About
Music education and leadership consultant Marc Jaffrey approached Anita to help Surrey Arts to develop an newsletter to improve their communications with staff, partners, schools, and music leaders/tutors. Surrey Arts is the county’s music and arts service, and was also the lead organisation in the local music education hub.
Anita met with Hugh Craig and Karl Newman, senior members of the Surrey Arts team, to discuss the project. One of the challenges was to make it easy for readers to navigate a huge amount of information and stories from across the arts service. The other was to work within the design/layout restrictions of the County Council’s enewsletter service.
How I helped
Anita worked with the team face-to-face and remotely over the space of a year:
• interviewing staff responsible for different parts of the Service to identify news and stories
• developing a framework for the first enewsletter. This covered audiences, goals, key messages, calls to action, suitable stories, and timeline
• interviewing staff, writing much of the content, or editing staff members’ contributions
• providing telephone support to Hugh Craig, the team member responsible for communications
• developing a set of recommendations for the ongoing enewsletter process. This covered the editorial process, guidelines for contributors and how to build and engage the audience
Surrey Arts is now able to communicate regularly with all those involved in the Hub and in its wider work, letting people know about news and opportunities, telling the stories behind the work, and advocating the value and impact of the Service.