Coventry UK City of Culture 2021

The challenge

How can a city’s position as a cultural tourism destination be strengthened in the lead up to 2021, and in the process equip its main partners (21 in this case) with the skills, knowledge, experience, and confidence they will need to deliver integrated digital engagement strategies for culture and tourism?

Sculpture of angel with wings, composed of knives

Our response

Following a preliminary survey of digital assets (that we also conducted), we delivered an extensive training programme. The programme delivered an online resource – guidelines for best practice – informed by local conditions and owned by partner team members. We needed to address a big shopping list of key areas: privacy, security, and data protection; measurement & reporting (focus on Google Analytics); email & social communications; paid search engine marketing; organic search engine optimisation; online PR; on-site discovery (guides); accessibility; and e-commerce.

Kickstarting a new approach

The process was phased to allow assessment and adjustment to best serve capacity and skills development, through a series of practical training workshops, resource provision (including online and remote) and facilitated exercises and pilot activity.

This has allowed for particular issues to be highlighted and focused on, whether that was Google Ad Grants eligibility, creating ‘search engine friendly’ websites, using Google Search Console to identify issues with crawling/indexing content, or how to monitor and optimise the performance of campaigns.