Brief: Website Design & Build
Background
We are a charity and Arts Council England’s Bridge organisation for the North West. Bridge
organisations support schools, youth services and local authorities to connect children and
young people with the region’s best arts and cultural organisations.
Our mission is to improve and enrich the lives of children and young people by increasing
opportunities for their active engagement in inspirational arts, culture and creative learning.
Curious Minds is part of a national network of 10 Bridge organisations funded by Arts Council
England to use our experience and expertise to connect children and young people, schools and
communities with art and culture by:

Facilitating networks and making sure there is an ongoing dialogue across the arts, culture
and education sectors. 
Helping educational settings, both formal and informal, identify and access arts and cultural
opportunities for children and young people. 
Helping other arts and cultural organisations, including museums and libraries, to bring the
cultural experiences that they offer to more children and young people. Vision and Objectives
Our Vision
Our vision is for a society where all children and young people, wherever they live and whatever
their circumstance, achieve their creative potential and live happy, fulfilled lives rich with arts and
culture.
Our Mission
We aim to improve the lives of children and young people by connecting them with the very best
arts, culture and creative learning opportunities. We do this by brokering partnerships with and
between schools, youth groups, arts and cultural organisations to create a climate were quality
and collaboration flourish.
We are deeply committed to developing and enabling collaborative practice and by keeping a
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‘foot in the door’ of both the education and cultural sectors, we aim to be expert and honest
brokers of cross-sector and cross-artform partnerships.
Our work is underpinned by a set of core beliefs:

Helping other arts and cultural organisations, including museums and libraries, to bring the
cultural experiences that they offer to more children and young people. 
We believe it is everyone’s right to have the opportunity to realise their creative potential.

We believe that art, culture and creativity have an extraordinary capability to transform the
lives of individuals and communities and that everyone should have access to them from an
early age.

We believe that the best cultural education happens when schools work in partnership with
the cultural sector and young people to plan and deliver it.

We believe that collaboration and that thinking and action that emerges from partnership
working is more powerful than that which any single individual or organisation can produce
on their own.

We believe in dialogue as an essential basis for learning and change.

We believe in placing children and young people’s ideas, interests and concerns at the core
of our work and provide rich opportunities for children and young people to learn creatively
and develop personal resilience and leadership skills.

We believe in developing Curious Minds as an organisation where people can work
imaginatively and creatively, enjoy a healthy work-life balance and develop their skills within
a culture of continuous learning.

We believe in generously sharing our knowledge, thinking and learning with others.
The Brief
Curious Minds continues to develop its marketing and partner engagement. It has the potential
to use powerful and rich media assets across its digital platforms (and those of our partners)
much more than is currently the case. This starts with the organisation’s website –
www.curiousminds.org.uk.
We are looking to redevelop the website to project Curious Mind’s vision, key messages and
projects much more dynamically for our target audiences. A particular consideration is to explore
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with us how we can most effectively represent and celebrate the distinctiveness of each project
whilst also clearly and consistently building brand profile for Curious Minds.
The successful digital designer will have proven and relevant experience to deliver brandliterate, practical and flexible web design, that brings the work to life and projects the values and
quality of the organisation through a forward thinking, inspirational and achievable design
approach.
We have the potential to build a very strong and distinctive brand for the organisation – not
merely a nice brochure-ware site. This will provide Curious Minds with a lasting and dynamic
design approach that will be recognised and resonate with our stakeholders and partners.
Overall the website should provide a shop window that allows us to:
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Engage our audiences, primarily schools, cultural organisations, local authorities and funders
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Raise the profile of the work we do
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Encourage sign up to specific programmes
-
Provide a space for encouraging charitable donations in future
Budget and Timeframe
The new website will be developed between September - October 2015. The available budget is
£6,000 inclusive of VAT.
Submission process
Designers and agencies are invited to express their interest in this project.
Please enclose the following by email to complete your submission. We do not want any
creative development as part of your submission. A creative brief will be discussed on
appointment.
Please provide answers to the following questions:

How you would approach developing this website design and build task? Please indicate
clearly your proposed stage-by-stage process/methodology, and timing.
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
A summary of your credentials (including of the individual/team), as well as supporting
evidence of working on relevant digital projects for comparable culture, creative, or education
organisations.

Experience of working with clients with limited marketing resources.

We are not prescriptive about the preferred platform for the new website, but please indicate
if you typically work with one, e.g. WordPress, Drupal.
Please also address the following questions:
–
Curious Minds delivers numerous projects with and for schools and arts organisations.
Our portfolio and role is therefore complex. How would you seek to ensure that the
website, that can potentially hold a large volume of detailed content for quite different
user types and needs, will be easy to use? Please also provide a brief critique of our
current site with our role in mind.
–
How would you envisage working with us on a day-to-day basis, not least as we are
based in Lancashire and regular meetings may not always be practical?
Deadline
Please submit your application by noon, Monday 24th August, to
sarah.bailey@curiousminds.org.uk and we will contact all candidates as soon as possible after
that date.
We will consider all applications and reserve the right to conduct informal telephone/in-person
interviews if needed. We hope to engage promptly.
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