Supporting experimentation and learning at the Royal Society of Literature
The brief
The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) is a 200+ year old organisation with a long history and an impressively long list of achievements. Their mission is old but the work they do is fresh and inspiring.
However, they’d reached a moment in which their work was not reflected by their brand and communications. At the same time, the organisation had a tiny team (just four people when we started the project in October 2022) and was in-between marketing managers, as well as in the process of starting a website rebuild and going through a brand refresh. These projects were taking time to complete and they wanted to do something in the meantime to move forwards. The RSL team saw an opportunity to experiment and learn: the year or so the brand and website work would take to complete could be used to build a better understanding of their audiences and how to reach them.
The project brief held as many opportunities as it did challenges. The team at the RSL was small, so they had few resources to implement the strategy once written. They were in the process of rebranding, which meant another imminent and disruptive change for the team and their audiences. And they were getting a new website built, meaning spending too much time on the existing site was not logical. However, the context from both the branding and website projects was available and shared with me, catching me up quickly on months of thinking. And similarly, the research I was conducting could feed into both processes, making sure everything matched the organisation’s goals and the needs of their audiences. This strange timing, which one strategist friend told me without hesitation that she would have walked away from, was actually rich in potential.
The strategy
The RSL delivers a huge variety of work for different audiences: what they do is inherently complex. Simplifying their communications was essential to enabling audiences to understand why the organisation exists and who it is for. To answer this challenge I proposed a simplified structure for the website, removing excess pages and all of the drop down menus from their main navigation. Their website was presenting so much information it was immediately overwhelming, not helped by the fact that the design was in need of an update. I kept suggestions light, focusing on the most essential and those that might provide some helpful insight when it came to building the new site.
On starting the project it was immediately clear that the strategy I delivered needed to be practical and straightforward for the small team to implement. I mapped out customer journeys and audience groups across multiple platforms to clarify where opportunities existed, and proposed changes at all levels of the customer experience to deepen engagement. I created templates in Canva and included practical examples of how different creative ideas for engagement could be rolled out. Finally, I included benchmark figures to map successes against, supporting the team to make the most of the intentionally experimental nature of the strategy.
The process
I organised the project into two phases: discovery and delivery. During part one, the discovery phase, I consulted the RSL’s audiences via surveys and conversations, conducted competitor research and analysed the RSL’s own content and platforms. Phase two built on learnings from phase one and included several conversations with the team at the RSL to ensure that the strategy I created would meet their needs and ambitions.
From the language they use and what they publish online and in their magazine, to how they interact with audiences on social media, the project was all encompassing.
After the strategy was delivered, the RSL asked me to stay on as communications consultant for the next six months or so, supporting their in-house team to deliver the strategy, comms for a busy season of events, and the roll out of their refreshed brand identity. We worked together for a year in total. The final report I created left their new in-house comms lead with an updated strategy that would catch them up on a year of change and opportunities for further experimentation.
Key skills:
Communications consultancy
Strategy
Creative communications
Digital communications
Primary and secondary research
Data analysis
Copywriting