What have I been up to the past few months? Well, I joined the staff of our National cultural organization the Cultural Development Foundation as the Director of Business Development and Marketing - it's been a busy, busy time as the organization grapples with a complete restructure and rebranding while keeping up with ongoing work and designing new programmes and projects...so far it is great! I may look a bit tired now n then, but it's that 'good tired' when you know you've been doing some good work! So, here's our first press release about our changes:
The Cultural
Development Foundation exists in a competitive world and competes daily- for
people’s time and attention, for funding, sponsorship and recognition: the new
brand and new structure have been designed to re-align the work of CDF with the
contemporary needs of Saint Lucia’s emerging arts and culture sector in a world
where the Creative Industries are becoming major contributors to economies and
societies.
Our public value
proposition – the value that we create, that in effect justifies public and
private investment and support for what we do – has to be relevant and cutting
edge: taking into account our rich past while openly and actively embracing the
future.
That value has
many different facets – there is the historical social value that CDF creates
by caring for the Nation’s most significant traditions, keeping them full of
life for future generations; the value created as an institution – represented
by the extent to which we are trusted and accountable; the value we create in
providing the means for our clients, the arts and culture practitioners, to be
self-sustaining, profitable enterprises and pioneering, ground-breaking artists
garnering world renown for not just themselves, but Saint Lucia; The value CDF
creates for the consumers – developing a
rich quality of life for Saint Lucians full of our expressions of self,
building Nationhood, building international recognition, fuelling the love of
Saint Lucia by locals and visitors alike.
The road to the
re-branding and re-structuring of the Cultural Development Foundation began
with a ‘public value’ exercise that engaged
our customers in the development of a new strategy that would refine, redefine
and better articulate our core values, our core purpose, the core need. The
result has been a new identity, new management structure and redirection of
focus for the work of the organization. This new visual image, management
structure and direction were unveiled at the National Cultural Centre on
Wednesday 13th November 2013.
“A key consideration for CDF in the design of
its new visual image was to identify and communicate more effectively CDF’s
distinctive business model,” says Kennedy Samuel, Executive Director of the
Cultural Development Foundation.
In addition to
managing the visual image change and creating an identity, CDF worked with its
stakeholders and Darwin Guard of BOLD Ink to produce a tagline to better state
the benefit of the company’s unique structure and proposition: ‘Creativity, Culture, Community’ now
accompanies the institution’s name.
“The Saint
Lucian personality is the sum of six inescapable aspects. A sense of community emerging out of different and distinctly unique cultural communities; Exuberant festivals and celebrations given potency by our inbred creativity; a thriving culture flavoured by a
multiplicity of influences.” said Guard.
Importantly –
indeed, fundamentally for this project the considerations were a lot less about
the design, and more about the public value offer, especially in challenging
economic times;
“The
company-wide realignment “… aims to focus, improve and expand our current
operations and to carve out a distinctive niche for ourselves within this new
landscape.” said Petrus Compton, Chairman of the CDF. “We also believe this
move will increase efficiency, accommodate our planned program growth, and
facilitate new development activity.”
Now that the CDF
has completed the public launch, the work of implementing the changes has just
begun: The brand work has given us a stronger core organisational sense of
purpose, the reorganization has brought in a wealth of new skills and a
structure designed with efficiency and efficacy in mind. The new structure incorporates departments:
Events and Production; Business Development and Marketing; Training, Promotion
and Development; Operations; and a Finance Department.
In the coming
months, the organization will be actively reaching out and inviting all
stakeholders to re-engage with the Cultural Development Foundation and help
build a new era for the Arts and Culture in Saint Lucia
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| The New Team |
