As 2022 arrives, CTConsults is delighted to welcome some new and old faces to the team.

Starting with creativetourist.com, where we cover events, activities and places across the North of England, we are thrilled that Johnny James and Emily Waller have made the transition from freelancers to staff members. Johnny becomes Managing Editor and Music Editor, in between performing with his band The Blinders. Emily is looking after sales and campaigns for our valued clients and partners.

Sophie Young has started as Digital Data Analyst to support our expanding digital team. Sophie will be preparing insight reports, analysis and findings for our clients, such as for West Midlands Growth Company in their readiness to host the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games this year.

Finally, we are joined by new Place Consultant and former client, Amy Lewis. Amy will be helping meet the demands of our growing place-branding, masterplanning and cultural strategy projects, and is already enjoying building relationships with clients up and down the country.

Welcome, everyone.

Have a look at our Team page for more details about all our team members.

Digital Data Analyst

Salary ranging from £22-27K dependent on experience.

This is an early-career level role, suitable for someone who has gained relevant qualifications or undertaken an apprenticeship, and who actively wants to explore a career in Data Analytics.  You may also have relevant work-experience.

The primary purpose of the role is to manage, process, and analyse data held on our data warehouse platforms – to generate and communicate actionable insights that help us improve our project delivery and help our clients achieve improved ROI.

You will directly undertake and provide support in the following areas:

• Ensure that data held on our data warehouse platforms and CRM systems meet quality standards
• Assist the Data Insights Manager with the preparation of evaluation and insight reports
• Assist the Data Insights Manager with the communication and presentation of findings, analysis and recommendations to clients
• Champion data quality within the organisation and help us and our clients use data to inform business decision-making

Your work will have a positive impact in:

• Supporting the CTC team in meeting clients’ digital marketing and analytics needs, and extending strategic performance
• Supporting the development and promotion of best practices in digital marketing and communications
• Supporting the development and optimisation of our own digital platforms, including creativetourist.com and Culture Hosts
• You will be actively managing data through CRM systems, Google Analytics and Microsoft Power Bi

Check out our job pack to see if you’re the star we’re looking for!

All the details you need are here Digital Data Analyst Job Pack

Closing date Friday 5th November 12 Noon

After 10 years, one of our founding Directors Helen Palmer has made the difficult decision to leave CTConsults at the end of September.

With full support from the team at CTConsults, Helen has chosen to step aside so that she can concentrate on working more directly with the cultural sector and to build on her 15 years working as one half of Palmer Squared, a marketing and audience development consultancy established with her brother Andrew. This will include working with the outdoor arts experts Walk the Plank on their major, once in a lifetime Festival UK* 2022 commission – Green Space, Dark Skies.

Helen commented: ‘It’s been an extraordinary 10 years as part of a great team working to build CTConsults into the agency it is today. I’ve been lucky to work in some amazing destinations with clients across the UK and overseas. But it’s now time for me to focus on what really brings me joy and that’s working directly with and as part of the cultural sector to support and enable organisations to engage with a diverse range of audiences to explore creativity in all its forms. I wish the company all the very best for the future, not least because my brother Andrew is still one of the Directors!’

Under Helen’s stewardship alongside founding Directors Alex Saint, Andrew Palmer, Dan Lukas, and Mat Bend, CTConsults has evolved from its initial beginnings focusing on cultural tourism consultancy and its award-winning creativetourist.com what’s on listings site, into a place-based consultancy with key strengths in digital transformation and place branding.

Helen’s highlights of the last 10 years include developing Norfolk and Suffolk’s first cultural tourism strategy which led to increased investment and support for the region’s cultural sector. Amidst many other highlights, she led on creating London’s first cultural tourism strategy which helped to inform the Borough of Culture initiative, supported Bristol and Bath on their collaborative two-city cultural tourism journey, created new visioning strategies for National Museums Northern Ireland’s Ulster Folk Museum and Ulster American Folk Park, and delivered cultural tourism workshops in Denmark, Iceland and the Faroe Islands.

Over the summer we’ve been busy expanding our team to meet the demands of our growing client base and workload.

Our new Operations Manager Pam McNally has joined us to manage our team, lead on our finances, work with our Directors on business planning, resourcing and generally ensure the smooth running of the office.

Following our appointment by West Midlands Growth Company to deliver the Digital Visitor Engagement strand of their Business and Tourism Programme, leveraging benefits from the upcoming Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, we have appointed Ollie Ferres as our Digital Projects Manager and are currently recruiting a Digital Analyst.

As part of the consortium appointed by Fáilte Ireland to deliver major strands of their ambitious Digital that Delivers programme, we have recruited Megan McGurren as the Bookable Experience Development Project Coordinator, Eleanor Higgins as the CRM Manager and we are pleased to once again be working with consultants Anh Nguyen, Carly Straughan and Mike Newman.

Welcome all.

Along with our regular associates HemingwayDesign, we have been commissioned by Swindon Council to develop a place brand for its Heritage Action Zone.

Swindon was the epicentre of the Great Western Railway and much of its railway heritage is still present within the designated Heritage Action Zone area – from the railway village housing, to the Health Hydro, Farringdon Park, The Cricketer’s Arms, the Carriage works and the Mechanics Institute, to name a few of the iconic buildings and infrastructure. You may be less aware that is was also a fascinating model community – build around very contemporary values of home, work, learning and wellbeing. Following major grant awards the council is investing in the regeneration of the area over five years.

For a quick overview of this remarkable history have a look at Google Arts & Culture’s exhibit of Swindon: the heritage of a railway town produced by Historic England.

