Greater Lincolnshire LEP Proudly promoting Lincolnshire to the world
A website with tailored content to showcase the best things about living, working, visiting and investing in our county developed for the Greater Lincolnshire Local Economic Partnership (LEP).
Written by Julian Havenhand
The county of Lincolnshire is a wonderful place to live, study, work and invest.
This digital project was about promoting Lincolnshire to a wide audience and finding an innovative, shareable way of doing it. Traditional place marketing is usually delivered using video ‘show reels’, but having viewed several of these we found it difficult to distinguish one from another and to really get a sense of place. How could we deliver the right information to an engineering business trying to recruit a senior level manager from Italy as well as inspire a university student to study here?
We decided to create a website that allowed different audiences to ‘choose-your-own’ content to create their own Lincolnshire story to fit their needs. The idea of a customisable digital solution was born.
Greater Lincolnshire LEP awarded Optima the contract to deliver this innovative project to help them and other partners tell the story of Lincolnshire. The brief was to create an engaging narrative, tailored to specific audiences, including investors, visitors and people wishing to live or work in the county together with an online communications toolkit for partners to access and use. A key part of the project was engaging with users and stakeholders across various sectors and locations. We did this through a series of one-to-one interviews and workshops in Grimsby, Boston and Lincoln. The sessions played a fundamental role in shaping the direction of the project, the messaging and types of resources.
The resulting website we created houses hundreds of resources, but the real innovation is the functionality to custom build a ‘wall’ of resources using whatever assets you like, which can be shared via a link – like a Pinterest gallery. This allows website users to completely tailor their Lincolnshire narrative to their intended audience and allows other visitors to completely personalise their visitor experience.
What we delivered was a new resource and identity for Lincolnshire which challenges, excites and inspires together with a dynamic communications toolkit that can be tailored to any audience, achieving great ROI with the capacity to grow and evolve.