How Nature Calling is helping National Landscapes teams start strong new relationships with local communities
‘Art’… ‘landscape’… ‘sales’…? You might be forgiven for visualising a long-lost picture by JMW Turner in an auction house, but this is not a story about multi-million-pound oil paintings.
Jim Hardcastle is the lead officer at Mendip Hills National Landscape. The team there worked with Gwyneth Herbert, Jason Singh and Chris Howard, the community of Weston-super-Mare and producer Super Culture to create View In View Out as part of the Nature Calling programme. View In View Out saw the artists work with the people of South Ward through workshops close to home and visits to the Mendip Hills, caving, walking and just enjoying nature. The View In was shared with over 900 people who visited the installation in Weston’s Sovereign Centre in July, and the View Out was a series of interactive walking routes available for free throughout the summer in the Mendip Hills National Landscape and in South Ward.
Jim has a background in marketing and here shares how he hopes View In View Out has begun a ‘customer journey’, welcoming new audiences and seeking to build stronger connections with them in the future.
Young people from Weston-super-Mare enjoyed the sights and sounds of caving with artists Gwyneth Herbert, Jason Singh, Chris Howard and members of the Mendip Hills National Landscape team as part of the development of View In View Out.
How do you use art and a ‘customer journey’ sales model to meet core functions of a National Landscape: to raise awareness of its special qualities and support a broader range of people to benefit from it while looking after it?
The art project is Nature Calling; six major art projects, across six National Landscapes plus a further 18 smaller projects creating new ways of experiencing our natural world.
The customer journey sales model is the Awareness, Conversion, Retention funnel. It's a model that explains how to create a loyal customer, or in our case someone who'll continue to visit and really benefit from a National Landscape.
Imagine a funnel: a wide opening at the top going down to the narrow section.
First stage is Awareness, the widest part of the funnel, people will need to have heard about you somehow, through paper based advertising or online ads, or just word of mouth.
The second stage is Conversion; they'll need to understand what you're offering and understand how they’ll benefit before parting with their money in a pure sales environment, but in our case before they give us their time. With Nature Calling in mind it was the groundwork completed by partner organisations that convinced the communities to get involved.
The third stage is Retention; they liked what you had to offer and they'll keep coming back, if you don't forget them. The easiest action for this is to get them to sign up to your e-newsletter or follow your social media. This is where you can drip feed other content to keep them engaged that will subtly change behaviours and create pro-environmental behaviours at home.
The trick is to link each stage of the journey seamlessly. The awareness stage leads to a booking; they had a great time at the event they sign up to the e-newsletter to find out about more events. This model reinforces the phrase 'it's easier to sell to an existing customer'. And that you’re far more likely to respond to the endorsement of a product by a friend, so if the participants of our art projects return to their communities raving about the great experience they’ve had, that starts new people on their customer journey with you.
The value of using partner organisations in different locations combined with art events is to expand and diversify the people starting their customer journey with National Landscapes. If we use the same awareness raising techniques, we run the risk of only talking to the same types of people. To reach new ‘customers’ we have to use new channels like exciting and innovative art projects targeted at defined communities.
