Chingford Mount - Summer Window Art Trail - Waltham Forest Council
Located within the shopping district of Chingford Mount, North East London, Waltham Forest Council and their “Safe Streets” team are keen on providing high street animation within the town centre whilst pledging to keep residents safe and secure.
This is all to increase footfall, and to create a happier, more engaged resident by using WeTheSeeds public art installations and campaigns as a means to bridge the gap between the community and the high street.
This project aims to build on the town centre branding we created previously to create a summer-themed high street animation, in a way in which not only puts a friendly face to businesses, creates local resident cohesion and boosts tourism - Creating a safer environment for all.
We Are Chingford Mount
The process
WeTheSeeds created a campaign strategy which set out to utilise the area’s existing town centre branding. We wanted to showcase an overall feeling of cohesion, participation and inclusion, as well as a nod to safety. Therefore, we opted with the campaign name “We Are Chingford Mount”
We set out to collect stories from local residents to create a more “humanised animation". Based on our previous learnings, we found that resident trust (and therefore safety) is built through the understanding of the values and character of others. We wanted to showcase the stories of other local residents to guests taking the public art trail to show them that the people living in the area are just as exciting, wonderful and interesting people as well!
This extended out to the businesses taking part in the public window art trail too. In total 18 pieces of unique Window Art Advertising / businesses we set to be part of the campaign. Within each of these windows’ designs, each not only worked with their unique product, brand and service, but each piece was designed in a way in which nodded at each resident story, boasting a co-created nature.
We expected guests to pick up an art trail map at participating local businesses and also cast their vote online on which window painting that they thought was the best, by scanning a QR code poster in the window. The QR code poster also hosted the resident’s story alongside a short game for the local children to play.
We also created the strap line of the campaign: “Extraordinary stories begin with feeling safe”.
To start things off, we created a campaign sub-brand and ran social media ads locally with bespoke social media content creation, this was for residents to submit their stories around the theme of “feeling safe” when living in the local area. We also created a questionnaire and ran an on-site engagement, speaking to local residents about their thoughts, stories and what makes them… them!
Growing the seeds
As we complied the data from the engagement into multiple short stories, WeTheSeeds then engaged with 18 high street businesses in Chingford Mount, creating a bespoke landing page which educated them as high street business about the overall campaign, resident stories, the “Safe Streets” project and also the process behind receiving the window art installations for themselves.
Naturally, high street businesses were very excited to be part of the campaign, as a means to showcase their products and services outwards towards the community, through one of the world’s most powerful mediums of visual communication. This led to the ultimate co-creation of 18 high quality Window Art Advertising digital pre-paint designs that had been co-created with the resident and business, all whilst following the summer and safety campaign themes.
A sample of the digital designs can be found below:
Once the digital designs were signed off from each high street business, our expert design team worked with the town centre's campaign sub-brand to produce relevant promotional media, including an art trail map, window stickers, QR code window posters with resident stories, bespoke landing page with voting system, and pre-launch campaign material over on social media. This was shared with local community group Facebook pages and the council themselves to help with the promotion of the campaign over their own comms channels.
Each piece of Window Art Advertising was installed successfully on 18 high street business. These were painted by our qualified window artist team following an 8-hour installation at each site. The installations became an engagement-style event on the high street with local residents asking about the campaign and wanting to find out more about taking part.
To round off the campaign post-launch, we shot videos with local residents explaining more about their role within the community and the impact of the window art trail campaign.
