Our Director Colin Bell, explains how research driven policy and programme development is something he has passionately and impactfully championed across his career. Here he talks about how this approach led to the creation of 90 new businesses in his role as Business Growth Director at the North East Local Enterprise Partnership.
The North East Local Enterprise Partnership was the custodian of the economic plan for the North East of England between 2014 and 2024. That plan had a vision to create 100,000 more and better jobs for the region during this time. A big part of that plan was to contribute to this ambitious target by increasing the density of scaleup businesses by 50% during this period.
The focus on scaleups was heavily informed by the annual Enterprise Research Centre, Local Growth Dashboard that provides intelligence on high-growth business dynamics across the UK. The report clearly demonstrated that the North East was drastically underperforming comparator regions in terms of its high-growth startup rates.
The report’s findings highlighted the relationship between high growth businesses and job creation emphasising that if the North East was to achieve its aspiration of delivering 100,000 more and better jobs. I was business growth director at the LEP at the time, and I used this research to help identify the need for and build a business case for a programme of activity to support the creation of more high growth startups (achieving a turnover of £1m+ in the first three years) which over time would become scaleups.
The North East LEP commissioned additional research to build on the research from the ERC, to help better understand the target market that identified that high growth startups often shared the following common characteristics:
- Founders were experienced and in secure and well-paid jobs.
- They started the business with a cofounder.
- And didn’t raise finance to start the business (many did once established).
The research also identified that female and black and ethnic minority entrepreneurs were underrepresented and required targeted engagement.
I felt really strongly that I wanted to attract new entrepreneurs to the programme – people who had big ideas and who potentially has not engaged in business support before. Which is where comms came in and where we really started to understand and demonstrate the importance of communications in making the vision of this programme a reality.
I was on a mission to create new high growth businesses in the North East – anyone who knows me, will know that I champion entrepreneurship in the highest regard and truly believe that it is fundamental to making an economic impact. But I couldn’t do that alone and needed the support of communications to make this a reality.
So Jen and I sat down and started talking about my vision, and some of the findings of the report. She looked at this from a different perspective to me – how were we going to find these people, how could we inspire them to get in touch with us so that we could get them involved in the programme and support them to start an amazing business.
By working as a team, policy and comms, having been driven by evidence and data, we created a campaign aimed at the identified market that focused on reducing the perceived risk attached to starting a high growth business and to generate expressions of interest from people with business ideas capable of scaling to £1 million in three years.
Together we developed a fully integrated communications campaign, we analysed our target market, worked with our creative team to develop those messages into a campaign that we then launched across multiple channels including social media and Google Ads, with the intention of inspiring people who had a niggle that they had a great idea. We monitored the campaign, some channels worked and some worked really well for us and some didn’t and we adapted our campaign to work harder for us.
Case studies with successful North East entrepreneurs were used to help address perceived barriers and chosen to reflect the business sectors which research showed are most likely to spawn the highest number of high-growth startups, including healthcare and education and we created an inspiring video to really drive the campaign.
Social media insights were used to identify influencers within the North East business community so they could be targeted with requests to support the campaign and help create a movement of entrepreneurs.
The impact was phenomenal:
- 305 expressions of interest generated.
- 90 people joined the programme.
- 58 high-growth startups created.
- 99 jobs in the first year
- 50% female and/or Black or Minority Ethnic founders
This creative approach paid off, with the film being viewed 26,543 times in the six-week campaign timeframe and 1617 sessions on the campaign website.
Complementary campaign artwork used bold design to convey key messages, all ending with a call to action directing people to the High Potential Startups website to register their interest.
What would have happened without comms?
To celebrate the impact of the programme a celebration event was held with Sara Davies MBE, attracting an audience of 300+.
The reality is that without effective communications we would have had little to celebrate, research would have remained research and not have been used to change the course of peoples lives the way it did and converted into economic impact.
The impact of the evidence presented by the ERC Local Growth Dashboard and the additional research that it inspired is huge – that’s where it all started. But applying that to an opportunity to create impact has been truly valuable, and communications has played a critical part of that. High Potential Startups demonstrated how evidence led, policy and programme development delivered better outcomes!
If you want to engage more people in your research and use it to design more impactful policy and programmes then we would love to help. You can find out more about Content and our range of services here.
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