Natur am Byth Audience Engagement
The Natur am Byth! (NAB!) project, which aimed to create Wales’s largest natural heritage programme to save species that are close to extinction and help people reconnect with nature, were recently awarded a £4.1 million grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Critical to this success was for NAB! to be able to demonstrate to the lottery that they were going to engage a wide range of people and in particular to reach out to people who had not previously been engaged in nature conservation. Resources for Change were commissioned, by NRW to support the NAB team in designing and delivering programmes of local engagement. The output of this work was audience engagement report, that formed part of the round 2 submission to the Lottery Fund.
What Resources for Change brought to this project was expertise in community engagement, particularly in reaching out to a diverse range of people and good knowledge and experience of previous projects that were successful in obtaining lottery funding, therefore we knew what the lottery fund are looking for.
The engagement report reflected the impressive amount and range of engagement work undertaken in the development phase which included events and activities engaged over 6,500 people across Wales and these people were reached through in different ways, including contacting key groups, surveys, workshops and in other ways. All this work has given the projects a better understanding of the audience and how to help Natur am Byth to make a difference.
The key challenge faced in this project was that it was sometimes difficult to manage as we had to be responsive to the needs of a range of project offers who themselves were faced with a lot of different local challenges
There were a good variety of project officers with different abilities, with a different approaches to the engagement , which meant that we had to develop a series of bespoke engagement solutions.
The outcome from this project is that Natur am Byth were successfully awarded £4.1 million, thanks to the National Lottery, from the Heritage Fund. R4C are proud to have played a small part in the development of the biggest wildlife conservation programme in Wales.