THE Fife Economy Partnership gave a resounding thumbs-up to the Promoting Fife initiative at their Board meeting yesterday, Wednesday 29 June.
Promoting Fife is a place marketing programme, based within Fife Council’s Enterprise & Protective Services. It is charged with developing key activities to help raise awareness of Fife collectively as a great place to live, work, visit and invest.
Promoting Fife aims to support, enhance and complement existing strategies. It is an overarching objective providing a foundation on which a variety of projects can be built – across organisations, services and sectors. Promoting Fife is the ‘glue’ binding Fife’s diverse product proposition and anchoring all communications in a common purpose – the promotion of Fife.
Fraser Phillips, chair of the Fife Economy Partnership, believes it is essential for businesses across Fife to get behind this project. He said: “Support and engagement is fundamental to the Promoting Fife programme realising its objectives. A central framework will provide diverse audiences with clear messaging about Fife and its vision, allowing Fife to shout louder and collectively achieve a sum greater than all its parts.
“Modern Fife has enormous potential to be more competitive and grasp new opportunities – particularly in renewable energy and tourism. Our aim is to make Fife the easiest place to do business and this initiative will play a very important part.”
A small team of five has been developed to oversee the Promoting Fife programme. The unit will work collaboratively across identified sectors to inspire world class perceptions and create a bigger and better profile for Fife as the natural choice for living, working, visiting and investing.
The team will achieve this by helping each sector isolate unique claims that support the presentation of Fife’s credentials as being the natural choice in each field.
A Promoting Fife Network comprising marketing professionals from across the public and private sectors will contribute to Promoting Fife priorities. An internal stakeholder group will oversee the Promoting Fife agenda with an annual review meeting with the Fife Economy Partnership. Sharon Rice-Jones, appointed Promoting Fife manager on 1 April 2011, will act as senior officer to the Fife Network.
Sharon Rice-Jones is committed to Promoting Fife. She said: “Projecting a strong positive image of Fife with increased location awareness will influence the area’s ability to attract people and investment. Until the Promoting Fife team was created there was no formal structure supporting the promotion of Fife which may have been limiting its economic growth potential.
“Fife is ready to position itself as a modern, dynamic and competitive place in which to live, work, visit and invest. It has good news stories to tell and must communicate these, its benefits and capabilities, clearly and consistently to external as well as local audiences. The Promoting Fife programme aims to provide Fife with the mechanism to deliver this”.
Our key areas of work over the next year include:
• a perception study to establish a baseline awareness of Fife from which all marketing, messaging and campaign deliverables will be developed
• website redevelopment providing Fife businesses with a one-stop-shop landing page for news, marketing tools and links to other relevant sites
• PR and social media strategy which aims to highlight positive and encouraging news and events to a broad range of local, national and international media
• an Ambassador & Advocate programme which brings together individuals and organisations representing the live, work (study), visit and invest themes who will raise awareness of Fife on the international stage
Promoting Fife’s collaborative approach to positioning Fife will involve liaising with key partners and stakeholders in order to help shape and promote Fife.
We look forward to working with you and help us help you by telling us your latest business developments, successes and achievements.
Email us at promoting.fife@fife.gov.uk or to discuss this further contact Sharon Rice-Jones Tel 08451 555555 ext 442259.
Alternatively, you can follow us on Facebook or Twitter by following the links from http://www.welcometofife.com/.
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Contact: Frances Chisholm
Phone: 08451 555 555 Ext 442689
Email: frances.chisholm@fife.gov.uk
Website: http://www.welcometofife.com
