Workshop Series: Digital strategy and story development for rural creative businesses (Session 1)
Workshop Series: Digital strategy and story development for rural creative businesses
Creative businesses that are closely linked to community and place often need more than a ‘one size fits all’ approach to business strategy. In today’s world, ideas around successful organisations are often defined through terms such as ‘profit-maximising’ and ‘growth-driven’. While relevant, these terms don’t necessarily support the full picture, or celebrate the distinctive profile and and unique provenance of ambitious businesses, network and projects based across the Highlands and Islands.
This bespoke series of interactive online workshops will be based around the highly successful Red Squirrel business development programme, with more details on this approach available to access here. The programme will be broken into three taster sessions designed to offer attendees an opportunity to refresh their business strategy and story, gain helpful tools and techniques and learn more about the Red Squirrel framework and research.
Session One – Introduction, Thursday 10th November, 2pm-4pm
An introduction to the concept of Red Squirrel, and a framework for defining the key elements of your story (based on learnings from our work in storytelling for rural and creative businesses)
Session Two – Strategy Statements, Thursday 24th November, 2pm-4pm
Working through our process, Squirrels will learn what strategy is (and what it isn’t), they will learn the art of the ‘strategy statement’, and will get their strategy down into one clear paragraph based around the three key components of strategy. This is an essential ‘rudder’ for guiding a business to realise its opportunities, address its challenge and provide a foundation for communication and digital storytelling.
Session Three – A Story for Red Squirrels, Thursday 8th December, 2pm-4pm
Following the foundation work in sessions 1 and 2, Red Squirrels will come away with their own distinctive story for strategic marketing and comms purposes formulated from two clear steps: 1. Understanding their audiences 2. Structuring their story
Attendees will also get access to a dedicated digital storytelling kit to build storytelling capacity in their business.
Given the interactive nature of these sessions, spaces are limited and we’d request that participants are able to attend all three sessions to make the experience as beneficial as possible.
Red Squirrel Community
Squirrels will also be assigned a ‘story buddy’ so that they can continue to develop their business story over time, and in collaboration with another Squirrel.
https://strategystory.co.uk/redsquirrel/
Register here
