For over a decade, Creative Tourist has been connecting its culturally curious audiences with unmissable experiences in the North of England. Our updated website is helping us to go wider and deeper with this mission, as we reveal more arts and cultural gems than ever before.

Head to creativetourist.com and you’ll find guides to cultural destinations right across the North, from small towns to major cities. These guides join the dots between standout attractions of every kind, from heritage sites to future-leaning theatre shows. The idea is to encourage readers to explore both what’s on their doorstep and what lies beyond their usual arts and cultural stomping ground, while revealing connections between places.

There’s a huge amount of information on the site, but it’s incredibly easy to find, with improved navigation getting you to the heart of the matter in a few clicks. Events feeds, for example, now allow you to search by both category and location. Looking for exhibitions in Leeds? Or theatre in York? There’s a filter for that.

Explore these new features – and many more besides – while taking a quick trip around our new site. We have to say, we’re rather proud of it.

We are currently recruiting for a Project Analyst to join our growing Digital Transformation Team

Key Purpose and Role

You will play a key role in our digital transformation projects by bringing your project management and data analysis skills and experience to our team. You will manage the workflow platform for a major tourism project and use it to support and track the progress of over 450 business participants as they move through a digital transformation programme – measuring the impact of interventions on their digital maturity and informing the development of the programme. Experience with cloud-based task management systems such as Monday.com or Asana is essential, while experience with business intelligence platforms such as Power BI is highly desirable.

Manchester based, full time, 12 month contract leading to a permanent position with scope for hybrid home-working.

For more information and how to apply please see here – Project Analyst Job Pack

We are currently recruiting for an early-career level role that puts you at the heart of what we do – you’ll be involved with our core product – CultureHosts and our diverse project clients.

It’s a customer-facing role, a data analyst role and a design solutions role. You can have experience in any of these and we’ll help upskill you with the rest. We want to help you understand our customers and clients better. In turn, you tell us their stories through different types of data and interaction, and work with us in designing brilliant solutions and opportunities.

What this role brings to the team

Your work will have a positive impact in:

• • Meeting clients’ digital marketing and analytics needs, and extending strategic performance
  • Developing and promoting best practices in digital marketing and communications and product management
  • Developing and optimising our own digital platforms, including creativetourist.com and CultureHosts
  • Creating brilliant relationships with our users and clients
  • Affecting how audiences engage with cultural and tourism experiences in the UK and beyond

Manchester based, full time, permanent position with scope for hybrid home-working

For more information and how to apply please see here – Customer Engagement & Data Associate Job Pack

We are currently recruiting a Sales and Campaign Manager to promote our award winning website and to communicate and secure campaigns from partners who match our brand profile. 

CreativeTourist is our culturally focused What’s On website for Manchester and, increasingly, the North which we have been proud to run successfully for over 12 years.

Award winning, and highly regarded for its quality guides to cultural events and destinations, CreativeTourist.com has a large and active following of readers interested in arts and culture, food and drink and destination experiences. The site has adapted over that time, continually responding to the changing needs of the cultural sector and the interests of culturally motivated audiences with a click-through rate that is three times the industry average.

• Website audience:
• Ages 25 – 55+
• 75% North West based
• 130,00 visitors each month
• 37,000 social media followers
• 7,000 newsletter subscribers
• 16% click-through rate to partner websites

CreativeTourist is about to have a 2022 refresh and this will open up significant new campaign opportunities. The Sales and Campaign Manager will communicate those opportunities with our cultural partners, procuring campaigns for our editorial team to deliver.

Manchester based, part-time 6 month contract, potentially leading to a more permanent position.

For more information on the role and how to apply please see here Sales and Campaign Manager Job Pack

We are delighted to share a really exciting job opportunity to work full time on an 18-month Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) to develop and embed a range of strategic management capabilities that will facilitate the rapid growth of the business by exploring digital transformation and exploiting digital market opportunities in the UK cultural heritage and tourism sector.

Employed and supported by a team of academic experts from the Manchester Metropolitan University, you will be based at CTConsults premises in the vibrant and growing Northern Quarter Manchester City Centre.

For more information about the project and how to apply click here 

Our focus is bringing innovation thinking to the worlds of culture and heritage-led destination development, place making, travel and tourism – and we are recruiting again to our expanding industry-leading agency.

One of our specialisms is to drive digital transformation in these sectors by bringing together the capabilities needed to help organisations, partnerships and destinations be more visible, grow and thrive. We help our 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 behaviours and practices.

