Wiltshire Creative is a relatively new NPO bringing together Salisbury Playhouse, Salisbury International Festival and Salisbury Arts Centre. Lack of clarity or common cause was making it difficult to manage a public-facing brand that would reach and resonate with the wide and diverse communities they wished to serve. They could sell tickets in a transactional way to individual events – but wanted to create deeper audience and community connections for bigger impacts. They wanted audiences to understand what the organisation stood for as a collective and why it mattered to their community, beyond a great night out.
We engaged a wide range of stakeholders (internal and external) who had strongly differing views of the potential, the priorities, and the direction the organisation should take. We then worked across the organisation to establish a clear common cause and strategy. While the direction and intended impacts had to be set by the organisation, first understanding the perspectives of various stakeholders helped us consider how best to ‘land’ the outcomes and bring others like them on the journey.
We then consulted audiences through a range of exercises and focus groups to better understand their perspectives, motivations and needs from the organisation. We found mixed levels of understanding of what Wiltshire Creative was and offered. Some audiences clearly articulated what the organisation meant to them and their deeper connection, while other priority groups – for example younger audiences – needed targeted engagement to show them what made Wiltshire Creative relevant.
This has resulted in a cohesive positioning strategy for the organisation – where the Playhouse, Arts Centre and Festival can each offer something special but also sit alongside each other in a coherent story for audiences.
