Lucy Ibrahim

Coordinator City Marketing – City of Ballarat    

In late 2019, the City of Ballarat facilitated a community-led project that gave the people of Ballarat the opportunity to say what they wanted the city to look in the future. The community was asked how they felt about Ballarat at the time, their vision for the future, and how they thought that vision could be realised.

This project inspired the Ballarat Prosperity Framework – a blueprint designed to help shape Ballarat in a way that reflected the place’s past, as well as a future it’s people aspire to. This work is at the heart of Council’s planning processes and continues to shape the conversation around unifying the city, building community pride and celebrating what it means to be from Ballarat.

In March 2020, Ballarat was named by RMIT as Australia’s most liveable regional city, but by April the reality of COVID-19 had well and truly sunk in. The moment of pause provided by the pandemic gifted the city’s leaders with the opportunity to plan how Ballarat could capitalise on the increased interest in regional living. This planning led to a whole-of-city brand framework being developed. This work gone on to inspire a website targeting potential residents, businesses and visitors, a community-based campaign We Are Ballarat, and destination marketing campaign Made of: Ballarat – all of which were launched a year on from the first planning meetings in April 2021.

In this session, Kelli and Lucy will present their learnings from the past two years, the importance of grounding everything in local wants and aspirations, and how they are measuring the success of their work. It is a must for community leaders wanting to learn from those that have, from scratch, undertaken a multi-pronged approach to Place Branding.

 

Biography:

Lucy has spent most of her career in creative agencies leading strategy, conceptual development and campaign execution for destination and event brands, including New Caledonia, Tourism New Zealand and Adobe. After 15 years in Sydney, Melbourne and London, Lucy discovered Ballarat and instantly fell in love. She saw the opportunity for a young family to carve out a new lifestyle, and since then she has headed up tourism marketing for the city before taking on the challenge of marketing Ballarat more broadly in the areas of economic growth and prosperity.