Memorandum to the Board
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BWB3434F INFORMATION REPORT MEMORANDUM TO THE BOARD MARKETING REPORT NOVEMBER 2011 Report by Marketing Director 1. PURPOSE 1.1 To inform the Board of developments and issues in the Marketing Directorate (which includes responsibility for the boating business). Periodically we will highlight an issue of interest in more depth. 2 HEADLINES ‘Soft’ launch of charity name and symbol well received Annual meeting is helpful in airing and discussing controversial issues Voluntary fundraising is meeting milestones, though corporate giving presents the greatest timescale challenges Canal & River Trust launch event date of 20 April provisionally agreed Volunteering on target for 30,000 days in full year 3. COMMUNICATIONS 3.1 Opinion formers An exclusive preview is taking place in London on 23 November, inviting opinion formers from the charitable sector to learn more about the Canal & River Trust plans for England and Wales. 3.2 Media relations All board members and trustees should be receiving our weekly news update, please let us know if you have any difficulty receiving it. There have been two separate instances of drowning that have both attracted national media attention because of the tragic circumstances. One in particular, the death of a young boy, has led to local comment about safety. BW’s last Annual Meeting and the ‘soft’ launch of the Canal & River Trust name and logo have received mostly positive coverage in the waterways press. A launch event date of 20 May 2012 has been provisionally agreed with Birmingham City Council The winter works season got off to a good start with publicity helping to attract 2,000 people to the first Open Day in Worcester. Similarly, the search to find a dog to be the face for a Trust marketing campaign promoting dog walking visits in 2012 has been well supported – particularly across social media channels. Other highlights attracting national media coverage include the results of this year’s waterway wildlife survey, conservation works to improve habitat for reed warblers and super yachts coming to London’s Dockland’s for the Olympics. There has been continuing travel-related features in the daily as well as Sunday papers. Conference season, specifically the Lib-Dems conference in Birmingham, led to a number of waterway mentions and uses as backdrops. And finally, out of 55,000 entries, the public chose a photo of a horse drawn canal boat as their favourite image for BBC Countryfile/Children in Need 2012 calendar. 4. VOLUNTARY FUNDRAISING 4. Individual Giving 4.1 Case for support Following a workshop made up of senior staff and trustees, an overarching case for support has been developed for the charity. This is encapsulated in the strapline ‘Keeping people, nature and history connected’. This case for support will now be developed into specific propositions for the face to face towpath fundraising and the launch appeal. 4.1.1 Face to Face Fundraising Following a formal tender process, we have now appointed two face to face fundraising agencies to work with us from April 2012 onwards. Clive Mattock Fundraising Limited are private site specialists who work for RSPB, Wildlife Trusts and Woodland Trust. GIFT Fundraising are a street fundraising agency who work with Unicef, NSPCC and Amnesty International. These agencies will initially be appointed for a 4 month trial, recruiting 1,000 donors each. Work is now progressing to identify where they will base their teams and how they will present Canal & River Trust to the public. 4.1.2 Launch appeal A small project group has been set up to progress the launch appeal. Over 400 ideas have been submitted by staff across the business for projects that could be funded by the appeal and that meet the brief of ‘Bringing the towpaths to life’ by investing into wildlife projects, improving safety and increasing access. The appeal is now in a ‘private phase’ where we are researching and approaching statutory and trust funders to provide lead gifts to key projects. The success of this private phase will determine the overall financial target for the public phase (which will launch in April 2012), as well as the projects that will be featured. The project team are liaising with Waterways Managers and Enterprise Managers to identify projects that will be included in the appeal and statutory funding opportunities. 4.2 Supporter Care The development of the ThankQ database and discussions with the internal Shared Services Team have helped clarify the requirements for our Supporter Care Team. This team will handle all database amendments, processing and supporter interactions for both donors and volunteers. The role profiles, location and line reporting of this team are being developed jointly by the Head of Fundraising and the Head of Community Engagement with the intention of recruiting this team to start by April 2012. All processes for database and financial processing are being developed by the Head of Fundraising with support from Finance and IT colleagues as well as internal audit. This is time consuming but critical back office work. 4.3 Corporate partnerships We have contracted C&E Advisory to support us in our work of identifying and engaging corporate supporters. With them we are holding two workshops with trustees and staff to develop our proposition to the corporate sector. Meanwhile, conversations are ongoing with several major companies, all of whom could play a significant role in the launch as partners. This area of work remains high risk because of the tight timescale. 4.4 Future planning Advance planning is already beginning on other areas of fundraising. Three of these are outlined briefly below: 4.4.1 Events Numerous staff have signed up to take part in a sponsored cycle ride from London to Brussels, committing to raise a minimum of £1,300 each for the new charity. This is a great way to engage staff in fundraising in the short-term. Longer-term we are still intending to launch our own flagship event (or series of events) and the Head of Fundraising is in negotiation with two specialist sporting event agencies to develop this concept, with a view to launching in 2013. 4.4.2 In memoriam and legacy giving We have agreed a supplier who will provide an online book of remembrance for those who support our work through legacy or in memoriam giving. Work to identify sites of potential memorial forests is ongoing. 4.4.3 Staffing The Individual Giving Manager post has been successfully recruited. Start date is being negotiated now. The Leadership Giving Manager will be recruited pre-launch. Staffing requirements relating to Supporter Care are mentioned in 4.2 above. 5. MARKETING 5.1 Brand identity The Trust’s name and symbol have been (generally) well received both internally and externally. The next stage is to develop the high level work that Pentagram has done into practical brand guidelines. We have asked six agencies to quote for the work and will be appointing shortly. This work should be complete by the middle of December. In the meantime, two rebrand projects are underway: People’s rebrand (working title) – working with volunteers to rebrand the signage using stickers at key high footfall/fundraising sites. We are not alone in using stickers to update signs. Our supplier works with companies like Asda, Sainsburys, Iceland and National Car Parks. It’s a complex project as our signage comes in many different types, shapes and sizes so stage one is to work with volunteers to survey each rebrand site. Only then will we know the true cost of the project. However to give some perspective, a brand new sign costs in the region of £300 whereas stickers cost between 50p and £2 each depending on the size. Rebrand prioritisation plan – this will help inform decision making about what else to rebrand for April 2012 based on minimum cost for maximum impact as we cannot afford to do everything overnight. This will cover everything from name badges, uniform and workboats to boat licensing forms and word/powerpoint templates and much, much more! 5.2 Website for Canal & River Trust The project to create a completely new website www.canalrivertrust.org.uk continues and is on schedule and budget. Wireframes are complete and basic design of template pages is out to test with BW staff and selected trusted external contacts. Work is well advanced on key national editorial content with the focus now on training staff and other potential users to create, upload and maintain their own content. We still expect to have a ‘live’ site for extensive ‘real’ testing by mid-January. 6. PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT 6.1 VOLUNTEERING Volunteering Activity Volunteer activity is well on target to reach the target of 30,000 days this year, reaching just almost 20,000 at the half year point. A number of large volunteer campaigns are underway – education volunteer recruitment, volunteer lock keepers, towpath survey etc. and we are hoping to exceed the target. ELearning The eLearning/diagnostic tool for building employee understanding of volunteering across BW has been finalised and will start to be cascaded in November, completed by March. This will be released successively to Directors, Senior Managers, Line Managers and then the remaining employees. This will be computer based with a workshop version being planned for bank based teams with no access to computers. Thank Q Supporter Database The specification work has been completed for the volunteering elements of Thank Q. This will allow for a single database to manage and monitor volunteers and group information across the organisation. This will transform our management and communication with volunteers as currently no central database exists. Training will be given in January to key users.