Our mission

Our mission is to protect, manage and improve Crystal Palace Park as a green, historic, ecological, recreational, sporting, cultural and educational resource in the interests of the community and other park users.‍ Our brand values stem from that.

Communications objectives

Broadly, we need to ensure that: 

• ‘ownership’ of the park and the Trust’s aims and activities is clear; 
• ongoing dialogue with audiences flows more seamlessly, with reduced negative iteration (i.e. as audiences learn to recognise us we can be less repetitive); 
• our brand identity becomes a positive reminder and signifier of the goodwill accrued by our activities, and one which makes us distinct.
  

Bear in mind that we have many close ‘competitors’, occupying some of the visual and verbal space that we inhabit: from the other park friends’ groups, to Bromley, and our partners and clients. The local community are surrounded by Crystal-Palace-this, park-that and numerous similar sounding entities. The background ‘noise’ of all these strengthens the need for our activities to  be clearly signposted and consistently branded. At the very least, we need not to compete with  ourselves.

As much as funds from events are reinvested back into the park, so the goodwill accrued  by positive engagement with the park may be invested in our brand, symbolically and associatively. This may help redress the balance where contentious activities such as hosting  major events are apt to be perceived negatively: by controlling the presentation to ensure clarity of our aims of reinvestment and renewal for the benefit of park users, we may hope to counter any tendency for major events to be seen as purely profit-driven mechanisms faceless promoters. 

This requires a clear and managed content and presentation within all forms of communication (anything from stakeholder communications, website, representation within event marketing, press releases, etc). Such communications are multifaceted, in that we will represent many things to many people, which in itself necessitates clarity between our organisation and its ‘branded’ or ‘sub-branded’ activities.  

Key messages and personas

Useful key messages are already documented and this work is ongoing. We also have a growing lists of stakeholders and other audiences. There is a lot of value in this, but a clear, high-level overview will be important moving forward to distil this work and align our messages with different interest groups. These can be distilled into a smaller number of audience ‘personas’ (i.e. concise descriptions that represent ideals rather than specifics) that are distinctly mapped with high-level messages. From this standpoint, ‘boilerplate’ or pro-forma texts can then be written and approved for ongoing use, from press releases to website and social media, speeding up the creation of communications, while making them more relevant and consistent.

Further definition of brand attributes and values, audiences, personas and key messages (we have some good work on this documented already, but a distillation with clear relative apportionment will help us improve the efficiency, consistency and clarity of our communications). The primary deliverable will be a document outlining a small number of target personas, listing key messages and aligning the one with the other. This will tie in to further, separate work on communications processes.