Chingford Mount - Winter Window Art Trail - Waltham Forest Council
The shopping district of Chingford Mount, North East London, is a community Waltham Forest Council are continuing to engage.
Within the 15-minute city, they are utilising WeTheSeeds public art installations and campaigns to increase high street footfall, further economic investment into the development of the area and help to grow the community with the council.
This project aims to create a winter-themed high street animation, that has can attract visitors, work with town centre branding, support local businesses and empathise with local residents to make them feel welcome and proud to be a part of the local area.
Winter Window Art Trail
The process
The Winter Window Art Trail is a campaign strategy WeTheSeeds created to engage the local businesses directly with the community, thus creating an attractive, animated town centre that people could feel welcome in within the festive period.
Taking its place within the winter months, the art trail consisted of 15 uniquely designed pieces of Window Art Advertising, which would be hand-painted onto the windows of high street businesses in order to create a window mural trail which was reflective of each businesses’ personality, brand, and offering.
Guests, including visitors and local residents, would be able to take part in the trail, vote for their favourite winter window using a QR code within each window artwork, engage over social media channels via curated campaign content and find out more about the personality behind each high street business by watching a mini-documentary.
To kick things off, WeTheSeeds engaged with 15 high street businesses in Chingford Mount to find out more about their offering, and let them know more information about the purpose behind the engagement campaign.
Naturally, high street businesses were very excited to be part of the campaign, as a means to showcase their business outwards towards the community, through one of the world’s most powerful mediums of visual communication. This led to the co-creation of 15 unique pre-paint window art designs, which all reflected the businesses’ brand, services, and followed the winter theme.
Once these had been approved by businesses, our team booked each business in- ready for installation.
At the same time, social media marketing material was created and posted on council comms in line with the town centre branding guidelines we created for Chingford Mount previously.
Growing the seeds
Working closely with each high street business, our window art advertising team hand-painted 15 unique pieces of Window Art Advertising within 10 days. These were all following designs approved by high street business owners and painted directly onto the shop’s shopfront glass window with specialist window paint.
Our team of window artists arrived at each windows’ location within Chingford Mount in North London to get these window paintings installed. The glass window mural paintings created a real “buzz” in the community, with many residents stopping to take photos and share posts over social media.
We also provided an opportunity for local artists to learn how to paint windows, these were artists whom have worked on other mediums and may not have always had the opportunity to paint a window.
Final installation photos are below:
Once the Winter Window Art Trail had been installed within the public realm we furthered engagement over social media by creating a “discovery reel” which not only showcased the public art trail, but the whole area and businesses in a bid to attract tourists. We also promoted this over social media through paid advertising.
Our team also created printed marketing material, which was given out to members of the community and business owners taking part in the campaign.
This marketing material also followed the town centre’s branding guidelines.
Teasers of our team installing each piece of window art advertising were also created and posted over social media channels.
These were bespoke posts created by our social media team to promote the campaign to an online audience.
Over the holiday period, WeTheSeeds continued engagement over social media, with teasers of the mini-documentaries with the businesses taking part in the campaign, and also posting the final window photos as a final call for the community to vote for each window’s design.
The town centre’s microsite landing page was also updated to showcase each businesses’ new window painting, and a voting form was created at the bottom of the web page for the community to come and vote on their favourite window.
Lastly, mini-documentaries were filmed with each of the participating businesses, as an opportunity to showcase the “face” of the high street business over a video medium.
The videos were insightful to the businesses’ products and services, alongside creating an all important “investable” personality for residents and tourists.
All of the videos can be viewed on the Chingford Mount town centre microsite.
Between the campaign launch dates, the microsite received 2500 visits, with within Waltham Forest being roughly ¼ of all visits during this time. The most traffic came from Leyton, Chingford and then Walthamstow being the top 3.
During our campaign, the landing page alone reached 534 views, this meant it was the highest ranking page during the period.
The Winter Window Art Trail page made up roughly ¼ of all-time page views on the Chingford Mount website.
The campaign’s ads over paid social reached 24,000 residents within 2km of Chingford Mount.