Arch Stories #4

Not everyone is clear about the difference between a strategy and a plan.

Maybe this example of a project we delivered for Nottinghamshire County Council will help….

First of all, I must put this story in the right context by making it clear that it happened a few years ago, so the council will be a different place now. Having said that, one thing in local government doesn’t change – the pressure on budgets.

As part of the drive to save money, the council had created a new directorate, bringing together into a single team the many people across the organisation in a communications or marketing role for different council services. Existing activity was under-performing and at the same time, the money available to spend on marketing was being cut by two thirds.

The council had also carried out an extensive audit of all marketing activity. The question was, with every service still wanting marketing support, how was the council to work out what it stopped doing? That’s where I came in…

To start with, we needed an coherent way of deciding what was most important. It had to be owned by everyone, to stop the risk of disagreements. I was an independent arbiter, working with staff across departments and at all levels. Together we came up with some criteria which were closely aligned with the council’s established priorities – supporting independent living, economic prosperity, safety and value for money.

This enabled me to produce an over-arching marketing strategy which committed the council to:

• A marketing hierarchy, using the agreed methodology to identify key priorities (increasing library and the take-up of school meals, to name just a couple)
• Focusing on a number of specific core audiences (staff, older people, young families, business etc)
• Allocating resources accordingly (with priorities getting a bigger slice of the cake)
• Placing a greater emphasis on digital media (social media and websites)

This was pure strategy, setting the framework and rules within which to operate. It helped the council to see the bigger picture and do things differently. For example, a quarterly what’s on guide was produced for the first time, so that the public could access information about Nottinghamshire events in one place.

Once the strategy was adopted, we could then build the detailed plans for delivering marketing campaigns for individual services – what each project was designed to achieve, the tactics to be deployed, how the money would be spent and when, how success would be measured etc. It’s this level of precise operational detail which really separates a plan from an over-arching strategy.

You’re probably wondering if it worked. Well, the council certainly thought so. All necessary marketing activity was possible within the drastically smaller budget, and the different types of marketing had an impact. In the first year there was a 33% increase in visitors to the Robin Hood Festival for half the previous marketing outlay, and a 29% growth in visits to the council website.

This is what the then Director of Communications Martin Done had to say:

“Delivery of a complex project involving 500 council services was exemplary, helping to persuade teams that a radically different approach to our marketing was not only more efficient, but also more effective. All of this was achieved on time and in budget – a first-rate performance!”

As a result of this work, I was later asked to help develop a new communications strategy for the council, and to help it market its services to schools more effectively. But that’s a story for another day…