Tombolo was a 3-year innovation project, which developed new products and services to help city authorities improve how they use data to address city challenges.
Story Design
Running a storytelling process with Tombolo allowed us to gain a more thorough understanding of the project's audiences, key messages and the impact that we wanted to achieve. We knew that senior decision makers in city authorities had little time to invest in reading long research reports, so we developed materials that simplified our messaging and vision for the team to use when introducing the project to new authorities.
As part of the storytelling process, I also ran workshops with the team to explore the project's messaging and values in more detail and practise blog writing.
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Film production and storyboarding
One of our first goals of the communications was to raise awareness of the project, so we made a short film to introduce Tombolo and its mission.
Communications Strategy
To achieve high engagement with our audiences and test the products and services that we had been developing over the three years of the project, we ran a weekend-long hackathon in March 2018. Teams had 48 hours to develop digital solutions to challenges that three city authorities – The Greater London Authority, Transport for London and Barking & Dagenham Council – currently faced. The event relied heavily on effective communications to build excitement for the event, ensure that teams had sufficient information and guidance for how the weekend would run, and to capture the process and outputs of the hack.