Spirit Nottingham Launches New Website to Showcase Nottingham’s Diverse Cultural Offering

4 April 2011 | By Popsop Team

Digital agency (untitled), part of Schawk Inc., has recently developed a website for Spirit Nottingham, a collaborative partnership between the leading cultural venues in Nottingham, spearheading the promotion of the city’s cultural offering. The innovative new website which offers users a unique portal to research and plan their visit to Nottingham in an exciting and engaging way is part of an overall digital strategic approach developed by the agency.

(untitled) was briefed to develop an online solution that:
•    increased engagement in the cultural offering amongst visitors
•    and repositioned the perception of Nottingham, establishing the city as a cultural hub with the 12 million visitors the city receives every year

(untitled) delivered an online solution that incorporated eCRM, email marketing and a number of tactical digital options. Integral to the success of the strategy was the creation of a website that delivered an enriched user experience through innovative methods of content exploration.

“We recognised that in order to achieve the required objectives we needed to deliver a solution that allowed the visitors and residents of Nottingham to actively engage with the culture of the city.” The overall strategy was designed to provide the Spirit Nottingham partnership with a comprehensive approach to promoting Nottingham as a cultural hub and encourage direct engagement with the target audiences.

At the heart of the strategy is the website, which utilises existing and bespoke technologies such as integrated Google maps, interactive timelines, tag clouds and popularity bubbles. In addition the website serves a variety of venue and user generated content that spans over 180 venues and more than a thousand events across the city.

Visitors to the website are able to plan personal itineraries, create route maps and rate and comment on their experience of the cultural city, its venues and events. In addition, the website encourages cross-sell visits between venues bringing increased numbers of visitors and ultimately investment into Nottingham.

The new website adopts the principles and philosophies of the emerging HTML5 for structuring and presenting content. “As a key driver and destination, in a long term strategy to position Nottingham as a centre of culture, the website had to increase engagement and create an enriched user experience through innovative methods of content exploration.

“Spirit Nottingham is a great example of the opportunities digital presents in achieving an organisation’s complex objectives. In this case, tasked with the challenge of shifting perceptions of an entire city, we developed a unique, non-linear, multi view website that encourages the user to explore. It’s a brave approach for this type of organisation and embraces the use of new technologies and philosophies,” comments Rob Hollands, Digital Director, (untitled).

Developed as a result of an innovative cross-sector cultural partnership between 11 of the city’s key cultural organisations, The Nottingham Cultural Partnership saw all of the organisations collaborate for the first time, delivering a website that features the best art venues, museums, galleries and city centre restaurants, pubs and bars that Nottingham has to offer.

“This is the first time that Nottingham’s cultural sector has collaborated to promote arts and culture in the city. The project is a fantastic example of combining private sector funding and public sector needs to achieve a common goal that is of benefit to everyone. We could have created a straightforward listings website but Nottingham simply isn’t that plain and boring, we wanted a website that reflected the vibrancy of the city. This is a distinctive website, I don’t know of any other city in the UK that has a website like this and we are very proud of what we, as a partnership, have achieved.”

“After speaking to a great deal of digital agencies we were very lucky to find (untitled), they instantly understood our vision and have worked tirelessly to give it form and create the site. I don’t feel we could have achieved this with any other company,” comments Rob Williams, Project Leader Spirit Nottingham and IT director at the Capital FM Arena.

Envisaged under a Labour government and delivered under the new Conservative leadership, the website was co-founded by Greater Nottingham Partnership and Arts Council England East Midlands with match funding secured from the originating partners. These included Broadway Media Centre, Dance4, Galleries of Justice, Lakeside, New Art Exchange, Nottingham City Council, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham Playhouse, The Royal Centre, Capital FM Arena and We Are Nottingham.

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