Sector
Charity

Location
Suffolk

St Peter’s is a former church, Grade I listed building and cultural venue, situated in the heart of Sudbury. Whilst it is no longer a place of worship, the venue remains open to the public and is used primarily as a space for a range of events. With a big regeneration project underway to breathe new life into the building, The Friends of St Peter’s and its Trustees wanted to transform the redundant church into a vibrant cultural venue.

The main challenge for St Peter’s was to bring awareness to the new role of the building as a venue, whilst still celebrating its heritage. This project involved re-positioning St Peter’s as a diverse cultural venue able to attract a range of audiences in Sudbury. Our ongoing relationship with St Peter’s as their marketing partner won us the Marsh Award for Digital Volunteer of the Year in 2022, a testament to the strong community ties in Sudbury.

Brand Facts

St Peter’s was first recorded as a church in the 14th and 15th centuries, and therefore holds vast cultural and historical significance for the people of Sudbury.
Since 1976, having been declared redundant as a church, St Peter’s has been maintained and managed by both The Friends of St Peter’s (registered charity no. 271090) and national charity The Churches Conservation Trust.
Situated in the centre of Sudbury, Suffolk, St Peter’s hosts a broad range of events; from live music to theatre, exhibitions and fayres, festivals and more.

Project Facts

Former church St Peter’s needed a brand identity and toolkit that they could easily manage, giving them the independence to create their own marketing materials.
St Peter’s needed to communicate with wider audiences using a range of marketing channels that were appropriate for their budget. They were also looking for marketing to strongly support their Heritage Lottery funding application.
The refreshed brand identity for St Peter’s aided The Friends of St Peter’s and The Churches Conservation Trust in securing a £2.8 million fund from the Heritage Lottery, kick-starting the regeneration project.

The Client

Hosting local events and entertainment

Following an unsuccessful application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, St Peter’s were looking for branding and marketing support to position them well with a strong and appealing brand identity. As the largest venue in Sudbury, with a central position on the Market Hill, St Peter’s has a huge amount of potential, appealing to both the local community and tourists.

St Peter’s needed a solution that gave them a strong identity and encouraged a wider audience to get involved. They required an easy-to-manage brand toolkit and a website that showcased their range of events, celebrated the heritage and demonstrated the future of St Peter’s.

The Challenge

The Friends of St Peter’s and The Churches Conservation Trust were in the process of applying for funding from the Heritage Lottery to fund the major regeneration of the building. Not only did their project need to promote St Peter’s as a cultural venue, but it also had to hit specific criteria from the Heritage Lottery Scheme.

Our Process

Securing Heritage Lottery funding

Through a process of collaborative workshops, we developed a brief to create a brand identity toolkit and website for St Peter’s to support them in their regeneration and growth.

Having established and shared a positioning statement for St Peter’s, we began to create focus for the brand going forward. We segmented potential audience groups and used their journey of discovering St Peter’s to influence the brand messaging and structure of the website to improve user experience across the board.

We created a vibrant yet sophisticated brand identity for St Peter’s that appeals to their varied target audience groups. The logo, with four arrows pointing to the centre, symbolises St Peter’s as a venue at the heart of Sudbury that brings people together. The logo is just one of the elements that we provided St Peter’s with as part of their broader brand identity toolkit.

Understanding the audience: asking key questions

In order to successfully establish St Peter’s as a community hub for Sudbury, we needed to identify three key areas in order to develop their brand identity and website:

Which audience groups did St Peter’s want to appeal to?
How do these audience groups behave?
How do we effectively communicate with them?

Creating a brand: assembling a toolkit

A brand identity toolkit sits within an accessible cloud-based brand governance portal. It allows all of the elements that make up a brand to be hosted in one place, and includes the following elements:

Logo & colour palette
Typography, patterns & photography style
Tone of voice & document templates

What does this mean for St Peter’s?

All of these elements have enabled St Peter’s to continue creating marketing material that is on-brand, and to promote their image as a meeting place for the community.

The Results

With a new strong brand and image, St Peter’s were able to secure £2.8 million in funding from the Heritage Lottery to help with the regeneration project. We continue to support St Peter’s in applying their new brand identity successfully across various physical and digital marketing material. Their messaging now encompasses the wide range of events and activities that St Peter’s hosts, and their emotive tagline, “Experience More” , is used across all marketing material.

Since the development and launch of the St Peter’s brand toolkit and marketing materials, including the website, audience groups numbers have significantly grown. Significantly, a broader range of age groups are now attending St Peter’s. In addition, we created an easy-to-manage website for St Peter’s that allowed them to effectively communicate with audience groups and enhance user experience. Our relationship with St Peter’s is ongoing as we support them in the next exciting stage of their regeneration project, along with their partnership with The Bridge Project.

Thanks to the brand identity toolkit and the website you developed for us we are attracting more diverse and younger audiences, I have no doubt that your support has played its part in attracting a grant for St Peter’s from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Thank you very much again. Your team have been a delight to work with and the results speak for themselves.
Oliver Forder – Chair of The Friends of St Peter’s

Mackman Group created a fantastic website for St Peter’s, and this was no doubt an important factor in raising the profile of our work there, leading to significant funding towards our £2.5M regeneration project. Mackman gave us a beautiful website that gives us complete independence to update and maintain the online presence of St Peter’s easily and efficiently, safe in the knowledge that the Mackman team are there to ensure technical updates and stability. It has enabled us to run important campaigns to fundraise and to recruit new volunteers, and the site integrates seamlessly with other third party software which has enabled us to sell tickets to events and link to our social media platforms, significantly widening the reach of our audiences, all which is crucial to our success.
Alli Burke, Development Officer – The Churches Conservation Trust

We are delighted that the work we have done to develop a brand identity toolkit for St Peter’s has proved to have played an important role in helping them secure the funding they needed.
Paul Mackman, Managing Director – Mackman

Brand Identity Toolkit & Venue Website – sT peter’s