ABOUT

A Choir of Our Time – a new community choir in Lambeth and Southwark which brings together amateur and professional singers for a one-off spectacular performance of Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre.

Task: There were two stages to this project, choir recruitment marketing for the Local Vocals, followed by event marketing for the collaborative production taking place as part of Southbank Centre's Neighbourhood Festival.

Stage one involved creating a visual identity for recruitment materials to encourage people who may not normally engage with the arts to join the Local Vocals choir; the challenge was creating a style that removed the barriers and perceptions that stop people from joining local arts groups.

Stage two focused on creating a name for the larger scope of the project and a visual identity for the marketing campaign driving people to buy tickets to the performance. The design style had to represent Morley College, other key stakeholders and fulfill the primary objective of driving ticket sales.

Solution: The first stage of recruitment had a design style that was fun, colourful and engaging – it worked to change the perception of choirs as exclusive and encourage hard-to-reach members of the community to engage. The jargon was removed and simple messaging urged people to come and give it a go if they enjoyed singing. The marketing was successful with over 50 members of the new Local Vocals choir performing in the project’s performance.

For stage two, the design concept focuses on one main image of a dandelion, which represents the nature of different elements of the project, e.g. the different community choirs and BBC Singers. It also works well with the theme of Tippett’s oratorio; a story of hope and optimism in a time of war. The dandelion design theme was applied to a range of materials, including posters, leaflets and the event programme in addition to consulting on the application of the concept to the website.