Vincent Dance Theatre

Overview 

Led by Artistic Director / Chief Executive Charlotte Vincent, Vincent Dance Theatre have been moving people to make them think differently since 1994, producing socially engaged dance theatre work on stage, on film and online. The company delivers extensive research, participation and professional development programmes, working specifically with women and children to highlight issues around gender equality and equality of opportunity for those whose voices may not otherwise be heard. Vincent Dance Theatre (VDT) are going through an exciting period of development, recently securing NPO funding 23-26, igniting a need to review and explore the current brand identity, a review and refresh of their key strategies; marketing and communications, audience development and digital. VDT were also keen to explore the development of their current website.   

What We Did 

The strategies represented an opportunity to build new and different relationships with participants and audiences, to make stronger connections with VDT communities, both current and potential.  The strategies identified and described current audiences, while understanding more about those  not currently engaged. These insights then built and sustained relationships with a wide range of audiences further informing the brand identity and marketing and communications strategies.  The previous approach outlined the importance to better understand its core audiences who have been loyal to VDT over 25 years, while also attracting new marginalised audiences, there were clear opportunities to grow on this thinking and expand it further, especially in relation to digital audiences and the potential crossover with visual arts audiences. While extending the reach of VDT was important it was equally important to ensure those audiences being reached are more diverse and forming a deeper level of engagement with VDT, PKC aimed to achieve via more targeted marketing, refined social media planning and unique content creation, utilising blogs, case studies and ensuring they were easily accessible via the website and other platforms. There was a clear opportunity to focus on VDT as both a feminist organisation and female led and a clear narrative on this across all platforms but most readily through social content to reach more audiences engaging with key topics and discussions surrounding this.  To achieve this we delivered the following:

1.An audit and review of all existing data on those who engage across VDT, this would provide a clear picture of existing audiences and participants and their relationships and connections to VDT, which would in turn provide a picture of who is not engaging from the local or regional population.

2. Identified goals, principles and strategies for audience development strategy, Extrapolated from the findings and in the context of the vision and mission for VDT, PKC led conversations with the team to identify the key ‘pillars’ of the audience development strategy, including discussions of objectives and targets based on the insight generated. We then tested and developed proposed approaches to reach core, priority, niche and ‘thematic’ audiences, creating a framework for the audience development strategy as a working document.

3. PKC devised, developed and delivered a brand model for VDT, embedding within the organisational culture and

supported VDT with the tools to embed a brand identity that people value and want to be part of. PKC then aligned the brand model with the audience development strategy to create opportunities for growth, to question and re-position the vision and mission to ensure it is audience centred, through a workshop to inform the final brand document. This created a final toolkit including: brand architecture, brand strategy, vision, mission, values development, brand positioning, culture change and embedding, tone of voice and brand messaging. This supported company buy in and placement of brand within organisational culture via the workshop contributions.

4. PKC created a marcomms strategy and structured forward plan for reviewing KPI’s, led by our research, data and market knowledge, PKC informed VDT’s planning for communications for the next 3 year period and developed measures to quantify success. Providing a multi-channel audit of the organisations marketing and communication channels to ascertain what was working and what might be missing and outlining digital and more traditional communication channels with the potential greatest impact based on VDT’s audience data. This created a comprehensive and fully realised marketing and communications strategy to include: executive summary, purpose, situational analysis, SWOT and PEST analysis, resources and capacity, objectives, marketing forward plan with KPI’s and outlined annual budget.

Results 

Ahead of the new financial year all strategy documents and brand booklet were completed, reviewed and approved to action. Beginning the end of April we re-established the monthly newsletter, creating distinctive sections to ensure all areas of key activity streams within the organisation were captured, additionally we reinstated the newsletter social posts then pushed to each platform to increase subscriptions to the newsletter. This also gave us an opportunity to talk about the branded strands within the work and showcase the visual identity. Open rates increased by 6% in one month and new subscribers by 5%. Across social media platforms we saw a significant rises in following and engagement; increasing followers to 9.7k, increasing page and profile reach to 71k and page and profile impressions to 94k. By September 2023, PKC working with external website development company HdK completed a new VDT website to ensure that when audiences reach the site they are encouraged to stay on the site. These changes in colour, contrast, font size, and navigation will greatly improve dwell time, engagement and correspondence.