ave you ever put yourself through a ‘Values elicitation’ exercise? If you have, you will know how enlightening this process is. Taking the time to deliberately drill down on what your personal values are, and which are your strongest/most important, will lead to a better understand of why you make certain decisions or react in certain ways.
This is important because your values inform your beliefs, your beliefs influence your behaviours, and your behaviours guide your actions. This is how your values connect to your actions.
The same goes for your businesses. If you haven’t worked out who you are, how can you expect your customers to know, and believe in you?
At OrangeDoor, we have done a lot of work on this area because we owe it to ourselves, our employees and most importantly, to our customers. During this journey we were delighted to discover that some of our strongest values (Integrity, Family, Professionalism, Passion, Creativity and Truth) are still with us since we were founded 22 years ago.
Our values inform our 3 main belief pillars:
- Diverse thinking powers creativity, innovation and performance
- Decision-making should be based on evidence and insights as well as great creative thinking
- We must balance people, profit and the planet
This is who we are, but why do we do what we do?
An interesting observation of the early stages of the pandemic was watching buying decision-makers and influencers become more empowered. B2B communications expectations finally caught up with those of B2C. As people worked from home and the work/life balance blended, customers’ expectations that businesses play a genuine role in society saw Purpose get a second wind. If you weren’t authentically stating your role in the solution, you had a problem.
OrangeDoor’s purpose is to enable change-makers to stand out and influence others
..In doing so, we become the facilitators of change. The words are important:
We ENABLE – we are a hugely important facilitator in supporting our clients affect the change or actions they have identified.
CHANGE-MAKERS – this is the starting point to our new business targeting strategy. We begin by identifying the companies we want to work with, ones we would be proud to have as clients, and then we go after them.
STAND-OUT – differentiating our clients’ activity, event delivery and customer/employee experience will enable them to stay front-of-mind for their audiences. This also helps drive our creative ambition.
INFLUENCE OTHERS – this ties back in to both selling product and providing a strong messaging rationale so that our clients’ customers can make informed decisions and reach buying consensus around our clients’ brands.
Connecting Values to Actions
As part of our briefing process and insights research we include our clients’ mission, vision, values and purpose and help our clients (in some cases re-) connect their values to their actions through the event strategies and creative ideas we propose.
For our own part, we see two areas where OrangeDoor can make a difference:
1. Improving our internal process, policy and initiatives to have a more positive impact on people, the planet and of course profit, and
2. How we engage with and influence our industry and clients outside of our four (hybrid) walls.
We use the incredible B-Corp framework and are undertaking a 360-degree revamp of our internal process and governance, and have set ourselves the target of B-Corp accreditation by the end of 2022. This framework is giving us not only the structure to affect change internally, but also the benchmarks by which we measure ourselves and become accountable.
Outside of our business we have so far embarked on supporting a number of initiatives including; The UK CreativeFestival which is the brainchild of the Creative Circle and Creative Foundation, which helps improve diversity in the UK’s creative industries. We run the Festival at cost. We are also heavily active in Dell Technologies’Women Entrepreneurs Network (DWEN) community and also within WEConnectInternational, a global organisation that champions women-owned businesses like ours. These are just a few examples of how we are connecting our values to our actions.
The future of Purpose?
We would like to get ourselves to ultimately having a Purpose-led business strategy. Our purpose is currently a strategic filter within our strategy which helps us decide on initiatives. ‘Does this initiative help us with our purpose?– YES – continue to explore, NO – delete.’
Purpose-led strategies are bolder – your business becomes less defined by your capabilities and industry sector. If our business strategy was purpose-led, acquiring and integrating with a lobbying agency or purposeful social media agency could make us more full-service marketing, build on our expertise in the events and experience industry and focus us even more on the positive impact we could make for clients. Pretty exciting.
But for the time being, we are very set on driving value for our customers for what they have employed us to do already; world-class virtual, hybrid and physical events that enable our change-maker clients to standout and influence others.
