Chichester Community Development Trust (CCDT) is a publicly funded and not-for-profit organisation that owns and cares for community buildings in the Chichester District. It holds in trust several buildings, including disused Chapels, Pavillions, Youth Clubs, Football fields and new buildings that they take on and run for the benefit of the community. It has to meet those communities’ collective needs and encourage local social enterprises to flourish within its walls and boundaries. The team was in its tenth year, with increased activities and buildings to manage, and needed a way to tell that story to help fundraise and keep the Trust supporting the community to thrive.

Flintlock was approached and asked to help.

Our starting place was to tour the sites and visit the buildings to comprehend better the breadth of what the Trust was responsible for and to see the community life in action. We then facilitated our proprietary Spark workshop with the leadership team to learn about their roles and responsibilities. And to understand what was working and where they faced challenges. We found that there was a lot to unpick.

The team was underresourced and wearing many hats. We discovered that a recent project to restore The Chapel and to get it up and running with a programme of events had become consuming. Fundraising was a persistent cycle of bid-writing. The team felt unclear on conveying what they did and succinctly getting across the story. Evidently, we needed to find a way to help everyone get clarity.

It was also important to get an outside view. So, we then spent time running our 1:1 Spot Sparks with key stakeholders, including conversations with voluntary organisations, their District Council partners, Developers and, business groups and local institutions to gather insight; here, we discovered that CCDT was a much-admired and highly collaborative organisation that brought a lot of benefit. But, importantly, it also revealed that there was no one quite like them. It left us in a rare situation, with a small competitor set of other venues and a small amount of cross-over in certain funding situations. In short, they were their market and had a real opportunity to do more to stand out and blaze their trail.

Overall, we made one critical observation: an emerging mismatch between the external and internal views. The team saw their role as delivering buildings and creating social enterprise partnerships, and the stakeholders felt CCDT were there to be the lynchpin of all the community activities. The confusion was partly founded in an impossibly broad endline of ‘Making Things Happen’ – a promise that was making the team dizzy.

We needed to focus on all these considerations and bring the elements together in a clear and compelling brand strategy.

The Trust already had a mission statement and values, which we evolved and adapted to help make them shorter and more memorable. We also created a more emotionally compelling purpose: To enable connection, opportunity and cohesion by making inspiration-filled spaces that people need to bring community to life.

And we gave them a crystal clear brand essence of ‘Making Space for Community’. It provided a much more transparent reflection of the Trust’s work and what they were there to do. Plus,they could easily use it to replace the ‘Making Things Happen’ strapline tripping them up.

To support this, we created three brand pillars to form their key communications messaging:

• Great places
• Ready for business
• People at heart

These focussed on how the buildings were created for community needs, collaboration and partnerships to develop social enterprise opportunities and how the Trust involved the community voice to meet their needs and bring people together.

To support how the brand would get communicated, we created a personality and delivered a succinct tone of voice.

A follow-up Get Sparked marketing workshop has recently been faciltited to help identify how to bring the brand strategy into marketing action with a clear plan, content calendar and KPIs.

It’s early days for the team as the roll out the strategy but it has proven to be a real turning point for them. They now have the clarity they need and a memorable essence that they are rallying behind because it helps them to quickly articulate what the brand stands for and the supporting messages for what stands them out.