Regenerative Strategy and Systems for a Scaling Social Enterprise
Client: The Woodland Presents
Location: Dartington, Totnes, UK
The Problem
The Woodland Presents is a Community Interest Company nestled in the forest at the Dartington Estate in South Devon. Since 2016 it has been the passion project of founder, Alex Tempest, along with a handful of truly inspiring people who have come together to improve the way that people and trees can work together in harmony.
As a social enterprise, The Woodland Presents brand operates as the parent company for its commercial projects: The Glade - an outdoor events space in the woods, and WoodLab - a woodworking hub. The Woodland Presents leases land from the Dartington Estate and have transformed the footprint of an old tractor shed into a purpose-built two-story woodworking shop where members, users and learners come together and use top-of-the-range machinery to make beautiful handcrafted items.
The team applied for and won a grant in early 2022 to improve their business strategy, marketing communications, growth systems and training. They chose Ipsa Consulting to come on board as a Virtual Marketing Director to assist their ambitious plans.
What we did
Over a period of 12 months we worked with the Directors on a wide range of projects from business strategy, brand strategy to mapping and implementing systems. With a fast-moving environment and some really groundbreaking ideas in the pipeline, they required business planning and marketing strategy along with creative operational suggestions to use their resources efficiently.
Using a series of intensive workshops, we developed a brand strategy that made sense of their brand hierarchy, uncovered their audience segments, core messaging based on their values and vision and mission statements. With this information the team had a clearer idea of who their marketing tactics should be targeting and what to say to them.
Another key challenge was the customer journey - with limited resource their events booking processes needed to be as streamlined as possible. So we mapped out the various different sales processes, brought in a Dubsado specialist, and set them up with automated booking that means each participant can buy a place on a course or event and then a sequence of tailored emails and reminders will follow at set intervals.
Their future plans included a new service where customers could commission bespoke furniture and wooden joinery items. This was new ground and so there were many variables about the process of consulting each sale. We mapped out a chronology of processes that had variables depending on project type, location, required information and level of design required etc. This was then tested with live commissions and iterated as necessary.
“Cath is pragmatic, proactive, experienced and down to earth. She is flexible and adaptable enough to to meet our needs on multiple levels. It’s been great working with her and has helped us develop no end. We’d thoroughly recommend her for others to bring their business needs to”
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The client was able to make sense of their complexity by being challenged about their understanding of what the purpose, vision and mission of the organsiation was. And in turn this meant that their audience and stakeholders would also have a better understanding of it.
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Yes, the Directors were able to bring multiple new offerings to market at a faster pace with our help and streamline existing services to ensure a better customer experience.
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Social enterprises are always brilliant to work with because their business model has to be creative from the get-go. This team in particular were keen to break boundaries and do things in an unconventional way. I learned that whilst a social enterprise has a small handful of key impact areas, that actually so many causes and impact are very tightly intertwined with one another - it’s more of a web. And so understanding and unlocking potential in one area, means doing so for its neighbours too.