SW Digital Development Project

Case Study 4: Content Development

Brief for a Copywriter

Writing for the web, social media and marketing materials is a particular skill and you may wish to hire a specialist to produce content for you. This brief was used to specify the input Gloucestershire Revealed wanted to develop for its marketing campaign.

Brief for copywriter

Boosting the Brand: a viral e-marketing campaign from Gloucestershire Museums to the cultural tourist.

Funders and project management

The project is funded by the Museums Development Fund through Renaissance South West with in kind support given by the partners of the Gloucestershire Museums Group. The project manager is Julie Reynolds, Museum Development Officer for Gloucestershire.

Project Description

A viral e-marketing campaign will be delivered to increase the cultural tourist’s awareness of the museums’ offer in Gloucestershire and in turn improve the economic sustainability of museums through increased visitor footfall and income generation. The campaign will build upon the established museums’ tourism brand, “Gloucestershire Revealed” and develop it to strengthen the museums’ relationship and profile with the cultural tourist.

This will involve upgrading the webportal to make it more interactive and compatible with mobile phone access and developing social media networks. A viral e-marketing strategy will also be developed to produce a variety of branded e-marketing communications, which will be disseminated through the newly established social media networks and published regularly on the website to create much more interactive, up to the minute, visitor information.

All new e-marketing communications will be shared with the local DMO’s, Forest of Dean and Cotswolds to offer a high profile for the museums on these platforms throughout the year, supporting the work of these agencies and developing their relationship with museums in Gloucestershire. This will enable museums to promote their offer more effectively and improve visitor access to high quality, visitor focused, information. All marketing will be enhanced by the creation of new visitor focused images, aimed to appeal specifically to the cultural tourist.

To enable the viral marketing strategy to be continued after the life span of the project, knowledge gained through the project will be cascaded to all members of the Gloucestershire Museums Group and templates for all styles of communications will be set up to allow for simple data collection and dissemination to continue on a regular basis.

Key Peformance Indicator 5: Engage support to create 3 new specialist cultural tourism museum guides and publish on Gloucestershire Revealed and DMO websites by March 2012.

Background to guides

In 2010/11 Gloucestershire Museums Group received a small grant to develop a project that would strengthen their relationship with the local DMO’s and produce high quality visitor focused information. As the grant was received at the end of the season, the project was rolled out over the winter months. The project, all though small and out of season, was successful and saw the production of three new visitor guides, “Winter Warmers”, “Wet Day Discoveries” and “A Grand Day Out for Grandparents” with targeted visitor information supported by “visitor focused” photography. These were produced digitally and have been published by DMO Forest of Dean and DMO Cotswolds on their websites as well as on Gloucestershire Revealed, our own visitor webportal. This enabled museums to increase their presence on the DMO websites, which had previously been quite low profile and established good working relationships between the MDO, Gloucestershire Museums Group and the DMO’s.

Copywriter tasks

The copywriter will be required to carry out the following tasks to support the delivery of the project:

  • Develop themes and produce three new cultural tourist focused tourist guides* centred on the museums in the Gloucestershire Revealed partnership, by end January 2012. Each guide should be in the region of 2000 words in length. They should be presented to the Project Manager for editing by beginning of January 2012. The text should be provided in MS Word. The final document will be published as a pdf file on line on Gloucestershire Revealed and DMO Cotswolds and Forest of Dean and other portals that promote tourism.
  • Attend meeting on 16th September to introduce yourself to the project team and discuss your ideas for the themes for the tourist guides. The themes will be agreed at this meeting.
  • Liaise closely with project photographer to secure relevant high quality visitor focused images that complement the themes of the tourist guides.
  • Liaise closely with Julie Reynolds, MDO at all times who will be acting as Project Manager and editor for this project.
  • Attend a meeting in March 2012 (date to be confirmed) of the project team to deliver a report covering the work completed.

*the guides should be developed, compiled and distributed with the project needs in mind :

  1. Museums need to ensure that they actively compete for the share of the tourist spend to maintain their income.
  2. To compete in the market, museums need to produce high quality targeted information supported by professional “visitor focused” photography.
  3. Gloucestershire Revealed needs to provide the Destination Marketing Organisations with the quality information they require to communicate to visitors.

Financial information

A fee of £850 will be paid for this work, which will include all travelling and other expenses incurred.