Visceral Business — Developing Social Organisations Since 2008

Macmillan Cancer Support is making the transition from managing social media to being a social organisation.

Celebrating their 100th anniversary in 2011, as one of the UK’s biggest and most successful not for profit organisations, Macmillan Cancer Support is aware the next 100 years will be done very differently.

Two million people live with the effects of cancer today, a figure that will rise to four million by 2020. With more pressures on the cost of care, Macmillan is committed to adapting to these challenges by becoming a more networked organisation and when they decided they wanted adapt, they chose us.

Working with the Digital Team, we’ve been assessing the strategic potential of social business design for Macmillan as a whole, looking the social leadership capability talent and skills, the cultural readiness to integrate social business principles into the organisation and the user experience inside and outside it, before developing a plan for Macmillan to put being social into the heart of its strategy.

With the Macmillan team we’ve defined the social dimensions of the brand, developed a social brand architecture and a range of strategic recommendations that are now at the core of the way they do things.

The social side of ‘We Are Macmillan’ is coming to life, with social networks and channel strategies to support it, and 100 social brand leaders incorporating social experiences into the way Macmillan communicates, learns and develops.

As Katie Smith, Head of Digital Media, Macmillan Cancer Support when we began the project put it:

‘Visceral Business have been a great partner to work with as we’ve developed our social media strategy. Their knowledge of brand, organisational culture and social media has been invaluable in helping us to shape our thinking and will have a lasting impact at Macmillan. Their creativity, enthusiasm and passion for what they do is infectious and make them a pleasure to work with’.

Café Direct are an award-winning ethical and sustainable business. They wanted to see how they could use social media to augment their business model, bring growers and consumers closer together and develop user preference for the brand.

Many brands like Café Direct are realizing social business is an adjustment. It changes how they can bring out the best in their brand, its positioning and proposition and that there are options to developing a community of interest and advocacy around it. We’ve worked with Café Direct to map the options in their social media landscape and a created a plan for development for them as a sustainably social business.

Developing the core properties of Café Direct in its marketplace, we’ve been looking at the values, attributes, positioning behaviours and points of difference in their sector, and the kind of in depth relationships and dialogue Cafe Direct can have with its users.

In developing a strategy for social business value creation, Cafe Direct had a big advantage we wanted to make the most of, in that their strapline ‘We are the growers and you can taste it’ was already social.

Cafe Direct have a loyal following with a huge amount of untapped goodwill in place towards the brand. We’ve come up with a plan to develop their ethical credentials using their existing activity and bring influential users closer to the business.

With our partners Dub we’ve created The Cafe Directors, a community space for deep insight generation and cocreation. It’s yielding dividends for everyone - for the growers, the fans, the brand - as well as new revenue and cost saving opportunities.

Make Positive are making waves at the technology forefront of cloud-based organisation. So when it came to taking their business to the next level they knew there was also a step change they wanted to make towards being also more social.

We’ve been working with Make Positive to distil the nature of their social brand, develop their network and create a strategy for their social CRM and business development.

Make Positive is exactly the kind of organisation where bringing people, technology and the brand together has been able to give the organisation a sense of greater sense of direction, persuasive brand intent and efficiency.

Visceral Business has been working with Make Positive to create a values base for the business that can enable them to react and make technology gains at greater speed, focusing at a core level on what adds value to the business.

We ran a survey and workshop with the Executive team at Make Positive, assessed their brand positioning and developed possible strategic routes for development.

We then facilitated a set of threshold and stretch values that support and refine Make Positive’s core value proposition.

Looking at the business model, we’re helping Make Positive develop their corporate influence as socially engaged entrepreneurs with a following, Make Positive going from a having a brand as a badge to a social organisation with demonstrable impetus, because they are changing the way they communicate using their brand and developing networked social business opportunities.

PYE, the Partnership for Youth Empowerment, is a rapidly developing global charity working around the world.

Established as a leading provider of transformative youth training focused on developing the potential of young leadership, PYE’s mission is ‘to awaken the purpose, power and possibility in young people’.

They came to us to define and expand the potential in the brand as a beacon of change and more social organisation, focused on galvanising a global audience. We have been working with the leadership group around the globe, using cloud-based methods of facilitation to collaborate with them as a team remotely.

With them we have facilitated and developed a brand platform that defines PYE’s strategic positioning, proposition, purpose and values. We’ve also looked at the name change that saw them simply become PYE, a global confident standard for developing youth potential through transformative working and now we’re working on creating a new brand look and feel and developing its social infrastructure.

PYE’s development illustrates the way we work. As facilitators working with people as a team together it illustrates the ‘is us’ in Visceral Business, and how we’ve been able to go into deep collaboration as agents of change to help clients create change themselves.

PYE knows that as a social business, it is a people business. As Gwyn Wandsborough, PYE’s Strategic Development Director has put it ‘Visceral Business has given us a complete set of elements needed to create a successful and lasting brand - from concept development to business models and more. Their approach is forward-looking, informed by future tendencies in developing socially engaging brands, and the support they deliver helped us to ensure our brand can survive and indeed thrive within a rapidly changing environment. As a client, this approach feels organic, participatory, deeply thoughtful and very exciting.’