Archive for the 'Corporate' Category

Barclays Spaces for Sports Wins New Global Award

Barclays' Award-winning CSR programme Spaces for Sport

Barclays' Award-winning CSR programme Spaces for Sport

Barclays Spaces for Sports has won a Sport Business award at the Global Sports Forum in Barcelona.

Since  its launch in the UK in 2004 with partners the Football Foundation and Groundwork, Barclays Spaces for Sports has created 200 sports sites in disadvantaged areas across the UK benefiting half a million people. In 2008 it was extended globally with further sites and projects already established in South Africa, the United States, the UK, Spain and Zambia.  Barclays is also working with charity Compassion for Migrant Children in China to benefit a migrant community in Beijing.

The programme has already won Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative of the Year at last year’s Peace and Sport Awards in Monaco. It has previously been recognised with a number of UK awards, including the BUPA Healthy Community Award at the Business in the Community (BITC) Awards of Excellence in 2007, Best Grass Roots Sports Sponsorship at the Hollis Sponsorship Awards 2007 and the Sport England Community Programme Award at the Sport Industry Awards 2007.

Barclays has committed more than £37 million to Barclays Spaces for Sports since its inception. WildWest has played a very small part in the success of the programme, designing promotional literature and reports for Barclays Spaces for Sports.

Barclays Spaces for Sports International Award

International Advertising for the Barclays Spaces for Sports Programme

International Advertising for the Barclays Spaces for Sports Programme

The Barclays Spaces for Sports campaign has received an award for Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative of the Year at the Peace and Sport Awards in Monaco.

The awards ceremony was held as part of the third Peace and Sport International Forum, and the Barclays’ award specifically recognises programmes which help rebuild bridges between divided or opposed communities.

Barclays has spent more than £37 million on the initiative since its inception, and it has also benefitted from a further £30m donated from the Football Foundation, a body funded by elite football and the government in the UK.

The Spaces for Sports programme runs in the US, South Africa and the UK.

Satya Capital – an investment company working in Africa

Our new web site for Satya Capital is now on line

Our new web site for Satya Capital is now on line

Satya Capital is an investment company working to provide development capital to expanding and emerging companies in Africa.

Now, it has a new web site to promote its activities and to showcase its work, designed, hosted and maintained by Wild West.

Satya Capital is a company investing in Africa and the huge potential of that continent, and it is doing so with the advantage of some in-depth knowledge of vital success factors. The company targets investments of between $20m and $50m, and has some unique experience in working with companies in the region, most notably through the establishment and growth of Celtel.

Satya would be pleased to hear from companies and others who may be able to introduce investment opportunities. Satya is one of a growing number of private investment companies choosing Wild West for promotional and communications work.

For more information on Satya and its work, visit www.satyacapital.com

Electronic Christmas? Our first brief of the year

It must be Christmas soon.

We’ve just had our first brief for an electronic christmas card, which, like the first cuckoo, is a sure sign that the season is about to change.

A lot of our clients and friends like cards that can be emailed. They’re fun, they cost a whole lot less to deliver, they’re environmentally friendly and what’s more, companies can give some money to charity from the budget.

Gif animations can be delivered to pretty much any email box. Flash animations are trickier but there’s usually a way to get recipients to take a look at what a company has created. And if a card like this is done with a bit of flair, it can help underline a company’s position and credentials, and become an effective piece of marketing weaponry, without looking inappropriate.

So, with Christmas around the corner, what will you be sending this year?

What more do you need from us?

We’ve implemented a new web site. At the moment, it’s a simple holding site – in line with our bold new look. You can reach it on our old address (www.wildwildwest.co.uk) or on our new one – www.designwildwest.com

The pictures which you view through the WW device are samples of our work – from the ribbons on the Barclays Premier League trophy, through to our web site for Stock Spirits.

It is just a holding page really, but you can check our address, view or download our (very smart!) new credentials document or (of course) link through from the site to this blog (and we’ll be updating our blog header very soon too).

If you would like to see more from us – either on the web site or on this blog – then please let us know. At the moment we’re debating what we feature on the web site – our past award-winning work, case studies on topics as widely different as corporate naming or annual reports, or simply the kind comments we’ve had from our clients over the years. Please do get in touch if you have suggestions or comments!

And if you’ve not dealt with us before, maybe now is the time to think about whether we can help you? As you’ll see – in corporate design, in web and electronic marketing, and in sport sponsorship activation – we have a pretty good track record. Why not go to our web site now and take a look at our brand spanking new credentials document? We hope it will convince you to get in touch.

