Enable · Supported employment
A council employment service handed back able to speak for itself
Enable is Shropshire Council’s supported employment service, connecting people with disabilities and health conditions to employers who want them. The work was good. The way it was told was not keeping up.
The problem
Enable’s story was told inconsistently, by a small team with no marketing capacity, to two very different audiences: employers who needed confidence and candidates who needed to see themselves. Supported Internships, its most important programme, had no identity of its own.
See
Workshops with the team, a values session, focus groups and a look at the competition showed a service that was person-centred in practice but institutional in print. The people it existed for were not in the picture, and the materials assumed a reading level many of them did not have.
- Team workshops
- Values session
- Focus groups
- Competitor review
Shift
Put the person at the centre of the brand, not the council. Step Up became its own sub-brand for supported internships, and everything Enable publishes was rebuilt so a candidate can read it, with Easy Read versions as standard rather than an afterthought.
- Brand strategy
- Proposition
- Step Up sub-brand
Build
Brand strategy, a new identity and the Step Up sub-brand, guidelines, Easy Read brochures, banners and campaign materials. Then two years running Enable’s social channels inside the council’s own platform, before a full handover: written guides, tone of voice, a case-study toolkit teaching the team to gather and photograph their own stories, and a named contact for two months.
- Visual identity
- Brand guidelines
- Easy Read brochures
- Banners & campaign assets
- Social content
Move
A service the team now runs themselves, with materials candidates can read and employers trust. The handover pack and case-study toolkit mean Enable keeps telling its own story without an agency, which was the point.
- Two years of social delivery
- Handover pack
- Case-study toolkit
- Team training
In their words
“Choose people you can work with collaboratively and who also have a passion for your vision.”
Roshni ShrosbreeCEO, Enable
Portrait to come
What’s the thing you’re trying to change at the moment that you’re finding hardest to make happen?
Work with usNext project
