Brighton & Hove Community Strategy
Client: Brighton & Hove City Council
Project: Launch of the Brighton & Hove Community Strategy
Timescale: September 2006 – May 2007
Background
Produced by the 2020 Community Partnership (Brighton & Hove council’s local strategic partnership), ‘Creating the City of Opportunities’ is a community strategy outlining the long-term vision to improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of Brighton and Hove.
Objective
- To promote the community strategy to the people of Brighton & Hove by launching it in a format that attracts the mainstream population.
Implementation
We decided to use a citywide primary school competition to launch the community strategy. After successfully securing The Argus as our media partner, we worked closely with the paper to develop a competition to get school children to design a flag for Brighton & Hove. The competition ran over four months and the winner was chosen by an online poll on The Argus website from a selected shortlist. The winning design was made into a full-sized flag and a selection of the runners-up flags were made into bunting.
In order to promote the competition and the winning flag and to get another chance to reach the wider community with the community strategy, we secured a further partnership with community arts group Same Sky, which organises the Children Parade that launches the Brighton Festival every May. Through close liaison with Same Sky we were able to promote the competition to over 100 primary school teachers at a meeting organised through the festival and we also arranged for the winning flag and runner-up bunting to be flown at the Grand Finale of the Children’s Parade.
To conclude the launch, celebrate the end of the competition and generate another media opportunity, we persuaded the Mayor of Brighton & Hove to hold a special party at the Mayor’s Parlour for the children whose entries were short-listed.
Following the Children’s Parade, the flag and bunting were put on display at the city‘s Jubilee Library for another opportunity to increase public exposure.
Results
Over 400 competition entries were received from primary school children across the city. The public voted for their favourite through The Argus website and over 1,500 unique visitors logged on and voted.
A text and a web poll were conducted to decide which of the five designs with the most votes should win. The five designs also featured in the paper to alert people to text or vote online. Over 500 people logged on and over 100 people texted in.
The winning flag was flown at the Children’s Parade on the cherry picker from which the Mayor led the ‘Big Sing’ for over 4,000 children plus teachers and parents.