Case Study –

Fifth Sense

Fifth Sense is a UK based charity that supports people who have lost their taste and smell functions. They had won a round of lottery funding and wanted to use this money to extend their reach.

Brief

Creating a communications strategy to help grow the charity’s reach.

Process

Fifth Sense was a project started by CEO Duncan Boak, who lost his smell and taste after a motorbike accent. He wanted to help those in his situation access resources to help them navigate life with anosmia.   

A strategy sinks or swims with the buy-in of those delivering the work. 

Trust is critical; without trust and without those you’re working with believing that you’re there to create the best possible outcome for them, your job is impossible.

The first task was to workshop the current communications and identify an audience map of users. 

Next, the job was to align the Fifth Sense mission to grow the support, awareness and research around the smell and taste disorders in the UK – with the audiences and identify the gaps.  

Because of the incredible work this small team had been doing, a couple of the audiences were fine; communications were strong, the social media worked, and there was no point changing it because it was doing well. 

We needed to change the flow and tone of information in other areas because they talked to different people.

I was keen to come in as an enabler, not as an expert, and I still believe that the most critical thing you can give to a growing organisation is the confidence to try things out, fail, and get up again. To hold back for fear of getting something wrong is by far a worse act than trying and making a mistake.  

After developing a strategy report that outlined the audience groups and content that worked for them, I had weekly calls with the delivery team. 

Each week, we discussed their work, what had been successful, what had not so, etc. and what they were keen to try the following week. Over three months, they took ownership of the strategy, and their final act in my time was to create a plan based on the work we’d done on the audience groups.

Outcome