In December Blue Sail launched Shared Story. This blog gives you some background on why we developed the process and more about what’s involved.
One of the key strands of Blue Sail expertise is developing destination plans – from visioning strategies to detailed action plans. No two destinations are the same, so neither are their plans but there are two challenges that destinations tend to share:
– How to get all the local partners signed up and become ambassadors for the destination
– How to ensure plans are delivered with everyone clear about their role and where they add value.
So we developed Shared Story with these needs in mind drawing on our extensive experience of helping destinations create effective partnerships.
Shared Story is a people and place based approach. It is about working with people in their destination at every stage to achieve buy-in and involving the many in that process, not just a chosen few. It is about valuing and using the distinctiveness of place to guide priorities and finding common and fruitful ground to work together, then translating that into achievable actions to make a destination work better.
We begin with creative sessions to get all the key interests working together to agree what is special about their place. We help partners decide what that means for the place and create a Shared Story – a narrative that people can use to describe the place and what it stands for. It is a sophisticated story because places are complex and multi-layered. We proof the story to ensure it is evidence based and works for tourism.
We facilitate round table working sessions using Shared Story as a tool to help agree priorities and develop Blueprints for action. These sessions help partners identify how they fit into the bigger picture and how they can contribute to making things happen.
By placing people and place at the heart of the process Shared Story helps develop a new way of thinking in the destination. That is why it is different.