West Dean is an internationally renowned specialist college, known for its excellence in conservation, arts and design education.
Spanning two locations in the stunning West Sussex countryside, and London’s bustling Design Centre, West Dean offers a cross-disciplinary environment and a focus on hands-on skills with vocational application. Students benefit from working on live projects, learning from industry-leading tutors, and access to state-of-the-art facilities.
Over a number of years we’ve supported West Dean across a wide range of projects, including crisis communications, staff and student engagement, strategic counsel to the senior leadership team, content management and editing.
Engaging diverse communities
During the COVID pandemic we worked with the CEO to land a number of challenging messages around restrictions, behaviours and services. A communications plan was developed with key messaging directly targeted at staff, students and visitors.
As custodians of a large estate used by multiple stakeholders including tenants, business, students, visitors and staff, we also supported the senior leadership team through ad-hoc, estate-related crises that required careful communications handling with the many users.
Transforming content
Drawing our expert skills in copywriting, editing and digital and print production, we produced a number of marketing communications materials for West Dean to reflect their powerful new brand and take their messaging up a gear.
This included devising board recruitment marketing packs, editing strategic business and estate plans, drafting policy and media statements. We also produced and edited their first all staff e-newsletter, achieving an engagement rate of over 92% per issue.
Achievements
92% opens on monthly internal staff newsletter
successful stakeholder and media handling on crisis communications
impactful brand communications materials for a wide range of purposes
CEO and senior leadership trusted counsel