Please bookmark our address now: www.designwildwest.com

Consistent International Presence – Rule One for Growing Brands

When we were commissioned to design and build the corporate site for a rapidly growing branded drinks manufacturer, Stock Spirits Group, we were concerned that international sites (the company had several overseas companies) should have the same look and feel. The company agreed and now we have implemented not just a corporate site, but sites covering international sales, US, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Some of these sites are in three languages too, just to add to the complexity, but each one has a standard (though flexible) format. If you visit any one of them, you’ll be in no doubt that you are in a Stock Spirits Group site.

Working with Stock, we made the decision early on that it was important to give countries full flexibility in terms of marketing in their home territories – so we would link out from the corporate site to any brand sites which they had built and maintained for their particular markets.

That immediately defused the ‘not invented here’ syndrome and demonstrated that what we wanted was corporate consistency, but not a corporate straitjacket.

Stock keep on expanding, and as they do, their network of sites grows too. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the next territory to be covered, followed by Croatia. And the brand promise offered by Stock Spirits products and the reputation of the company both continue to strengthen and develop.

www.stockspiritsgroup.com

You only do it once a year. The Annual Report

Standard Annual Reports

Standard Annual Reports

Every year, you have the opportunity to put the case for your company, to analyse its trading position and the measures it is taking to ensure continued profitability and growth. There’s no question that the Annual Report is an important document.

It will be of vital importance to shareholders and other investors too, if you have them, but many other groups will study the document, for reassurance or the reverse. Your staff, your customers, analysts and journalists, members of trade bodies, those who supply you with services and products – these are just some of the possible groups who will be interested in what you have to say and how you make your case.

Wild West has worked on annual reports for two of the largest and most successful organisations in marine insurance for some years now. The Standard Clubs of London and Bermuda provide mutual insurance to a large percentage of the world’s shipping, making sure that international trade can continue to thrive.

We’d like to think that our design and presentation input has helped these organisations – and the company that manages them, Charles Taylor & Co – to grow and thrive.

Boost Web Site Traffic. Add a Blog

Blogs like this one aren’t difficult to set up. The difficult thing is to keep them updated regularly with news from your company. If you do manage to do that, though, you should see some tangible results and sooner than you might think too.

The web is an information medium, but it’s a news medium too, one where (for example) experts can provide very succinct nuggets of information (and we’d like to think that this is one of those!) which help to showcase your company’s capabilities and what it is good at.

That’s exactly the kind of content – continually refreshed and updated – that search engines love. Too often, web sites are treated like the annual report. ‘We did that months ago’ – people tell us, without realising that by failing to refresh and update content, they are losing potential visitors and more importantly, the business that comes with an understanding of your special expertise.

Wild West is a team of people – designers, programmers and marketing experts – all of whom can bring to bear particular expertise on issues that regularly face commercial organisations – from identity and branding, through to the creation of documents and web resources that will help the business to grow.

A blog is part of today’s marketing toolkit. Ignore it, and you might just be turning your back on business.

Blogs can focus on a specific aspect of your business, on an area of specialisation or something you are particularly proud of (like a sponsorship deal or a social responsibility programme). In fact, today’s blogging software is often enough to organise and publish all the marketing information that a smaller, specialist company may have the bandwidth to put out. That could mean that it might be able to do without the expense of a web site altogether, at least at the outset. Something to think about there, particularly for start-up companies!

Stock Spirits – Partying Around the World

Boznia-Herzegovina and Croatia will be getting their own Stock Spirits web sites later this year, reflecting how Stock sales (of brands like Czysta de Luxe vodka, Fernet Stock and Limonce) are expanding throughout central and eastern Europe. Wild West will be building these multi-language sites with the same stylish design as www.stockspiritsgroup.com and national sites for the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. The corporate site for Stock Spirits also includes recipes for some exciting cocktails, from the classic Vodka Martini through to an exotic Blue Lagoon. To view them, just click on the button in the illustration panel to the left of each page.

Helping to Eliminate Pollution

Guidance on Responding to Pollution for Dutch shipowners

Guidance on Responding to Pollution for Dutch shipowners

All over the world, shipowners and seamen are being told to eliminate pollution, to such an extent that, in many areas, it is a criminal offence to cause or allow pollution to happen, even accidentally. Much of the burden of this problem – and everyone agrees that pollution must be prevented – falls on those who insure commercial shipping. This is true especially for the many commercial craft who ply their trade on Europe’s waterways. One of the leading insurers is the Standard London organisation, whose managers are longstanding Wild West clients, the city-based Charles Taylor & Co., part of Charles Taylor Consulting.  As part of their response to the need for continued vigilance about pollution and the need to handle it effectively, Pollution Response sheets like these are designed and produced by Wild West in a variety of languages – Russian, Dutch, German and English. Just another example of how designers have to deal with multi-lingual issues these days! You can see more our design work for Charles Taylor at www.standard-club.com/knowledgecentre/