Communications discovery and emerging narrative

The Bay Trust case study

St Margaret’s Bay, Kent

The Bay Trust is an environmental education charity nestled in the chalk landscape at St Margaret’s Bay, Kent. With its gardens, café, educational spaces, and vital biodiversity work, the site offers a unique blend of nature, learning, and community.
However, like many organisations with rich histories and diverse offerings, The Bay Trust face a common challenge: how to weave its many distinct strands into a single, compelling narrative. The goal is to ensure that visitors understand not just what they are seeing, but why it matters within the wider purpose of The Bay Trust. This is vital to the Trust’s longer-term sustainability.

Our approach: Co-creation

Rather than imposing an external strategy, famille adopted a collaborative discovery process designed to surface the ideas, language and values already living within the Trust’s team.

Through one-to-one conversations with operational staff and a facilitated workshop, we explored what makes the place distinctive. By prioritising listening over prescribing, we allowed the team’s deep care for the land to shape the strategic direction, identifying the core concepts that bind their operations together.

Key insight: Restoration as a dual narrative

Initially, staff spoke passionately about restoring physical features like the lake and water systems. But through our synthesis, we identified that this physical restoration mirrored a deeper aspiration: restoring the connection between people and place.

Physically: Restoring habitats, water systems, and infrastructure.
Emotionally: Restoring confidence, visibility, and human connection to nature.

This insight underpins a strategic narrative thread, allowing The Bay Trust to tell a story of active renewal.

Secondary insight: Interpretation as invitation

We also discovered that many of The Bay Trust’s innovative practices (permaculture, biochar, regenerative gardening) are deeply meaningful but require context to help visitors fully appreciate. We positioned interpretation as a core communications function, turning ecological complexity into accessible stories of learning and curiosity. This ensures that the “wildness” of the site is seen as intentional and inviting, bridging the gap between operational reality and visitor understanding. This unlocks potential for visitor growth by tapping into values-aligned audiences who prefer grounded authenticity over a highly polished and more structured visitor experience.

The outcome

The project delivered a foundational shift in how The Bay Trust understands itself and communicates outwardly:

A unified values framework: We identified five core values that underpin the next workshop to bridge gaps between board governance and daily staff operations, giving the team a shared language for decision-making
Clearer audience positioning: We defined the ideal visitor as “the wild at heart”. People seeking authenticity, calm, and discovery. This allows The Bay Trust to lean confidently into its distinctive character
Actionable Roadmap: A strategic report outlining priority workstreams, including improved on-site interpretation, stronger links between the café and gardens, and a clearer digital presence.

“Working with famille has been a real pleasure. It has been truly respectful - focused on helping us create assured narratives that are based on why the charity exists, what we recognise as special about what we do and the places in which it all happens.”

Keith Harrison, Chief Executive Officer, The Bay Trust.

Why it matters

For charities managing complex sites, it’s easy for operational realities to overshadow strategic narrative. By grounding the communications strategy in the lived experience of the staff and the physical reality of the landscape, famille helped The Bay Trust turn its purpose into its greatest strength: a holistic, authentic invitation to connect with nature.