CLARION HOUSING GROUP IS NOT ONLY THE LARGEST BUT ONE OF THE OLDEST SOCIAL LANDLORDS IN THE UK.

With over 100 years of heritage the group has become Europe’s largest housing association, working across 170 local constituencies. With a truly social mission, it is essential their people deeply connect with why their work matters, however, at such a large scale, this is complicated.

We worked with Clarion Housing Group to help develop this articulation, taking into account the requirement to communicate across all employees, with a diverse range of roles and accessibility across the country. Another important consideration, was taking their Executive Committee on the journey too.

This group was responsible for approving ‘strategy communications’ and therefore needed to buy in to the process and proposed articulation. With this in mind, we worked with the Strategy and Communications teams to develop a phased approach to the messaging that would see the ideal position be achieved via a series of iterations to avoid creating too much of a jump from the status quo initially.

We started the design process for both the creative and narrative components by identifying the key takeaways from this content. What did we want people to know and do as a result of interacting with these communications? Using this insight as a basis, we were then able to begin the creative process and started by building a ‘strategy on a page’ document that would house all of the high-level essential content we wanted everyone to know and understand.

This document was created with interactive functionality to enable employees to explore deeper levels of content they were most interested in, without overcrowding a clear and simple front page. We staged our timings for the development of this document to enable the Strategy and Communications teams to share a test version with the Executive Committee, enabling them to familiarise themselves with the content and functionality – as well as provide their feedback.

The result was a document fully supported by the Executive Committee which was launched across the organisation with a plan for additional supporting materials and activity to follow. Clarion Housing Group will revisit the interactive document on a 6-monthly basis to add updates on key projects and initiative to keep employees informed on progress.