Communicating in the world of theatre and fine arts has been a learning experience for Helen Tovey. Andrew Thomas meets the head of comms at the Unicorn Children’s Theatre

Photographs by Jeff Leyshon

It’s hard to imagine that Helen Tovey almost became a chef. The recently appointed head of marketing and communications for the Unicorn Children’s Theatre is someone whose life, professional and personal, has been enveloped by theatre and the arts world. Yet the young Tovey, having narrowly missing a place at Chelsea Arts College and uncertain as to what to do next, came close to starting catering training. The 34-year-old recalls the tipping point that pulled her back from a life of hotplates and short orders, “I didn’t like having to say ‘yes, Chef.’ I resisted it for a good few months, but I basically didn’t like being told what to do.”

Fortunately for Tovey, that stubborn streak led her to return to her first love. Certain of a life as an artist since the age of four, she went to Brighton University to study fine art.

Although she did well at university, she began questioning art as a vocation, “I didn’t feel that what I could give to the art world really added any value. I could do it and I did it really well [Tovey graduated with a first class degree] but I think you need to have something else to be a great artist and I wasn’t prepared to be mediocre.”

Within a year she had stopped producing her own work.

The area that she enjoyed most from her course had been creating the exhibitions and art events and organising the promotional materials that went alongside them, both for her own shows and those of contemporaries. Having already volunteered at festivals, Tovey started exploring ways of becoming an event organiser. She helped out with a juggling convention and on other esoteric and exotic events before managing to get a job at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, front of house. These short-lived jobs and a six-month travelling trip to South America sound more glamorous than the reality. “I was generally unemployed for about eight months,” says Tovey. “Suddenly it dawned on me; no-one was going to give me a job until I had more experience.” She then managed to get an internship as a marketing assistant in Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre.

Although the internship was unpaid, the Belgrade Theatre was prepared to contribute to her travel and accommodation costs, virtually unheard of in the arts world, then and now. Tovey worked at the theatre for three days a week for about six months, earning enough to live on from working four days a week at the box office of Cheltenham’s town hall.

Although the Belrade Theatre gave Tovey her first break, she is familiar with the criticism of privilege levelled against unpaid internships. “At the Unicorn we work with LTC, a company that has created an apprenticeship scheme specifically encouraging young people who haven’t gone to university to get paid positions in the arts world,” she says. The apprenticeship is jointly funded by the Unicorn and the Arts Council. “I think it’s really important to increase the diversity of people in arts careers.”

A marketing internship for a regional theatre is not a glamorous job. Tovey spent many an afternoon persuading local shops to put up leaflets for the next production. But Tovey acknowledges that it was the start of a learning curve. Although money has always been hard to find in the arts world, this was 2004, before the economic downturn. Tovey acknowledges that, in the post-crash of 2008 world, there are fewer funds available for arts organisations. But that situation is not entirely negative.

“Everyone has to work a lot harder and spend their money a lot better,” Tovey says. “This forces you to be smarter and it forces you to think harder about what you are doing. Communication in the arts has become much more sophisticated. Segmentation and CRM are the buzzwords and everyone does that now. I would say that we are a lot closer to our audiences now and we think more about their needs.”

After six months, the Belgrade Theatre took Tovey on in a paid capacity, but the theatre began a two year redevelopment project and closed down. She started job hunting in London, and was shortlisted for, but narrowly missed, a position at the Tate. Undaunted, she returned to the West Midlands to take up another marketing assistant role at the Warwick Arts Centre.

“The arts industry is so small that you go where you can and get out what you put in,” says Tovey. She was at Warwick for two-and-a- half years. “I was very lucky to have a really good manager. I learned a lot about strategy and segmentation and I have taken those skills with me ever since.”

Tovey also feels her time at Warwick enabled her to start contributing to the arts world in other ways. “Having started my career through internship I now started running my own internships. I am delighted that a number of people who interned for me back then have gone on to the Battersea Arts Centre, Artichoke, the Southbank Centre and some of the West End touring houses.”

Feeling there was nothing left to learn at Warwick, Tovey heard of a digital marketing position at the National Theatre, applied and got the job, necessitating a move to London for the first time.

Tovey still seems in awe of the National Theatre. “It is an incredible place to work. It is huge and you get exposed to really big marketing campaigns.” This was 2008, and the National Theatre had started to understand the importance of digital but didn’t quite know what to do with it. “My role was a real testing bed. To some extent I could make of it what I wanted. It was a really interesting time to work there, and I started integrating email, website and social media into their campaigns.”

