Social Enterprise Spotlight on Transform Creative

Posted: 02 March 2015, in Member Spotlight

In our latest Social Enterprise Spotlight is Ana Soldatenko and Transform Creative – a newly-launched, Edinburgh-based partnership of creative professionals, specialising in high quality-yet affordable campaign, design and communications services for Scotland’s third sector. Get in touch with Ana on 0131 243 2690 / info@transformcreative.org.uk and check out www.transformcreative.org.uk. Connect with them on Twitter too.

What’s your social and/or environmental mission? We help other social enterprises and third sector organisations to communicate their work and run successful campaigns. We offer creative and affordable services in design, printing, photography, branding, website design and infographics.

How do you do it? We operate on a project-by-project basis. I sit down with each client to understand what sort of design services they want and what they hope to achieve, then bring together a team from our network of creative professionals – web designers, photographers, illustrators and so on – to meet that client’s needs.

What’s your personal motivation for being a social entrepreneur? Through the work of our parent organisation, Transform Scotland, we’ve built up an amazing amount of experience in running successful campaigns. I wanted to share this experience with other Scottish charities to help them too.

What are your current projects? We’re currently running a local environmentally-focussed campaign in Edinburgh, and designing political manifestos to ensure that the third sector voice is heard in the run up to the Scottish elections. We have also designed the brochure for Transform Scotland’s Inter-City Express campaign that was successfully re-launched last week. I can’t give too much detail away as all of these projects are still in development stage.

What exciting things do you have coming up? Transform Creative is an amazing group of very talented people. I’m really looking forward to working with them more, to design creative and original communications and campaigns in Scotland. 

Who do you want to work with more? We aspire to work with all kinds of organisations across the third sector, as well as smaller public and private sector companies. So far most of our work has been in the environmental and transport sector – we’d like to expand beyond this to use our skills and expertise to help other types of group too.

What’s your biggest challenge? As always when launching a new enterprise, the biggest challenge is identifying the target market and making sure we use the correct channels to reach that market.

What top tip would you give to other social enterprises? Just give it a go and don’t be scared to try things out. Once we came up with the idea of Transform Creative we got it up and running pretty quickly, using our enthusiasm and momentum to get our new social enterprise off the ground.