With a number of significant projects on the books, such as supporting partners in the West Midlands as they gear up for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games and supporting Failte Ireland, the national tourism authority in its plans to align pandemic recovery with digital transformation, we are realising our ambition to build a unique team with a focus on cultural-tourism digital transformation.

In recent months we have recruited successfully to several new roles – and continued growth has created a need for additional Project Managers as the business continues to grow at pace. Alongside your project management skills, you need to be personable, persuasive and patient communicators, as we take our clients on ‘new’ journeys.

The Strategic Projects Manager is a senior position where you will take responsibility for a significant portfolio of projects and play a part in the future development of the business.

The Project Manager will start out managing a key programme and product within the business,with lots of scope for future growth.

If you are interested in digital, digital transformation and applying it to the worlds of culture, destination-marketing, travel and tourism, we believe we can offer really exciting new opportunities, where you will be stretched, stimulated and rewarded, knowing that you are making a real difference to post-pandemic sector recovery, innovation and sustainability of a key industry.

Start your next-step career conversation with us by sending an application over as soon as you can – and not later than Friday 25^th February 2022, 12 noon.

Job packs here:

CTConsults Job Description – Strategic Projects Manager

CTConsults Job Description – Project Manager

Note salary ranges are indicative/negotiable subject to the mix of experience and aptitude – Strategic Projects Manager expected £40k+ / Project Manager expected £33k+).

Congratulations to the team who took on the huge undertaking of delivering the All Party Parliamentary Group report ‘The Case for Culture:What Northern Culture Needs to Rebuild, Rebalance and Recover’.

CTConsults is proud to have supported this crucial, laudable and urgent work. The publishing of this report is a significant step towards positioning culture as the fastest way to achieve the Levelling Up ambitions for our region. The cross-party support for the report demonstrates the shared understanding that culture is a vital tool for regeneration and recovery.

In particular, we are pleased to see the prioritisation of improving digital infrastructure  – we are passionate that digital transformation within the cultural and tourism sectors is essential to drive sector growth and innovation.

Collaboration talks to heart of our core values. This is the first time the North has come together as a region to champion and create a pan-Northern vision for the cultural sector, and we are hopeful it will bring together many of the initiatives and programmes we have been involved with and advised on over the last 10 years to support destination marketing, in relation to cultural assets.

Many of our current and former clients are featured case-studies  in the report – both urban and rural – such as York where we delivered a place brand, and Cumbria where we are currently developing a cultural strategy.

How will CTConsults implement the recommendations of this report? We will continue to commit to working with our clients to ensure culture is ingrained in all sectors. We care deeply about cultural- and place-based collaboration, and will continue to help places prominently position culture, heritage and tourism within their investment principals as tool for Levelling Up across all our work, whether cultural strategy, placemaking, digital transformation or place brand.

Once again, thanks and applause to the Northern Culture Club on this achievement, and we look forward to working with partners to realise its aims.

Before Christmas, Amy, Alex & Andrew visited West Cumbria to conduct a stakeholder workshop, with our associate John Knell of The Intelligence Agency. CTConsults has been commissioned to develop a Cultural Strategy for the area, a vast and rugged region which encompasses industrial and maritime heritage, futuristic technologies, sandy coast and the quieter areas of the Lake District National Park. 

The workshop was held at the Florence Arts Centre, located at a former haematite mine just outside of Egremont. When the mine opened in the late 19th century, it was the deepest in Europe; at its closure in 2008, it was the last working deep mine on the continent. Since then, the site has been home to an active artist community and arts centre, comprising studios, theatre & events space, gallery, café and shop.  The arts centre is one of the partners on the recently announced Creative People & Places project for West Cumbria.

The former mining infrastructure looms over the arts centre, and iron ore dust coats everything with a striking, rich red pigment. It is an atmospheric location which speaks to both the industrial and agricultural heritage of the area. On the rainy day we visited, even the puddles were bright red. Pigment from the mine has been used for centuries by local farmers, who use it to mark the fleeces of the famous Cumbrian Herdwick sheep. 

Now, the artists working at Florence use this pigment to create their own paints, inks and pencils. The Florence Paintmakers use locally-sourced materials and traditional techniques to manufacture the products by hand. This range of high-quality art materials can be purchased here and provides a sustainable source of income for the Centre. More information and images can be found here.

This is a brilliant example of creative placemaking, where the very ground itself is used to create art which is distinctly and uniquely of this place. The CTConsults team looks forward to exploring more of West Cumbria on further visits, as the project progresses.