Last week, Maria Miller talked to arts executives from across the UK about the necessity for their organisations to present economic growth as well as cultural value. In these straitened times, everything anyone’s money goes into has to demonstrate the ability to create a decent return on investment.

Naturally, there’s been much debate about this ever since, with Dame Liz Fogan, for example, saying that “accountants making artistic decisions …is as silly as having artists making accounting ones.”

I’m torn on this. Clearly the arts cannot be a bottomless well for taxpayers’ money: but of course it’s often hard to demonstrate direct financial benefit. That’s why our own regional Cultural board, on which I sit, is working with the tourism and heritage sector to create a combined and demonstrable impact on the region’s growth across a number of streams including employment, reputation and income.

But Spring has certainly believed since the start that, if the arts are to flourish in the way available talent allows, it’s for businesses to put their hands in their pockets, not just the taxpayer. And that’s why five years ago we joined forces with composer and concert pianist Nathan Williamson to launch the Southwold Concert Series.

Nathan describes the Concert Series as “…the result of all sides of a community – businesses, charities, artists, volunteers – working together.

“By bringing leading artists to Southwold we’ve raised the profile of the town and the businesses that support us. Spring are the major Patrons and have been incredibly generous, and other businesses have followed their example in sponsoring concerts.”

The last few years have been significantly tougher for every kind of business and organisation than normal. Spring, in common with all of our peers, clients and suppliers, has had to work smarter, make some hard decisions and tighten our belts. But the one thing that has continued on an absolutely even level throughout the whole time has been our commitment to the Concert Series.

My view is that, when times are hard, the ability for a community to come together, to access high quality culture in its own environs, to have something that elevates everyone out of the daily grind to a more intellectually rewarding place, is irreplaceable. I see it very much as our duty to support that for as long as it is required and possible.

So we entered the toughest years of the recession with an ebullient redesign for Series programmes, website and publicity, and the message ‘discover musical contentment in Southwold’.

Our commitment to providing administrative support continued with our provision of the Series box office.

And when concerts don’t quite break even, we have injected funds, too.

The result is that audiences have consistently grown. The Concert Series has added to the value of Southwold as a year round tourist destination for visitors from near and far. Local residents and workers can tap into world quality music in their own little town.

And why do we make this commitment – a commitment which adds up to at least five days of every month donated work, not to mention thousands of pounds in financial contribution? (In fact, we estimate that in time and money, the Series cost Spring around £36,000 last year alone.)

Of course, Spring’s a creative business, albeit one focused on commercial objectives. To be so clearly connected with an arts project of this quality and profile underpins the creativity that is at the heart of the agency.

But it’s more than that: it’s that thing called ‘civic duty’ in which I am a real believer.

Not a day goes by when we don’t think how very lucky we are to run a business like Spring – one of the top 10 most respected agencies in the UK – from the beautiful town of Southwold. To be able to work with clients from across the UK including the Conservative Party and Thwaites Brewery, who see something of themselves in our own pioneering approach – like where we call home.

And in underwriting the Concert Series, we have been able to give something back to our hometown. That commitment is our big ‘thank you’ to Southwold for providing such a great location for our head office, for sharing our brand values, for giving our staff wonderful lunch hours and weekends.

You can’t root every business decision in profitability. Some decisions have to come from a genuine desire to be honourable. One of the ways that Spring fulfils that is through our patronage of the Southwold Concert Series  – just one route by which we support our community and the arts.

University Campus Suffolk offers a fantastic range of part time courses for all types of students. Following a number of successful collaborations with us, UCS asked Spring to create a campaign to let more people know about these courses available across their Suffolk campuses.

What we discovered was that part-time courses at UCS are sufficiently varied to ensure that their students can overcome barriers – time, location and the sense of it being a big step away from ‘normal life’. So Spring’s campaign focused on the ease of turning your ‘free time’ into something productive and fulfilling.

Working with the word TIME, Spring created bright graphics emphasizing the messages of ‘me’ time, and ‘part’ time. We commissioned photography of real students which we applied to the TIME graphic device to support benefit-related messages.

A roadshow has been planned, with large moulded TIME letters produced as a focus for the exhibition space at each event.

We also developed a wide set of collateral including beermats, posters and flyers to be distributed around the Suffolk hubs of Ipswich, Bury St Edmund’s, Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth – the UCS centres.

Spring then worked up the part-time course prospectus within the new TIME theme – a bright feature which catches the eye and reinforces the messages throughout.

And, as an aside, we all had a great TIME working with the team at UCS again!

In our third year, we hit the Design Week top 100. It was an important step for us, since it demonstrated that the leap we’d taken in setting up the agency – and setting up on the east coast, to boot – was paying off.

