Kambe Events was commissioned by the NFC (National Forestry Commission) to undertake a review to revisit the future ambitions for Timber festival, its purpose for the National Forest and NFC and how best this can be achieved, in line with the NFCs newly developed vision.
“Kambe’s professional, collaborative and insightful approach helped us to see a bigger picture of opportunity and gave us the confidence to make a significant change from our previous direction of travel. Kambe were a delight to work with and brought together a strong consortia of experts from all across the arts, environment and festival sectors.”
– Louise Driver, Operations Director
The Brief
Make recommendations on the future purpose and aims of a festival-led approach for the National Forest, the NFC and its brand – the vision.
Identify priority outcomes that a festival-led approach should be striving to achieve for the National Forest across the three themes of the 25-year vision: Forest Environment, Forest Society and Forest Economy, as well as for their profile raising, marketing and wider income generation activities.
Identify specific deliverables from a festival-led approach that would support the NFC to deliver its corporate priorities.
Assess the scale of current and future funding and resource requirements from the NFC and partners to deliver the festival. Present this in the context of direct and indirect benefits vs opportunity cost to the organisation
Develop and appraise options for future delivery models against the agreed purpose, aims, outcomes, deliverables, income generation opportunities, risks and cost
Develop an outline business case for no more than 3 preferred options.
The Process
Our review was conducted in three phases,titled Re:View, Re:Set and Re:Think. Each phase informed the next one with insights and research findings underpinning the thought processes throughout.
As part of our review we cross referenced various documents, plans and policies in our early R&D phase.
An integral part of the strategic review was the stakeholder engagement process. The NFC SLT suggested various stakeholders that were key as part of the consultation in order for us to gain a holistic view of the situation.
Stakeholder interviews: Most were done with individuals lasting around an hour. We formulated an agreed set of questions in advance with space for personal opinion and free thinking feedback.
In our final phase the review team, first guided by the insights, generated suitable options individually. We then came together to peer review ideas and settle on the most suitable recommendations to present back to the NFC steer group. This forum was where we could stress test ideas, get rapid feedback in order to adapt, amend and improve our proposals.
Data to insight: Once all interviews were collated and transcribed we organised the data and feedback by the identification of patterns of thought and sentiment.
These key findings were cross referenced with the online questionnaire that was sent out to 212 people. The Insights Report was then our foundation to move forward into the final ideation phase.
The Result
These key findings allowed us to present 10 suggestions to the Timber Festival Steering group. These options represent possible Next Steps that sit along a scale of change required to implement them.
The Senior Leadership Team and Board selected 4 of these to explore further.
We presented full action plans for each of these 4 suggestions of how to model the event in the future, including SWOT analysis’, case studies, content ideas, timelines and potential partners as part of a fifty page report.
