The Client
Established in 2012, PegasusLife was created to rethink and reinvent the places and ways people live as they get older. Over the past century, Britain’s population has aged significantly, creating a growing need for more new housing solutions to help meet the needs of the new generation of retirees.
Retirement housing helps prevent some of the largest hurdles facing older people in the UK. While physical health issues are well documented, issues such as mental illness and loneliness are still misunderstood and it is our mission to bridge the gaps that we see in these areas.
The Brief
Keeble Brown was asked to develop a stakeholder relations strategy that would facilitate the efforts of the client’s project team to persuade the planning authority to accept the unique and beneficial qualities of its proposals.
The first two projects involved highly constrained sites with multiple vulnerable receptors nearby, close proximity to conservation areas, strategic highways, congested local roads, policy conflicts and affordable-housing issues.
Our Response
A part of the strategy was to establish a narrative and template that could be applied to the client’s other schemes as these progressed from land acquisition to Pre-App. To do this we put ourselves into the clients’ shoes. Our client had a particular vision for its business and we knew that only by properly identifying with the clients’ perspective could we bring our communication and stakeholder narrative skills to life.
Our Programme
Tactically, our first effort was assess the situation. A combination of media analysis, methodical stakeholder mapping and thorough desk research made sure we understood both the nature of the location and the specific challenges that would face our client’s proposals.
Only then did we put ‘boots on the ground’. All too often we are told about development schemes that are run by people with no local knowledge and no understanding of the existing community or what it is like to live and work in the area. We avoid this by making sure everyone working on the assignment has a genuine sense of the place and the community, based on first-hand experience. .
