained at the centre of the organisation, we developed brand identity and best practice guidelines.
Once the key tools were in place to start marketing Culture in Common, delivering campaigns and communicating with their audiences, we stayed to continue to support the team by offering hands on, day to day marketing support.
Our 15+ years in arts marketing saw us develop exciting and engaging campaign plans that really connected with the New Forest communities.
We ensured that marketing messages were relevant to different audiences by creating bespoke user journeys through specially designed geographic based landing pages (using Mailchimp) which resulted in an impressive growth in email signups. We helped the Culture in Common team tailor their marketing to specific and various audiences which led to deeper engagement.
Legacy and Impact
Our work at Culture in Common enabled the team to start this new and exciting project with confidence. They knew exactly who their potential audiences might be, what they needed in terms of programming and exactly how to reach them.
Our management of overseeing the development of the new brand and creation of the flagship website added capacity to the team to build real relationships with their communities.
Our hands on support and day to day delivery of campaign work offered best practice examples across many digital and traditional marketing disciplines, and ensured that creative campaigns were targeted, relevant, engaging, and achieved the key objective – that the people across the New Forest, (who typically had low level engagement with arts and culture) become fully engaged with the Culture in Common’s new offer.