Carmello & John Dacorum Heritage
Carmello & John, against your marketing and communications brief. Five rings.
Dacorum Heritage is an Accredited Museum with no public galleries. One hundred and thirty two thousand catalogued objects, held for Dacorum Borough Council and seven local history organisations, on a shelf on Clarence Road.
Six thousand years of this borough, from a Neolithic axe head to an Ovaltine tin, sitting in the dark until somebody asks.
Which makes your communications the museum's actual front door. Not a support function. The building itself.
Spent on tactics before understanding, it buys a scatter of posts, a tidy document, and nothing that is still running in March.
Spent on understanding first, the same three thousand can buy you almost everything on your list, and a way of working that keeps going after I have gone.
So this proposal is weighted on purpose. The centre ring is the one that decides the rest.
A full day at the Museum Store with the team, on a Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, so it fits your opening hours rather than fighting them.
I want to sit with you, Bev, Lauren and Connie and find out what has genuinely worked, what has quietly not, and what you all already know that never makes it out of the building. Not a workshop. A day of listening.
Six thousand years of stories. We solidify the foundation before we start telling them.
Before writing a word of this I ran a technical review of dacorumheritage.org.uk against the live site. Here is one thing it found.
Your online exhibitions are invisible to Google.
The exhibitions subdomain carries an instruction telling search engines not to index it, while your main site points at that subdomain as the original version of each page. So the richest thing you publish, the exhibitions that are your public offer given there are no galleries, earns no search presence at all.
Cost to fix Two settings. An afternoon.
There is a fix list behind that one. I am not going to spend your proposal listing your faults, and none of it is anybody's failing, it is what happens when four people run a museum and a website. It comes with the engagement.
Action points, sized to the hours you have. Not a strategy document that reads well and changes nothing.
Twelve months with the anniversaries, the seasons, the school terms and the local hooks already in it. Your thirtieth year is in there. So is every point where Dacorum is already talking about itself and you should be in the conversation.
The search fixes first, because they cost almost nothing. Then the pages that should be pulling their weight: the loan boxes teachers are searching for by name, the exhibitions, the tours, the research service.
A small number of formats that come round again, so nobody is inventing a post from nothing on a Tuesday afternoon. Repeatable beats clever, every time, for a team this size.
Reminiscence, the pop up museums, open stores and the schools offer currently run as separate efforts. They should be feeding each other, and feeding the channels, without anybody doing extra work.
Your identity has been updated recently and it is good. I would not touch it for the sake of it. I would look at how consistently it is applied across the places people actually meet you, and adjust only where it is working against you.
There is repetitive work here that a small assistant could lift off the team: drafting listings, writing alt text across the collection, turning one article into a fortnight of posts, answering the same research enquiry for the ninth time.
Whether it is worth building, I genuinely cannot tell you until the listening day is done. I would rather say that now than promise it and quietly drop it. If it does not earn its place, I will tell you, and we will spend the time on something that does.
A media day at the store with a specialist videographer*, directed by me, paid for inside the fee.
You finish the day holding a bank of edited vertical clips and stills. Objects, stories, the store itself, the people who know it best. Enough to publish across the months that follow.
Your team leaves with the content in hand, not a mandate to go and make some. That distinction is the whole point, because the second one never survives contact with a Tuesday.
This is the part small museums almost never get, because it usually sits outside the budget. On this budget, it does not have to.
The videographer figure is an estimate at this stage, so treat it as an intention rather than a quotation. I would rather find somebody good and local to Dacorum than book a name from London, and I would confirm the cost once the listening day has told us what the day actually needs to produce. Subject to understanding more.
The outer ring is the only one that counts to anybody outside this conversation. People who did not know you existed, who now do. People who knew and did not much care, who now do. A Council, a funder and a borough who can see it happening rather than take your word for it.
And it is not only about the marketing. What I care about is whether it turns into practice: a way of working your team still runs in March, and next year, without me in the room. Anything that only functions while a consultant is present has failed, however good the document looked.
You said it better than I can. If people don't love you, they can't save you. That is exactly the right sentence, and this is how we go and earn it.
Every line in the left column is lifted word for word from the brief you published. The right column is where each one is answered, and by which ring.
Review our current communications, audiences, channels and capacity.
Ring two, the listening day, and the communications and audience review that follows it. Capacity is the one I want to establish first rather than discover late, because it decides what the rest of the plan is allowed to ask of you.
Set out clear priorities for day-to-day marketing and communications activity.
Ring three. A twelve month campaign schedule with your anniversaries, seasons, school terms and local hooks already in it, and a small set of formats that come round again so the day to day stops being invented from nothing each week.
Strengthen our approach to digital media, including website content, email newsletters and social media.
Ring three for the search fixes, the website pages that should be earning their keep, the newsletter and the social formats. Then ring four, which puts months of finished material in your hands rather than a recommendation to go and make some. The brief also asks for analytics: that is part of the review, not an extra.
Develop messaging that supports Dacorum Heritage's future plans, partnerships and public profile.
The last question of ring two, and all of ring five. How to speak confidently about a next chapter that is not settled yet, to the Council, to the seven organisations whose collections you hold, to funders, and to the borough. This is the strand I care most about, and the one a channel plan on its own never reaches.
The brief asks for someone who can build a practical approach for a small organisation with limited resources, ideally in heritage, culture, charity or community settings. That constraint is not a caveat at the end of this proposal. It is the thing shaping every recommendation in it. And the whole engagement runs to your published timetable, which is set out below.
One fee, inclusive of VAT where it applies, travel, the videographer, and every associated cost. Nothing else arriving for approval later.
Delivered by me personally, start to finish. No associates, no handing you to somebody junior. The videographer joins for the media day only, under my direction, and is paid out of the fee.
I am a marketing and business consultant, and before that I was the person actually making the thing. Designing it, directing it, writing it, shooting it. That never stopped being what I do.
So when I propose a campaign I can art direct it. When I propose a change to your website I can build it. This page is a fair sample: I designed and built it, in your own brand, using your own collection.
Fifteen years of it, a good deal with public and community organisations including NHS and local government advisory work, alongside consumer brands including Virgin Atlantic, Easyfairs and the Fiat Group, and a spell as chief operating officer of a British manufacturer. I guest lecture on marketing at universities and for the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
Carmello & John is my consultancy. It is small on purpose. You would be getting me.
Six thousand years, four people, three thousand pounds, and one very good sentence to live up to.
If anything here needs talking through, I am glad to take a call before the closing date, with you or with the trustees. Half an hour is plenty, and there is no need to wait until you have decided.