Tovey adds, “Social has changed how press departments work. They have to be much more responsive, and certainly it changes the level of control arts organisations have about brand. But it opens up the speed of communications and, for the arts world, that’s really positive.” She says, however, that social media poses different challenges for larger organisations whether in the arts or not. “You can’t respond to a social media backlash in the same way as a small organisation can. You’re much more limited to how open and casual you can be when a crisis happens.”

Although the National Theatre has had its fair share of crises, her work there yielded the campaigns in which Tovey feels the greatest pride, “The arts world always has the opportunity to be really creative with what they do because the content gives you so much to work with. You’re not having to try and make something interesting that isn’t.”

Tovey learned a lot from her time at the National – the benefits of working with an organisation that agencies, consultants and advisers want to have on their creds, the exposure to big ideas. “You are often working with advertising agencies and communication consultants and you benefit from their experience and expertise. It’s great to be exposed to ideas that you just wouldn’t wouldn’t see elsewhere.”

Tovey also admits that having the National Theatre on a CV is an asset. Nearly three years into the role, and Tovey felt it was time to move on and up. The frustrations of working for a large organisation were starting to show. “I wanted to do things the way I

felt they should be done – I was ready to run my own department.” Tovey felt the only way to achieve this was a move to a smaller organisation. She landed the role of head of marketing at the Chickenshed Theatre Company.

If Tovey wanted a smaller organisation she certainly found it with the Chickenshed. “Going from the National to the Chickenshed was a little like going from London back to a village in the Cotswolds. It’s a completely different scale,” she says. “But what the Chickenshed has is a national reputation. They are very well known across the country for the work they do.”

Tovey’s budget was smaller. “It’s easier when you’ve got more money, but it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got if you don’t have the basic communications principles behind it. The starting point is looking at an organisation and seeing what it needs.”

What Tovey felt the Chickenshed needed was a rebrand. That eventually shifted toward brand development, rather than a full rebrand, but it forced Tovey to explore brand concepts. “What the process did was get the organisation to think about what it stood for and how to communicate that to others,” she says.

According to Tovey, the rebranding process went beyond the comms team. The brand was starting to influence other areas such as programming and their outreach programme. “It was just amazing to see how the brand influences everything.”

Working with Joe Taylor from brand agency Morris Hargreaves McIntyre, Tovey ran a series of workshops that got Chickenshed to the point where it understood more coherently who it was. This in turn informed the design process. Tovey says, “We were constantly asking whether the design aligned with the branding work. It cut short personal opinion – we had the thinking right in the first place and getting everyone to buy into that was important and that they wanted to do it and for the most part that worked.”

Tovey had been impressed with how the National Theatre’s brand management. “They have such strong consistency. Their identity runs through everything they do but brand isn’t just about how you look. It’s about how you talk about yourself, how you think about who you are, your core beliefs,” Tovey says, adding that if she brought anything from the National to the Chickenshed it was a greater sense of brand consistency.

Rebranding Chickenshed was a major milestone for Tovey. The management of what was, effectively, a corporate brand saw Tovey start to develop broader communications knowledge to complement her existing marketing skills. “The rebrand process for me was the moment where I felt I really had gone up a level. I felt I’d taken what was a theoretical knowledge and actually made it happen,” she says.

Tovey was keen to increase her knowledge, particularly in a central London theatre. It was time to move on, and four months ago she started at the Unicorn Theatre.

“It is an incredibly exciting time to start here. The Unicorn is producing amazing work, working with really exciting theatre makers. And then the marketing challenges on top of that are really exciting as well,” Tovey says.

Tovey’s remit is wider than at any other time in her career. She certainly has a larger team. The box office and front of house managers report into her, and she has two marketing coordinators and a schools coordination manager, who sits between education and marketing.

Tovey is enjoys the role and communicating to a broader range of stakeholders. She still says, however, that she has much to learn. “My background has been marketing, but I’ve developed a much greater understanding of communications. I think the next step is to get a firmer grip on the relationships between the Arts Council, central and local government and the arts.”

It all seems like a far cry from contemplating a catering career. Despite her ambitions and her steady career path, Tovey still says her career has not been one planned. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a career plan, and I still don’t. I’ve just done the things that I like and I’ve tried to do them really well. When I get to the point that I feel I have achieved something good for both myself and the organisation then it has been time to move on. It’s important to keep growing.”