Our dream projects for 2023
As we reach the end of a creative and busy year, I’ve asked the team to think ahead to what their dream projects would look like for 2023. These are the kind of projects that we’re all hoping to sink our teeth into, so if these are on your wish list too, or you have your own dream project that you need a little help with, then you might want to have a chat with us to see how we can partner up to make such awesomeness a reality.
I would say my dream for 2023 would be working with a client on a project that delivers a true multi-channel content, communications and marketing strategy for their key business objectives. It'd be amazing to work with a client to properly define how all their different channels, formats, tactics and disciplines can work in harmony and help their teams collaborate across everything with more impact. There's a huge amount of potential in using insights and data to make content more efficient and purposeful.
The real dream here is to help clients find ways to produce a smaller, leaner and more sustainable volume of content where everything has a purpose and a place and where content isn't created simply to tick a box or because an organisation feels compelled to constantly be churning out tonnes of content across all their many, many channels.
Creating video content for our clients is quite a new but exciting area for Pickle Jar Communications, but over the last year or so, we’ve had the opportunity to flex our creative muscles working with a range of universities on video-based content - including our first VOD TV ad.
Our team have also been doing some great research and generating insights about brand differentiation within the HE sector, and I truly believe there are opportunities for universities and HE institutions to ‘go braver’ when it comes to video storytelling. Think John Lewis’s Christmas ads: it’s all about the storytelling.
Universities have the power to positively change young people’s lives. And they do - every day, every term, every academic year. Of course, universities are selling courses, and facilities, and academic reputation. But there’s so much more about going to university - and so many more angles, if we dig a little deeper.
So I think my dream project would be to help to create an ad that breaks the mould. That doesn’t look like a university ad. One that makes viewers go ‘Wow, I didn’t expect that.'
With events such as ContentEd Conference and Utterly Content Global under our belt, we often get asked if we’re an events company… and we’re not! However, I’ve been putting my thinking cap on and developing a new range of event services for you, our wonderful clients.
There are so many wonderful events, I would love to work with our clients on. But if I had to choose my dream project, it would be to run a series of international alumni events. Alumni are some of the greatest assets to a university (and normally free!), they can be your cheerleaders and help your recruitment and conversion.
Often, university alumni are situated all over the globe and often forgotten about. I would love to work with a university to develop a series of online and in-person events, focussing on key demographics and subjects, to introduce alumni to potential students. Having these events, will help develop relationships, allow potential students to feel more at ease, and truly answer their questions from a source who isn’t there for a hard sell.
There’s no denying that education is an excellent cause, but as a mother, dog owner, and nature lover, my dream project would be to support a charity or organisation that educates people around those causes close to my heart.
So, for me, my dream project would be one of the following:
• Creating a content strategy to engage young people and families with nature, particularly those groups who might not feel they have access to nature and open spaces. This might be for an organisation such as the RSPB, WWT or The Wildlife Trusts.
• Working with a parents charity, such as NCT, to develop content, resources and communities (online and offline) to support expectant and new parents.
• Supporting a dog or pets charity such as The Cinnamon Trust or Dogs’ Trust, to raise awareness of their services and recruit volunteers through an effective content marketing and social media strategy.
For me, all of those projects have an education aspect to them - educating communities about the resources, support and opportunities available to them, aligned to causes they care about.
I'd love to do something with live audience feedback at one of the conferences we or our clients run. We are examining and reevaluating the relationship between performance and audience, with live audience feedback and data allowing for greater real-time interactivity between audience and presentation in a way that's never been done before. And it would be great to implement this onto a much larger scale event. We could work on different levels of interactivity from post-event surveys and apps, to measuring audience behaviour through eye tracking… the possibilities are enormous.
My dream project would be something long term. I’d love to set up a proper longitudinal study that follows a group of students through their whole journey with an institution - following them from the early stages of thinking about what and where to study, through the application and enrolment process, then into their experiences while studying, engaging with different parts of the university, and then out past graduation and beyond. I’d like to look at how they interact with the university along the way, what kinds of content and information they care about, and what else is going on in their lives while they’re studying.
Universities do all kinds of surveys and data gathering about students and their experiences, but these are often snapshots of a moment in time, or they’re large, anonymous data sets. I’d like to do something that tells a more personal story to supplement that data. The findings would be hugely useful for content planning, recruitment messages, student engagement activities, alumni outreach, brand identity work… pretty much everything.
In 2023 I’d really like to get to grips with inclusion in content and experience. When content professionals think of inclusion, I think there’s a tendency for us to think just about accessibility. Accessibility and inclusion might dovetail but they're not the same thing. A dream project for me would be to work with a client who is committed to embedding inclusive practices in all their student experiences; web, communications, publications, recruitment events- the lot. Taking time to look at all the different channels, touchpoints and pockets of experience.
The thing about inclusive design is that when you do it properly; considering and designing every touch point carefully, embedding practices like research, reflection, testing and redevelopment into our daily practices; it just makes sense for everyone. Imagine being able to do with unnecessary bureaucracy in your work day or were able to spend less time digging through a webpage to find the information you need. Imagine being able to attend an event and get exactly what you wanted from it, without any friction. When you think about it, who wouldn’t want that??
Many of the universities I've worked with have a real challenge with siloes ways of working. Colleagues are often aware of the problem but aren't sure how to break down the barriers. The less visible but greater impact of this issue is the effect it has on students.
Students' often experience a fragmented, difficult to navigate journey through universities. We hear students in focus groups talk about how they need to learn the organisation of the university in order to navigate it.
In 2022 I worked on a couple of projects which looked, in different ways, at this problem.
In 2023, I'd love to partner with an institution to intentionally design the experience we create for students, break down the siloes and deliver a better student experience.
Your dream project for 2023?
What would your dream project be to work on in 2023. Don’t forget to let us know, and have a chat with us to see if we can help turn those dreams into reality.
