Framework for the Borderlands Initiative

The Borderlands partnership approached us for help with an investment framework as part of their multi-million £ growth bid to government.

 

The partners had lots of ideas for visitor economy development across four local authority areas - Dumfries and Galloway, Scottish Borders, Cumbria and Northumberland - but needed help to bring it all together. Melanie gathered collated and analysed all the product development initiatives that were planned or underway to see if there were common themes. She then designed and facilitated a brainstorming session to test her conclusions and work through a set of questions with partners. The result was a framework for Destination Borderlands consisting of a proposition, six objectives and a set of principles that were used to shape the bid and prioritise investment.

 

Melanie was asked to contribute to the project following a number of stakeholder workshops where the views were significantly varied and the aspirations very personal to each community and stakeholder. I was genuinely impressed with her approach. She was not afraid to present back hard issues and facilitated the discussion to ensure that an agreed direction of travel was reached for the greater good of the overall project. It had been a fast moving project and Melanie came in and added structure, direction and measurable objectives to it in a really short period of time. The work that she completed set the groundwork for the overarching objectives for the Destination Theme and the subsequent scoring criteria which ensured a transparent process as we went from a long list of projects down to the final 6.

Paula Ward, Regional Leadership Director, Scotland South, Visit Scotland