Windsor and Maidenhead RBC was faced with a problem – declining footfall brought about by the convenience of ecommerce, and exacerbated by Covid and the national lockdowns. DigiKind was engaged to address this challenge with a combination of creative communications, digital community building, and business support including free training.
The results were impressive. We achieved an uplift in footfall – currently 16.8% year on year compared with 2019 (compared with 10.45% in the South East and -14.5% in the UK), 30 new businesses opened, generated coverage in national and international media, and trained over 200 businesses in digital commerce.
Our three-pronged approach
The borough was not immune to the high street demise which was affecting the whole nation, brought on predominantly by the ever-growing convenience of internet shopping. In 2020, the drop in footfall was dramatically accelerated by the pandemic. With multiple lockdowns, restrictions on movement, and plummeting public confidence in face to face experiences, Windsor and Maidenhead was pushed to breaking point.
Working in partnership with the council, we combined a diverse range of research and insight from expert sources and identified we would need to focus on three key areas: digital transformation, creative campaigns and placemaking, and business support.
Our strategy used social media, web-based digital platforms, and on-street tech tools, empowering the local community to create content – thus creating a digital ecosystem unique to the local area. This created loyal brand ambassadors and built a word of mouth economy supporting business owners to safely reopen and thrive in a time of unprecedented change.
Our creative campaign was initially developed to help build confidence about safe shopping, and carried a strong public health message. Research showed corporate messages wouldn't engage the public or build trust, so instead we created an accessible brand persona which the community connected with, opting for hand drawn illustrated communications with a friendly tone of voice. The campaign was so successful we were asked to extend this into linked campaigns as the pandemic progressed. The friendly and less corporate imagery was well received by the local community and was shared widely online by brand ambassadors.
We used the same recognisable image style to create the ‘Don't Let Your Guard Down' campaign with on-street artwork and was picked up by national and international media.
Vital to the success of our strategy was creating communities around local high streets and providing the digital landscape to enable these communities to create and share content to support local business.
Together we created an infrastructure of digital channels, a web hub, and branded hashtags, which we continued to populate with relevant content in the form of weekly blogs, interviews with successful local businesses, and our campaign messaging. We ran a series of ‘instameets' to further engage the local community online and offline, to build brand awareness and promote the ‘place'.
We also created an online directory of local businesses to remind locals of the wealth of services that were on their doorstep.
Windsor and Maidenhead's service lead for economic growth place directorate, Steph James, said the collaboration with the council – My Royal Borough – helped businesses and locals to support their local places and build a strong, sustainable community. She said that they are seeing traders investing in the borough and setting up businesses even in a pandemic, going digital and embracing new technologies to reach and serve their customers.
And she also highlighted that the local community was responding positively by sharing beautiful images of their favourite places to shop, eat and be around the borough.
Supporting local businesses
For Digikind's strategy to be sustainable and resilient in the long term, the businesses themselves needed support via training, development and ways to connect.
We offered free digital training to 200 attendees in the form of easily digestible online courses: five hour-long sessions suitable for time-poor businesses. We also hosted inspiring breakfast briefings which showcased world-class entrepreneurs, and highly rated networking events. We supported the council's Additional Restrictions Grant scheme, whereby local businesses who met the criteria could receive a grant to help them reinvigorate following the lockdown, and we helped to disburse £800,000 in funds.
Kathy Kyle is director and founder of digital transformation consultancy Digikind
@bedigikind
• DigiKind is a consultancy that builds communities through digital transformation
