August 2024
Earlier this year, the SIKKA Team approached Belle and Co. to support the team’s creative and sustainability endeavours.
The needs:
- The focus on creativity was important, as all of the team are dispersed and displaced after the war, making it hard to find the creative motivation needed for a project of this nature.
- In addition, the seed funding which was initially invested by Goethe Institut is coming to an end, and the project needs to develop its own funding streams.
The programme solution:
Over the August and September months, Belle and Co designed and delivered an intensive 8 week blended online course covering various topics related to creativity and business development. We used Zoom for our synchronous sessions, and Google Classrooms for our virtual learning environment, where all resources and recordings could be accessed asynchronously.
The initial 3 sessions focused on creativity including understanding the SIKKA Story, underlying motivations of the members of the team, building new ideas into the platform as well as future-casting the SIKKA business in 10 years time. A number of creative tag lines were invented to capture the essence of the SIKKA story, including:
Art spoke truth, SIKKA captured their legacy
SIkka, a portal to the hearts of its Sudanese people
Sikka is the “living archive” of a revolutionary people
The potential move from a project to an organisational structure then warranted a business plan or actionable roadmap. The five (5) last sessions worked methodically through each section of a business plan from an executive summary to the financial plan:
After learning about the contents of a business plan, the SIKKA team then had to build each section in turn and present their plans in the subsequent sessions until they had built a final business plan with financial forecasting.
As a way to prepare the team for external audiences, Belle and Co. invited key industry stakeholders (Professional Rwandese Performer, a Sudanese Musician, a Congolese University Professor on Cultural Management) to an online pitch session, in order to give the team a real world feel for presenting the SIKKA platform and its story. The audience was able to feedback in real time, so the team could go back and refine their pitch for future funders.
Belle and Co and the SIKKA team continue engaging online, and regularly update each other on the WhatsApp Group to inspire and motivate each other further.