“As a new person in the CEN organisation I felt a fragmentation in both offering and states. I felt the minutiae of jobs/tasks were getting in the way of a strategically thought plan that was proactive and nationally consolidated. The work we have done as helped me to look at the organisation as a whole and to take a step back from the day to day. I see already a consistency in communications, with state-based staff coming to a national resource (me) particularly in the artwork/creative side of communications. Looking at the organisation with Jacob and creating structure around organisational 'champions' and the situations was a really helpful mind shift. To go from a list of resources, services or events to looking at what situations those resources could be employed in to solve a situational problem is really helpful. Working with Bolsta has been a really collaborative experience. I appreciated the lengths that Jacob went to in understanding CEN. He is sensitively directive and listened and clarified so well. The work we have done has set the stage for a more cohesive and strategic way forward in communications and interactions with CEN "champions" based on the experience map created and not just "how things were done".”
Rebecca Luscombe, Marketing Manager
Christian Education National, or CEN, is a national organisation. They serve 65 schools across Australia, a handful of state offices, and the National Institute for Christian Education. We came in to do their marketing audit, and that audit ended up reframing how the whole organisation talks about what it does.
When we looked at their marketing, it was spread across the states and reactive rather than strategic, a collection of tasks rather than a system. Lists of services, event promotions, resource announcements. All of it was CEN telling people what CEN offers, and then hoping the right people would come and find them. So before any plan could exist, the organisation needed to get clear on who it was talking to, what it was saying, and why.
The big shift was to stop leading with services. Instead of listing what CEN offers and waiting for the right people to come, we reframed everything around the situations where those people most need CEN. So rather than “here’s what we do,” it became “here’s the moment you’re in, and here’s how we help.” That move has a name in experience strategy, situational marketing, but the idea is simpler than the term: meet people in the moment they’re already in.
Part of that was getting clear on who CEN was actually for. They already had a term floating around internally, “CEN champions,” the school leaders they most want to reach, so rather than invent something new, we took the language they already used and made it central. Then we worked out the common situations those champions find themselves in, the moments where CEN is most useful, and built everything around those.
Through the discovery work, the situations got specific: stepping into a new leadership role, facing governance pressure, managing staff growth, looking for a development pathway. The team knew these moments well enough, but none of it showed up in how they communicated. So we ran four workshops, worked through CEN and NICE’s communications, and built an experience map that laid out the key moments leaders turn to CEN, and what they need at each one.
The audit also surfaced the opposite of a blank page: a long list of things CEN could do, and not much spare capacity to do them. So the work landed as a roadmap, not a wish list. We sequenced it by impact rather than size, starting with the moves, small or large, that would open up the work that came after, and matched it to the capacity they actually had rather than the capacity they wished they had.
That gave CEN its first organisation-wide way of understanding its audiences and the situations that shape what those audiences need. The team came out with a shared language and a clearer sense of how to talk to their schools in the moments that matter.
The lesson I’d pull out: if your marketing feels like it isn’t landing, look at the situations people actually come to you in. Answer the real moment someone’s in, and the rest of the strategy gets easier to build.
CEN's first organisation-wide system for understanding its audiences and their situations.
An experience map of the key moments leaders turn to CEN.
A marketing roadmap sequenced by impact, not size, and matched to the capacity they actually had.
Belmont’s vision and mission were locked and no longer quite relevant, and they were mid-rewrite on their values, so we leaned on purpose as a connecting thread through it all.
Belmont’s purpose statement was written to scale. It expands up into a manifesto and shrinks down to two words, and it threw off whole messaging moves, “people the world needs” and “this is where it all begins”. A purpose statement that generates rather than restricts.