A visitor once described our location as ‘counter-intuitive’. Coastal, and in a town with a creative heritage, but not necessarily commercial creativity. Staggering really, since we are just two hours from London by train and see an influx of industry leaders every weekend and holiday season, but Spring was the first agency of our kind to set up here.

It’s testament to the skill and ambition of the Springers that we have subverted the ‘agency locations’ norm and work with amazing clients – Bollinger, The Conservative Party and EDF Energy being just some of the big brands who know and trust Spring to deliver effective campaigns.

The start of this year marked the start of our seventh year in business. So it’s wonderful to celebrate another major accolade this year: Spring has been voted in to the top ten by our industry peers.

We have hit the number eight spot for this year’s Design 100 Peer Review. This is based on unsolicited peer recommendation and votes, and we couldn’t be more delighted. A big thanks to all our friends in the industry!

To mark the start of the year in which we will celebrate Benjamin Britten’s centenary, Spring has relaunched the ever-popular Suffolk Coast website.

New features include a subtle redesign to make more of the imagery and bring the site in line with current web style. We have introduced a clean sans-serif font in place of the previous newspaper style typography. We have also reduced the text content on landing pages, and increased the image-led calls to action.

The site’s identity has morphed from a summer to winter image of migrating geese, with a colour palette that evokes a big Suffolk winter sky.

Research into user journeys shows high demand for events information, so there are multiple routes into details of local happenings as well as clear signs of the site being kept very much up to date. Other heavy traffic areas are location articles, so again we have emphasised these in our layout and design.

‘Things we love’ is in keeping with visitors’ desire to see edited content – essentially, the best of the Suffolk Coast by those who know and love it best. The content of this section ranges from walks to shops, from recipes to attractions, giving visitors a flash guide to the region.

We have provided some neat short cuts – for example, a nifty little tool in the header bar summarises the weather in an appropriately conversational style, there’s a quick sign up to seasonal emailers, and visitors are given tabs to social media networks.

Spring’s content calendar for this site sees us creating three articles every week for the site, on subjects ranging from shopping to wildlife, local characters to unusual places to stay. This is the core of a site which is also populated by businesses and organisations located here, who tell us about their events, heritage and other matters of interest for us to edit and upload to the site.

The website was first launched three years ago as the digital home of a content strategy devised to engage an intelligent audience with an interest in the heritage, arts and culture of our area. This audience visits all year round, attracted as much by the Suffolk Coast’s quality food and drink offering, its landscape and lively events scene as by its beaches and big skies.

Spring’s consistent monitoring of visitor behaviour has led to regular redesigns as we maximise the site’s useability for its market. Essentially an on line encyclopedia of the area, the site has achieved a loyal following and often features across other channels including the BBC.

2012 has been an extraordinary year.

The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June gave Brits an opportunity to celebrate her 60th anniversary – and Grace Jones’s exceptional hula hoop skills – in a extension of the fervour created by last year’s royal wedding. This pride continued throughout Britain’s successful Olympics and Paralympics. We brought in a total of 63 golds, 61 silvers and 62 bronzes, stunned the world (and ourselves) with the vision of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony and Thomas Heatherwick’s extraordinary flame.

But I often think, as I enjoy the benefit of hindsight, that it’s great we can’t see into the future.

If someone had lifted a curtain on 2012 back in 2006, when Spring launched, and shown that we’d all – clients, peers and friends – be enmeshed in the third year of a biting recession, I suppose many of us might have postponed our plans. Whatever the size of business, whatever your position, however old your children, however big or small your home, whatever the capacity of your car’s fuel tank – it’s undeniable that we have all had it tough for the past three years.

Despite that, I have seen some businesses soar, geared up to thrive in any economic climate or flexible enough to reap the rewards of the difficult years. I’ve also seen some really good businesses collapse, usually because of cashflow crises caused by sluggish bill payers or their own clients’ businesses folding.

There’s no doubt at all that we’ve all had to sing a lot harder for our suppers.

Spring’s response to the recession, as the first waves of it hit back in 2009, was to dial up our delivery on strategy and campaign management. We restated our process to establish total equality between planning, creativity and application, and focused our work on extraordinary ideas that demonstrably deliver profit for our clients’ businesses. This is not about making any of the Springers’ lives easier, but does mean that we’ve minimised risk for all our clients in running with bold campaigns, and thus helped their businesses to grow – and in the process, our own.

As we near the end of 2012, our sixth full year of trading, I am pleased as Punch to report that we have seen 35% growth in the last year alone – testament to the willingness of our clients to run with our ideas, and the energy and skill of all the Springers, not to mention the advocacy of our supporters who have helped to spread our reputation across the east of England as we grow.

So, as is traditional at this time of year, I’d like to invite you to settle down with a cuppa and a festive pie to enjoy our summary of some of the highlights of Spring’s 2012.

Continue reading »