Consultancy

In my third year, I was selected onto an external consultancy course, called The Social Innovation Program (SIP), run by Burges Salmon and Bristol Hubs. The SIP gave me the opportunity to work with a multidisciplinary team that had not necessarily had any prior experience within innovation.

My team worked with ‘My Future, My Choice’, an inspiring creative charity for children. I was delighted to be awarded The Best Presenter prize when we pitched our findings and suggestions to Bristol Hub, Burges and Salmon and our client. We were even more thrilled to hear that our client was going to take on suggestions that we had made. 

In the team I took on the role of facilitator, Head of ideation, branding, and marketing. Since my team were new to using innovation methodologies and techniques, I learned a lot from taking them through the practices. It was interesting to come up against challenges such as their comfortability with creating out of the box ideas. I enjoyed trying to facilitate an atmosphere for creativity, helping them to shift perspective, remove any self-judgement and come up with as many ideas as possible. I lead them through a workshop of my process of co-designing our logo, exploring, and testing different designs and different ways we could convey the messages that we wanted our rebranding to carry. We conducted primary research through surveys, secondary research and had regular contact with our partners, building rapport and created a report for them, advising them on their next steps, which was greatly appreciated by our partners.

The SIP has given me great experience of consulting for non- profit organisations. Working with this social organisation gave me great confidence in leading conversations, consulting and maintaining relationships with partners. It has also grown my skills in working with new teams, exercising an air of teaching whilst working to achieve a mutual goal. It has helped me to understand how to be a creative thinker even in terms of the way you communicate with your team and partners.