Ickworth House, National Trust
Spirit of Place
Toolkit 2018
Our first meeting was about a potential temporary exhibition around a roof conservation project. When I asked about what was guiding the brief from a ‘property brand point of view’ our discussion turned into a brief to re-write a traditionally descriptive Spirit of Place, and develop a more directive ‘toolkit’ that could help the team create the brief for the roof project as well as any future briefs for visitor experience work.
Context – The Spirit of Place (SoP) document – along with a Statement of Significance, Conservation Management Plan, Property Marketing Plan, etc – is a key component in steering the Experience Design work for National Trust properties across all departments and visitor touch-points. However, many SoPs have historically been written in a factual and overly descriptive manner, resulting in staff and volunteers often finding them unhelpful in guiding or inspiring ideas for visitor engagement.
The challenge – How might a property’s SoP document be reworked to be easier to use, and better at directing teams towards visitor experience ideas that are more relevant to both the property and visitors alike? And is the ‘spirit’ of a place akin to a ‘brand personality’?
Misc. workshop material
My process – Site familiarisation visits and desk-based research; one-to-one meetings with key volunteers and staff across departments; running multiple full-day workshops, which were followed by iterative rounds of draft SoP tests, leading to a preferred SoP format; creating a deck of initial ideas to explore across several property locations, events, or initiatives; presentations to wider/regional teams, and hand-over of documents for ongoing testing and evolution with the property teams.
For Ickworth, I arranged the ‘toolkit’ into an A1 poster that the NT team could put up in offices – to act as a continual reminder and reference point for new briefs or ongoing projects.
A couple of final presentation slides.
Intro pages to the booklet version of the toolkit.
Above: The toolkit – Eight A4 pages that can be grouped into an A1 poster format.
I have also recently worked with National Trust teams at Felbrigg Hall and Anglesey Abbey on Spirit of Place work, following a similar process. For the SoP work I make the point that it ought to be regarded as a rolling prototype, to be continually tested and refined by the property team.