Preparing hospitality enterprises for new business
From 1996 to 2009 the City Fringe Partnership delivered major initiatives to improve the prospects of residents and support London's small businesses.
Download CFP research on the area and key employment sectors, as well as sector investment plans and evaluation reports of its programmes.
CFP projects, project delivery partners and links to organisations at the heart of CFP activities.
Project case studies:
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Preparing hospitality enterprises for new business - the growing City Fringe visitor economy
The Mayor's Office had led calls for promotions to encourage visitors beyond traditional London hotspots. Along with increased hotel accommodation, improvements to the transportation infrastructure, area regeneration, and a position between the West End and the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic sites, this provided a clear rationale for businesses in the City Fringe to get involved in shaping the future of the local visitor economy by feeding into the development of an investment plan. In 2008 the CFP was awarded funding from the London Development Agency to deliver its Visitor Economy Investment Plan, which was based on research it had already conducted in the hospitality and cultural tourism industries.
The one-year programme aimed to promote the area as a diverse and vibrant location with a rich visitor offer as well as the industries as attractive employment options for local people whilst providing sector-specific training opportunities.
Vortex Jazz Club
The CFP's Visit Us project in Hackney and Tower Hamlets provided London-based cultural tourism destinations, such as arts venues, museums, galleries, festivals and walks with a complete framework to create robust marketing and audience development strategies, thereby encouraging new visitors and preparing for their arrival. The participants received support through marketing, audience development and volunteer management training workshops, one-to-one's focusing on business planning and fundraising, networking seminars about London 2012 opportunities and a marketing toolkit to take them through the steps of developing their own marketing plans.
Caroline Quintanilha from the Vortex Jazz Club explained: "As an organisation we wanted to gain more marketing and audience development skills, network and share issues that concern people working in the arts. The Visit Us programme offered a lot of support through one-to-one's, workshops and seminars. We really wanted to refresh our marketing and based on our marketing needs, we picked the following activities; 'Making the most of social networks', 'Impress the press', 'Low cost marketing', 'Maximising your marketing' and a one-to-one on fundraising."
The Visit Us programme thoroughly met our expectations by giving us more tools and more marketing strategies. More than anything, this programme gave us the confidence to start something. In addition, being in a group was a great networking opportunity as it allowed us to share ideas and contacts with other people, which is always helpful.
Following the training, we have already started to apply some of the advice given, by producing a questionnaire for customers and a table to register data from customers. In order to ensure that the information from these training sessions is not lost, I provided detailed feedback to my colleagues, highlighting the key points, main ideas and how we could use them. We are determined to bring what I learnt into the organisation."
