Winchester Creatives: How it happened

Over the initial lockdown period, many people started side projects and other hobbies to try and quell the boredom and anxiety they were feeling. We decided to band together and use our shared experience, knowledge and skills in the best way we knew, to help young creatives in what is one of the toughest situations of our time. This is how the Winchester Creatives social enterprise came about.

So many people are having it tough during this pandemic and recession, but it’s definitely a sliding scale and I think it’s fair to say that even within the Winchester Creatives team some of us are experiencing it worse than others. Early on in April I’d seen the metaphor “we’re all in the same storm, but we’re not all in the same boat”, and it was a bit of a lightbulb moment — I realised that I needed to use this time to do something.

Soon after this, Richard mentioned he’d got some match funding from Winchester City Council to revive Winchester Creatives in an effort to help students get into the industry. I was excited and energised; leaving uni during a recession is hard (I had direct experience of this back in the 00s recession), especially if you’re hoping to get work experience in a creative agency sat on a spare desk — doing this in a creative directors home office doesn’t really work.

It was quickly clear that this was something that we needed to do, a problem we felt passionate about and had the experience to go about tackling. And so the Winchester Creatives social enterprise was born.

The power of collaboration

I’m a firm believer in collaboration being the key to unlock the potential of a project. When tackling something on your own, you’re only as good as your own skills and experiences. When bringing in other people, especially people who you’ve never worked with before, you can learn and accomplish a lot more. Whilst Richard and myself have known each other for a while, we’ve never worked on a shared project before. So when he suggested it, I jumped at the chance.

There are plenty of old adages about the benefits of collaboration, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”, “a problem shared is a problem halved” etc. My favourite is from Leslie Knope, “They say you’re only as good as your last idea. I say you’re only as good as the people you work with.”

We knew we couldn’t do it on our own so we set about recruiting a team of other like minded volunteers that wanted to do something good during Covid-19. Over the course of 10 weeks we didn’t just create a service, we started a team, a small, brand new, perfectly formed creative agency essentially. We grew organically, we added a design element when it was needed, a video skill set when the time came, and someone with social media savvy when we got nearer to launch. Very few of us had ever worked together before, so to create something from scratch with these brand new relationships forming was inspiring to witness.

The team grew out of a sense of passion and a sense of immense volunteerism that I have never experienced. To the initial crew, the people that got the whole thing off the ground in the first place, Dan Bee, Ary Petrelle, Ellie Taylor, Matt Hampsey and Halina Myers you guys are incredible, thank you for all the hard work you put into getting this going. Alexander Frey helped us out with some excellent filming and editing work. Camilla Coope has given us some much needed photography skills, and picked up the slack in other areas of the project to keep it running smoothly. Nicola Webster has proved to be an incredible social media manager, and fitted in with the team seamlessly. All of these people have put so much time into this campaign over the past few months, and it wouldn’t be where it is without them.

Back to the campaign

We’d secured a £2,000 grant from Winchester City Council on the condition that we could match it through a crowdfunding campaign. Crowdfunding is hard, even on the best days it can be anxiety-inducing, we knew this going in. We found the best way to combat this is with meticulous planning, and responsive communication coming out of the campaign.

We did a huge amount of investigation into crowdfunding and fundraising in a recession, to understand the journey we were about to undertake and the factors that would impact us along the way. These were our key takeaways…

The dip
There’s a lot of information around about how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign available. One of the common things people have found with crowdfunding is that there is a dip in pledges in the middle period of the campaign. It would be scary, but knowing that it was coming ensured that we could plan around this.

The recession
We knew that given the economic standpoint that the country and the world is in, the two consecutive quarters of economic decline would mean a recession would be announced within the first half of the campaign. We knew the corresponding news coverage would reinforce our campaign narrative, and make people sit up and realise that there was actually an issue here. But we know a recession also makes people hold on to their money.

The challenge
It would be damn hard. Whenever we told people about what we were planning before it went live, we had one consistent reply from almost everyone — it’s a very hard time to raise money from the community.

Piecing these things together allowed us to create a more informed narrative for the overall campaign. When the time came to launch our planning ensured that it was slick, and we knew we had a dedicated team that would respond quickly to change if needed. This was such a huge benefit.

Thank you

By the time the campaign had hit its deadline, over 100 people had supported it financially, hundreds more had shared it publicly with friends and colleagues, made introductions to useful people, applied to be mentors or helped in many other ways. It is incredibly moving to see our local and wider community get behind this issue and help young creatives. Thank you to everyone who has helped us along the way.

What’s next?

November sees the start of our mentoring program, as well as the start of our business sponsorship campaign. We’re looking for businesses and institutions to provide sponsorship to help provide our apprentices with a living wage while they’re working with us for 5 months. We want this to be an active partnership, as well as getting a warm fuzzy feeling inside, our business sponsors get to share a live challenge with the apprentices to work on over the 5 month period.

This is an exciting next step for us all to take, and it’s made all the more special having done the initial crowdfunding campaign and gaining the support of our community. I’m excited to see where Winchester Creatives goes next, and I hope you are too.