Over ten years, CTConsults has developed to become a highly-regarded cultural tourism, destination marketing and place branding agency – supplying innovation-thinking and strategy with a sleeves-up, hands-on mix of delivery programmes and tools to help places develop experiential tourism and place marketing.

Straddling in-destination and digital transformation, CTConsults helps its clients shape and make places infused with cultural and heritage opportunity. We do this through working on projects – typically with destinations and their local or regional partners, more than with individual organisations.

With a number of significant project wins in 2021, we are now extending our very unique and specialist consultancy team.

Job Description

You will work directly with our industry-leading directors to develop and deliver client consultancy work for:

• Place brand.
• Place masterplanning.
• Cultural/heritage/tourism strategy / marketing strategy.
• Partnership development.

We see this as a career-making opportunity for someone keen to move into a consultancy role and environment. There are opportunities for rapid advancement – our aim is to develop the post-holder into a lead consultant and bring new people through quickly.

You may come from one of a number of environments – arts & culture, tourism, place-masterplanning, marketing – even academic research or journalism (this list isn’t exhaustive) – and you will have clear views and opinions about what makes for a great place, and why culture and heritage is a key component in the mix.

You will be as interested in the online experience as in the in-person – and have a good understanding of marketing and digital.

How to Apply

All the details are here in our job pack. CTConsults Job Description_ Consultant_Place_6.9.21.

Please apply by Monday 27 September 12 noon 2021.

CTConsults is an industry-leading agency, bringing innovative thinking to the worlds of destination marketing and cultural tourism.

We drive digital transformation in the cultural and tourism sectors by bringing together the capabilities needed to help destinations and partnerships be more visible, grow and thrive. We help clients harness the power of data and capitalise on technology to support their business objectives, create high performing customer journeys and experiences, and develop digital skills and digitally minded organisation cultures.

We do this through working on projects – typically with destinations and their local or regional partners, rather than with individual organisations. With a number of significant project wins in 2021, we are now realising our ambition to build a unique cultural tourism digital transformation team.

We have been appointed by the West Midlands Growth Company (WMGC) to deliver a major Digital Visitor Engagement project for the region, as part of the government funded Business and Tourism Programme (BATP).

The BATP is supporting the showcasing opportunity of the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games to drive trade, investment and visitors to the West Midlands region and the UK.

Its Digital Visitor Engagement strand will create a new Digital Visitor Information Network that connects the destinations and tourist attractions throughout the West Midlands via a centralised listings platform. The new platform will provide increased opportunities for visitors to discover and book culture, leisure and tourism products via multiple consumer channels.

Delivery of the project comes at a critical time for tourism in the region, with preparations well underway for next year’s Commonwealth Games and Cultural Festival, as well as Coventry recently kickstarting its delayed celebrations as the UK City of Culture 2021.

To support The Digital Visitor Information Network, we will lead a digital marketing collaboration bringing cultural partners together to work on region-wide marketing campaigns that can deliver measurable results through improved reporting and ongoing optimisation of digital engagement.

Dan Lukas, Digital Director, said: “This is a really exciting time for the West Midlands and it’s fantastic to be working with the West Midlands Growth Company to make sure that all destinations and attractions throughout the region will have the digital capabilities they need to maximise their own tourism products and offer.

“The Digital Visitor Engagement work will make it easier for visitors to discover the culture and tourism offer at a time when all eyes will be on Birmingham and the wider region in the build-up to, and beyond, next year’s Commonwealth Games.

“This is a chance to harness digital in a way that both drives direct visitor engagement with individual attractions while also taking a holistic approach to showcase the wider visitor offer by responding to how today’s visitors research and book online, using many different digital channels.“

Becky Hall, Head of Visitor Attraction, West Midlands Growth Company, said: “We look forward to working with CTConsults, whose expertise will prove valuable as we deliver the digital visitor engagement element of our Business and Tourism Programme. This new digital project will lead to transformational ways of interacting with cultural and tourism industry partners across our West Midlands destinations.

“By increasing our region’s tourism digital know-how and collaborating to promote the depth of our cultural offer, we will give visitors a seamless experience of finding information, and booking events, festivals and performances.

“Tourism brings so many benefits to the West Midlands, from improved quality of life to job opportunities, and this programme will contribute to the long-term resilience of the sector.”

We have been working with clients in Manchester and across the country over the last five years to find solutions to the issue of widening access to what’s on cultural listings. We developed an online integrated listings platform (Culture Hosts) for cultural events that powers our own consumer-facing website creativetourist.com that targets cultural visitors to the North and also feeds cultural listings to visitmanchester.com, targeting national and international visitors to the city.

Manchester City Council appointed us to work in partnership to develop a website for residents that promotes the depth and breadth of cultural events and activities happening across the city down to individual neighbourhood level. The Loads to Do website is powered by our online integrated listings platform Culture Hosts.

Dan Lukas, our Digital Director said: ‘We are delighted to be working with Manchester City Council on the Loads to Do website in our home city. It’s great to be able to apply our learning and build on our work developing solutions to the age-old problem of how to find out what’s on. This new website will help to widen access to cultural activities and events for local residents and at the same time, make it easy for cultural partners to upload and share their listings information locally.’

Councillor Luthfur Rahman OBE, Deputy Leader Manchester City Council said: “We all know Manchester is the best city in the universe to visit and hang out in, and whether you live here or are just passing through, ‘Loads to Do’ is the one-stop shop you’ve been waiting for. Opening up a world of possibilities and new experiences to people as they browse the ever-changing listings, the website is for anyone and everyone, young or old, who has time on their hands and is looking for something to do in our amazing and welcoming city.”