Our Approach

Getting more out of your events

Businesses invest a lot of time and money participating in events, including conferences, market visits, trade shows and missions. It's an important strategic investment. But many companies fail to take a strategic approach. Events are not only about sales.

Our team works with you throughout the business cycle to maximise the potential of events not only for internal and external communications, but also for professional development and organisational learning. Our collaboration starts by understanding your business objectives and target audiences. We build your capacity to develop conversations, capture and promote your insights. We're there, too, after each event to help you develop your learning community and plan the next cycle of engagement.

Strategic communications

We have learned that people perform better when they have a sense of purpose and are working in a place that shares their values. Helping to create a sustainable future is a great purpose. But it requires new kinds of thinking and relating.

It requires the design of rich connections and facilitation of innovation across organisations and communities. It starts with each of us and our people.

Our processes

Contented’s approach is to work with individuals and organisations to design and manage enterprising projects that use places outside the workplace as a learning laboratory, engaging audiences through digital storytelling, and embedding action learning and design thinking, using techniques derived from open innovation.

Action Learning

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A simple but powerful leadership and development technique used by individuals and organisations to change behaviours and improve performance. Tackling real challenges, people work together, studying their own actions and combining their knowledge and experience to find new solutions.

Learners acquire knowledge through actual practice rather than through traditional instruction. An important application of Action Learning is in changing systems – principally, people and organisations – to identify hidden assumptions: things that are so embedded in our culture that we don’t even notice them.

Digital Storytelling

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The term ‘digital storytelling’ is sometimes used to refer to film-making in general and can cover a range of digital narratives, e.g. TV and web-based interactive stories, hypertexts, apps and narrative computer games. Research has shown how digital storytelling can stimulate behaviour change in people and organisations.

Media production is a highly collaborative process; digital stories can be presented in compelling and emotionally engaging formats, as well as being interactive. The key to the transformational power of media production is the emotional engagement combined with the tightly-knit team working.

Staff Engagement

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At the heart of Employee Engagement is a blindingly obvious but often overlooked truth: workforce performance determines to a large extent whether your organisation succeeds. So encouraging employees to perform at their best should be a prime consideration for every leader and manager, and placed at the heart of business strategy.

Our approach is to leverage your business aspirations to deliver more than just profit. A focus on values of sustainability, corporate and social responsibility allows your employees to develop a sense of purpose and an emotional relationship with their work. Digital media helps you get your share of the headlines too.

Open Innovation

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Working with people outside your organisation brings in new ways of thinking and is a powerful way of engaging target audiences. Open Innovation can feature company challenges, productive communities of collaborators and creative ideas or technologies. Any stakeholder can be a source of innovation - such as universities, investors, customers or suppliers.

These partners can then work together to develop pilots and the most promising are brought to market through a variety of collaborative business models, such as joint ventures, licensing deals or acquisitions. We design and manage the process, based on budgets and attitudes to risk, so the whole system wins.