As we round off another year, we take a look at what we’ve achieved and delivered for Kingston businesses and the town in the last 12 months.
Through engaging with Kingston businesses and working with local partners and stakeholders, we have achieved a lot in an often difficult and uncertain period, adapting our approach in response to local and global events.
We have continued to develop and expand our core services and projects, taking the lead on some exciting public realm work as well as rolling out a new consumer brand for Kingston. Find out more about what we’ve delivered for businesses and the town by reading on below.
Attractive Streets and Spaces
To create a vibrant and welcoming town centre, we:
- Deep cleaned over 8000 square metres of pavements, removing chewing gum and washing away grime
- Lobbied the Council for an improvement in waste management and secured commitment to change the Big Belly bins in 2023
- Installed over 120 hanging baskets and maintained several flowerbeds in the town
- Organised and supported 47 markets, activities and events to drive footfall and support town centre activities, including the Christmas lights and market
- Commissioned design proposals for permanent seating, planting and improved wayfinding at the train station, Lower Fife Road and Thames St and are now working on the next phase of making this happen
Marketing the Town
To position Kingston as a destination and promote local businesses, we:
- Introduced a town wide chimp trail to encourage people to spend time in the town centre
- Developed and managed the consumer facing website www.kingstonuponthames.info with 13k+ visitors on a monthly basis
- Gained 1000 new subscribers to consumer brand newsletter managed by Kingston First
- Achieved over 28k followers across our social channels (Facebook, Instagram. twitter), with almost 3,000 followers gained this year
- Developed and delivered a summer digital campaign to promote Kingston with almost 2 million digital adverts shown and seen by almost 70,000 people
- Developed and delivered a Christmas marketing campaign which was viewed by nearly 100,000 people
Supporting Members
To continuously support and provide insight to Kingston’s business community, we:
- Almost 7,000 employees from member businesses signed up to Keep it Kingston an app providing offers and discounts in the town centre
- Ran 2 x networking events, with 80 members attending across 30+ businesses
- Almost 100 businesses attended one of our training sessions ranging from leadership, social media to river safety
- Provided 92,450 recycling sacks and stickers to members via First Mile, saving them over £200,000
- Sent bi-weekly newsletters and information relevant to members, with over 96% of members finding them useful.
Representing and Influencing
To be the voice that represents the business community and a catalyst for change in Kingston town centre, we:
- Led on engagement with members, landowners and developers to influence direction of the Town Centre vision
- Produced quarterly data and insight reports about town centre performance with 8 out 10 members satisfied with our service
- Secured over 40 pieces of media coverage across the year: 25 Christmas-related media coverage, including articles from Metro, Primary Times, Surrey Live, and Londonist; 14 Chimp Trail related media coverage including articles from Time & Leisure, London Tv and This is Local London
- Built the only database of Vacant Units in the town centre and built and nurtured relationships with landlords and agents to encourage a mix of businesses in the town
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