verview:
OrangeDoor has undergone a beautiful metamorphosis in the past two years into a purpose-led strategic and creative shared-experience agency whose values are connected to real action.
We are female-owned-and-led with the values and heart of our founder at our core and we now have a fresh new management team working with our founder with renewed energy and purposeful ambition complementing the legacy and quality of everything that has already been built.
Our values have remained consistent for 22 years; Integrity, Passion, Professionalism and Creativity, with the addition of ‘Truth’ in 2021 to counter the post-truth era and reinforce Integrity and Professionalism in our values. As importantly, we have also introduced Truth as a call to our people to be their true selves and we embrace and encourage differences and diversity of thought. This also supports our 3 newly articulated 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
Because we believe in connecting our values to our actions, in the last year alone we have:
- Reorganised the business around our application for, B-Corp status and joining isla
- We have hired from the Government’s KICKSTART scheme and supported initiatives such as Fast Forward 15, The Collaborative Future, and the Creative Mentor Network
- We run UK Creative Festival, whose purpose is to improve diversity in the UK’s creative sector, at cost, and advise the Creative Foundation, DWEN and WEConnect International pro bono.
Our internal people-policies and support have also taken significant steps forward and we believe this approach has enabled us to hire some of the industry’s best talent when other agencies are having trouble attracting people from a diminishing pool.
Just some of these policies and activities include:
- A new menopause policy & a brand new breastfeeding policy
- 2 x Employee recognition schemes
- Quarterly ‘OrangeDoor Outstanding Contribution Award’
- Any time ‘MASSIVE Thank-You award’
- Improved frequent one-to-ones and performance plans + info-sharing meetings to help our people be the best they can possibly be
- Full wellbeing programme and all staff activity programme including family events
- Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion recruitment policy
- Implemented Responsible Sourcing policy
- Improved Environmental policy
- Developed an Environmental Management system for the business.
- 100% of office waste was successfully recycled
As a result we have seen:
- 84% employee growth in permanent roles since our lowest point in the year before
- 43% of employees who were made redundant have been re-employed since the pandemic
- 10 brand new roles and job titles have been created 2021/22
- 40%+ of staff have received a promotion.
- 61% of staff salaries are above average salary rates against industry benchmarks (ref: Glassdoor 2022).
- 100% age diversity with an even share between 18-59 years
- 60% of our staff identify as female
- 92 days (736 hours) spent training our staff in 2021/22
Meanwhile we also refreshed the agency brand and built the first stage of our new website which you can see here: www.weareorangedoor.com
Virtual Events & Services
Necessity is the mother of all invention and COVID proved to be a real opportunity for us to become industry-leaders in creating, developing and delivering world-class virtual and hybrid events. We turned the office into a COVID-safe filming and production studio and invested heavily in the people, the technology and the supply chain to help our clients flourish in a new events landscape.
We developed new approaches, new formats, new delivery mechanisms, new engagement criteria and new ideas! to overcome the restrictions that in turn made us a better agency.
We developed a proprietary approach to creating different formulas of virtual and hybrid events to match the clients’ marketing funnel stages and marry with the stages of their customers’ buying journeys. We integrated our thinking into Account-based marketing (ABM), Net-new acquisition, 3rd-party broad-reach, VIP entertainment and sales-led relationship initiatives, as well as employee-focussed acquisition, retention and nurture programmes. We cemented and validated the role of events in our clients’ integrated channel marketing programmes which led to us being invited to sit at our clients’ strategic tables.
Our number of virtual and hybrid events increased 375% YoY in 2021 from lockdown 2020 (x20 vs x75) and we had a 360% growth of new brand active clients in the same period (x3 vs x11).
We are super-proud of how the team adapted and evolved and how we fine-tuned our services to reflect the changing needs of our clients. Two of the projects that best reflect our work over that period are:
Future Outlook
The last two years has seen a seismic change in the marketing landscape not least due to the changes in customer attitudes to brands’ roles in society. The last ten years has also seen a huge swing towards data and tech-stack-led marketing and though this will remain as valuable insights platforms, we see the resurgence of storytelling in a more human-centric world as people crave personal engagement and inspiration.
OrangeDoor are investing significant resource into Research, Technology and Creativity in 2022/3 to pave the way for new approaches in shared experiences and insight-led creativity.
At the centre of this future growth will be our people and our clients. Closer development programmes are being forged with both and we are excited about creating a new, more purposeful, cleaner and diverse future at OrangeDoor and within our industry.
