Case study: North East BIC

The North East Business and Innovation Centre (BIC) is a bustling business community which provides office space and tailored business support services from its 14-acre business park in Sunderland.

The BIC’s team of experienced advisers supports hundreds of SMEs to start up and grow each year through a range of one-to-one business advice, mentoring, support workshops and seminars.

The BIC sought dodio’s expertise to deliver some of their recent marketing campaigns and to help improve their communication with tenants and new businesses.

Prospecting for Enterprise is a two-year initiative aimed at boosting enterprise and economic growth in the west of Sunderland by offering one-to-one meetings with enterprise specialists, workshops and information packs. The initiative is part of Sunderland’s Community-Led Local Development Programme aimed at delivering local jobs and economic growth with funding from the European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme.

We designed and created a suite of marketing materials for the programme conveying the values of breaking down barriers and extending the hand of support. These included posters, flyers, banners and a social media campaign. We carried out a photoshoot to create visual content for the campaign and developed advertorial content for the regional press.

To help the BIC to communicate and build relationships with its tenants, we helped to create the BIC Bulletin. Crafting a new and dynamic visual language inspired by the multi-faceted life of the tenants at the BIC, we developed a bi-monthly e-newsletter to showcase new tenants and key achievements of existing tenants as well as new site initiatives and events.

On the back of our success with the enterprise campaign, the BIC asked us to develop a new visual approach to support the launch of their new self-employment programme. We designed and created a range of offline materials including posters, flyers, banners and advertisements and we also developed an accompanying social media campaign.