Blueberry Helps Government Arts Body Double Its Reach

Our client is a central government body responsible for allocating up to £622 million to the arts sector every year. The non-departmental public body distributes funds to theatre, visual arts and film bodies.

WHAT THEY NEEDED

Our client needed to increase the number of high-quality bids from art organisations to ensure they could fund the tenders that would have the highest impact. They had previously funded numerous stakeholders in the arts, such as theatre, visual arts and film, but the case notes were not very detailed.

With multiple departmental teams within the organisation, there was no central register of contact data, no details on who had been contacted and what information each department had sent out. Consequently, companies were receiving generic information which had low levels of relevance to them and in turn meant less engagement, making it harder to drive quality bids.

Our client also wanted to encourage art organisations to advocate how important the arts are in society and the economic, social and community benefits that came with funding. To do this, they needed a central database for organisations and individuals within the sector to streamline communication and prepare data ready to go into their Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

WHAT WE DID

Blueberry held a series of data workshops with organisation members to help them prioritise information and develop an ongoing strategy to maintain high-quality data going forward. The workshops aimed to gain buy-in from stakeholders for the project and educate them on the importance of sharing data to improve communications across the board. As a lot of performance within the organisation was based on the client’s data, it was important that all stakeholder information was consistent across each department. Data was segregated and duplicated across 27 datasets. We helped organise the information using a range of technical data management techniques.

This involved combining data from different internal software, including their email marketing platform to ensure all information was consolidated within the organisation. By liaising directly with our client’s CRM consultancy, we ensured that the data was in the correct format to upload into their CRM.

We then refined the data through a targeted manual cleansing campaign, obtaining specific contact details to help our client with any further marketing. This also allowed us to conduct a market research campaign for our client, who wanted to issue a targeted ongoing newsletter for stakeholders.

The research results gave our client an insight into the information they needed to communicate to key stakeholders to boost numbers participating in advocacy work. In addition to these campaigns, we also conducted a series of smaller stakeholder projects, building data for specific stakeholder groups.

WHAT WE ACHIEVED

Throughout the campaign, we gathered or verified a total of 32,394 data fields across all organisations and contact records. This more than doubled the amount of information our clients previously held on these organisations and individuals.

We obtained survey feedback from 93 per cent of relevant stakeholders spoken to within our client’s database. For this reason, we were able to understand what stakeholders valued from their communications. This enabled our client to develop a forward-thinking communication strategy with a firm evidence base.

As a result, our client could establish what kind of resources and support recipients needed to better promote themselves and the arts. They could now easily collate this into interesting and engaging content to encourage more bids and increase funding going forward. We also included digital marketing contacts for many of the organisations we spoke to, giving them an additional channel for advocacy communications.