Strategy for water and environment organisation

The need

The Peter Cullen Water and Environment Trust has been doing important and inspiring work for more than 20 years. The leadership team realised that they need a fresh look at their communication and marketing activities. They also wanted to dive deeper into some of the challenges facing the organisation.

They know it’s time to build on their impressive legacy but also adapt the organisation for the current times; embrace modern marketing platforms; offer great value to stakeholders; and align their communication and marketing with their recently updated Strategic Plan.

Our solution

For the Peter Cullen Trust, the process, Claire and the Leadership Team met online to discuss the strategy for the organisation:

the key challenges and opportunities
strategic goals
potential future partners for the organisation
how stakeholders perceive their brand and service offerings
how the organisation might better connect with potential customers to foster the collaboration that is so crucial to their mission.

This is phase 1: Strategy Discovery. This culminated in a meeting report/transcript and a summary report. This was used as the guiding point for the next step in strategy development.

We then took the steps needed to create a full marketing strategy. This included:

deeper work on the mission, vision and purpose statements
desktop market research, examining the current (external) situation through a PESTLE and the internal and external aspects relevant for a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis
interviewing key stakeholders, which identified valuable background and identified challenges and opportunities
advice about threats and concerns related to the brand
an assessment of how the organisation currently engages with their stakeholders
recommended actions and a draft plan
a core strategic idea to ground all prioritisation, goal-setting and resourcing.

The team was able to provide feedback and we also ran a couple of follow up workshops to discuss aspects of the strategy and to refine it.

Read more about the Strategy Discovery and Strategy Delivery services on the website.

Results

The draft Communication and Marketing Strategy was presented to the Board. This isn’t always the process but Claire was invited to dial in for a Q&A session at the following Board Meeting to discuss key points.

The Peter Cullen Trust has set its future direction for communication and marketing. To deliver on its goals, the Trust has employed a new staff member with a dedicated focus on delivering communication and marketing initiatives and looking after crucial stakeholders.

In the client’s words

You helped translate our high level strategy and other work we were doing (like surveys) to better inform us to assist us in the delivery of our programs, communication with alumni and positioning in the marketplace.

I found it really helpful that you engaged with our stakeholders because it gave an opportunity to ask questions beyond the survey and provide answers we wouldn’t have otherwise got. That was incredibly valuable.

And then being able to use frameworks and models to develop the plan and translate that into a ‘strawman’ in terms of an annual operational plan was useful. It gave a focus on the level of resources, the investment, we needed to make to improve some of our processes.

So there were a lot of elements rolled up into the strategy. With recommendations set, we could discuss and then translate that to what it would be when the rubber hits the road in terms of carrying our communication and marketing efforts forward.

Darryl Day

CEO, Peter Cullen Water and Environment Trust

View the video from Dr Bek Christensen, Programs Director with The Peter Cullen Water and Environment Trust.