Leeds 2023: Year of Culture
Helping bring a city-wide cultural celebration to life through clear, engaging storytelling.
The challenge we faced
LEEDS 2023 was a year-long celebration of culture across the city, featuring hundreds of events spanning art, music, sport and community activity. Designed to reach people in every part of Leeds and beyond, the programme combined large-scale cultural moments with grassroots participation.
The scale and ambition of LEEDS 2023 created a complex communications challenge. The programme needed to engage a broad, diverse audience – from lifelong arts audiences to people who wouldn’t normally attend cultural events.
At the same time, there were multiple stakeholders, high public visibility and constant activity across the city. The challenge was to create clear, consistent, and engaging content that could cut through – building awareness, excitement and participation without overwhelming audiences.
We were brought in to support launch activity and ongoing content – working across campaign copy, editorial, event content, photography and video.
How we helped them
• Developed copy and concepts for the ‘One Year To Go’ launch campaign, helping to set the tone and build momentum ahead of the programme year.
• Wrote accessible, engaging content for dozens of events across all three programme phases, featured on the website and in printed guides distributed city-wide.
• Produced photography and talking-head video interviews for Me & 23, capturing the voices of staff and volunteers involved in the year.
• Conducted and wrote editorial interviews, including features with parkour athlete David Nelmes and the Hyde Park Picture House, bringing human stories into the programme.
• Worked within an established tone of voice, ensuring consistency across a wide range of content formats and audiences.
• Collaborated with internal teams and stakeholders to deliver content across multiple channels and outputs.
The impact we made
The ‘One Year To Go’ campaign delivered strong engagement across platforms, generating over 1 million impressions, thousands of interactions, and significant audience growth – helping build early momentum and visibility for the year ahead.
The content we created supported awareness and participation across a programme spanning the entire city. Internal stakeholders responded positively to the clarity, tone, and quality of copy, video and photography.
What they said
Just wanted to say a massive THANK YOU for all the work you've done on the content strategy and campaigns. It looks and sounds incredible and really takes us to another level in terms of our online presence. I love how you've translated our tone of voice into written content, and the assets looks amazing. Thank you so much!