Collaborate for Success
What are brand and strategy workshops and why are they useful?
We love workshops at Mezz – they’re a great platform for collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. To find valuable solutions you need to dive deep to uncover true insights, and that’s exactly what happens when you get a group of passionate people together for hours at a time.
We facilitate various types of workshops to help brands and organisations grow – from our purpose & values and Brand Uncover workshops through to customer journey mapping, marketing strategy planning, product development and creative problem-solving workshops.
This month we’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with three great organisations that provide essential support and services to our community here in the Hunter.
Read on to learn a little about the great initiatives these organisations have brought to the region and the different kinds of workshops we develop and facilitate.
Jenny’s Place – Domestic Violence Resource Centre
Marketing Workshop: Fundraising and Marketing Strategy Insights
Jenny’s Place has been a crucial service operating in the Hunter Region supporting women experiencing domestic violence and homelessness for over 40 years. We’re working with manager Marcia Chapman and the team at Jenny’s Place to create a new web platform that will enable them to build donations to support running costs for their Domestic Violence Resource Centre. Collaborating with the lovely Grace McLean and the team from NFP Connect, together we’re building a fundraising solution to ensure this essential service remains open and operable.
An all-star team was pulled together to workshop the fundraising strategy and marketing plan alongside the team at Jenny’s Place. So many opportunities were uncovered and ideas drafted for meeting both immediate and long term goals for the organisation. By combining the talents of experts with decades of experience in different areas like brand strategy, marketing, fundraising, public relations and sponsorship, the team at Jenny’s Place can supercharge their outcomes and move quickly and confidently towards their goals.
Once the new web platform is built we’ll be focussed on developing the marketing plan, campaigns and collateral to support the fundraising strategy. We feel privileged to be able to support such an important service in our region.
Hunter Water – Waterworld App
Product Workshop: User Journey Mapping and Solution Development
We’ve been working with the comms team at Hunter Water for over a year now on the WaterWorld app – an initiative to reduce the water use of teens across the Hunter. It’s a shower challenge that will be integrated into learning at High Schools, where students compete against each other to reduce their length of time in the shower. After developing the MVP (minimum viable product) and piloting it in schools earlier this year, we’re now focussed on starting to refine it into a finished product complete with a dashboard for teachers to track their class challenges.
We facilitated a workshop with the Hunter Water team earlier this month to nut out the User Journeys, deliberate on the insights we’ve learnt from the pilot and build specifications for product improvements. Stepping through user journey’s is a crucial part of the planning process – you need to walk in the shoes of those using your products or services to identify and build a solution that truly serves their needs. We were able to uncover key steps in the user experience for both teachers and students, and then apply the user insights from the pilot to understand their behaviour and goals at each step, enabling the right solution to be built.
Left Image: UX Workshop with Hunter Water to create Customer Journey Maps and product specifications for their App.
Right Image: User Focus Group we facilitated last year at St Phillips Christian College.
Hunter Homeless Connect
Brand Workshop: Uncover – Brand Development Insights
Last week we began to dive into insights to help develop a new brand identity for Hunter Homeless Connect. Collaborating with Michelle Faithfull (Hunter Homeless Connect Day Coordinator) and Jenn O’Sullivan (Chairperson) was a privilege and we were able to start piecing together some meaningful insights around brand perception, cause stereotypes and organisational goals that need to be supported by the new identity.
Rebranding is always about growth, but often businesses and organisations overlook the insight phase assuming rebrands are simply a visual exercise. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Branding starts from the inside-out and being strategic in your approach to branding is essential. Insights around organisational purpose, values, truths and goals right through to customer psychology, needs, behaviour and journey all need to be explored before an effective brand can be developed – one that is actually going to take your organisation towards the kind of growth and impact you really want.
Over the coming month, we’ll be developing a new brand identity for Hunter Homeless Connect to help reposition the organisation, shift perceptions of homelessness and support future fundraising efforts. We can’t wait to see what develops as we continue to collaborate on this one!
Images: Our Brand Strategist Nikki and Senior Creative Jess with Hunter Homeless Connect in their Uncover Workshop discovering brand insights
We also have team workshops to solve problems regularly…
Problem-Solving Workshop: Process Development
Team workshops are also a regular occurrence at Mezz, and this week we came together to solve a problem we were having and develop a new (and better) process in the studio. We’re looking forward to the efficiencies this will inevitably bring! Ingenuity and problem solving is something we love and we also happen to be pretty good at it. Luke our Creative Director has been brought in to help solve problems within creative and marketing teams at places like Salvation Army and Compassion Australia – he thrives on a challenge and will always jump at a chance to collaborate and improve things.
How might a brand workshop help your organisation?
If you’re thinking about developing a new brand for your organisation, have business goals you need to reach, are developing a new product or service, or have a problem to solve, a workshop is a great first step. Many heads are better than one and collaborating with creative and critical thinkers will bring insights and solutions you may never have thought of. We work with individual leaders, teams or groups to uncover meaningful solutions.
To find out more about our workshops, get in touch via our contact form below!
