Kettering Event Hub.
Empowering our cultural community: promote events, share ideas, and make it easier than ever for the people of Kettering to know how to support your project.
Making it easy to support local.
Hello! We’re Love Kettering, and we’re on a mission to bring some energy and excitement back into the place we call home. It’s been heartbreaking to watch the decline of our high streets in recent years, so we started thinking about ways to get people emotionally invested in our town again.
There is a growing swell of people wanting to get back to tight-knit community - it’s just that many don’t know where to start. That’s why we’re trying to make it as easy as possible for them to understand how best to support our local businesses and enterprises.
One such idea is a dedicated ‘What’s On in Kettering’ event guide. We’ve found an off-the-shelf platform, packed with features, that would provide a one-stop-shop for anyone looking for something to do or somewhere to go on any given day.
Kettering Town Council are backing us to explore the viability of this platform. You can find out all the details below and we could really do with your input to decide if it’s worth a shot. You’ll find a feedback form at the bottom.
Let’s make Kettering great.
“People want to go out, connect and have fun. They want to support local businesses, but it’s a lot of effort to track down something they are interested in. Attention spans are shorter than ever, so we need to make it as easy as possible for them to find things to do.”
There’s always something to explore.
We get it, we’re all resistant to have yet another platform to sign up to and maintain. These sorts of schemes have been explored before, but there are a few reasons why now is the best opportunity to make a real go of it - the main one being recent advances in the online space that make it so much easier for businesses to share comprehensive information easily, as well as simplicity of access for potential customers.
The main insight we’re working with is that people clearly do want to go out, connect and have fun. They want to support local businesses, but it’s a lot of effort to track down something they are interested in. Attention spans are shorter than ever, so we need to make it as easy as possible for them to find things to do.
The strength of this platform enables venues to manage their own profiles and update events as they please. Visitors are able to explore lists of venues or events, which can be filtered by categories, or displayed on a map view across the town.
Listings will also be supported by Love Kettering across our social channels (7k+ followers) and a weekly newsletter highlighting key events.
Venue Profile Pages
Each venue can set up a dedicated profile showcasing their activity, gallery and key information. For a small amount of initial effort, this will provide an always-on presence for people searching for places to go. The platform we’re exploring also provides a comprehensive suite of options to choose from in order to maximise potential benefits.
Available features include:
Description
Opening times
Gallery
Location map view
Tags of key features
Core categories
Contact information
Directions
Reviews
Ability to claim existing listings
Event listings
Job listings
Online store page
We’re also exploring the option of offering an assisted setup package that would include professional images, completion of your profile and upload of your first events, for a small fee.
Event Listings
Event pages can be shown as sub-pages from venues as well as in daily/weekly listings across the town, making it as easy as possible for people to find something to do on any given day. We’ll also curate and share highlight events each week, across our Love Kettering social channels and newsletter.
Available features include:
Description
Gallery
Location map view
Upcoming dates
Repeat events
Event coundown
Add to calendar
Tags of key features
Core categories
Contact information
Directions
Reviews
Online store page
Host profile
Community Forum
An important feature when creating a central hub to empower our local businesses would be a platform that enables our various enterprises to efficiently talk with each other.
We’d love to include a community forum that provides easy access to ask for help or advice, suggest collaboration ideas or share information on upcoming events or dates - that would be useful for the wider network to be aware of.
Community empowerment comes from helping each other out and lifting each other up. A streamlined channel of communication for businesses and enterprises throughout the town could be an essential tool to help facilitate that.
Potential boards include:
General chat
Upcoming events
Neighbourhood watch
Help and requests
Collaboration ideas
“We’re in this together after all, so let’s do our best to lift each other up and see Kettering thrive.”
— Love Kettering
Kettering Clubcard
We’re exploring additional options of how to incentivise the public to visit our local businesses more often, as well as provide funds to keep the costs of maintaining this whole platform as low as possible.
One idea is the Kettering Clubcard - a membership scheme that provides exclusive treats and discounts from participating local businesses.
We know there are some concerns around eating into profits with a scheme like this, but we don’t see the benefits as needing to be purely monetary. For example, at Nick’s Fish and Chip Shop, they offer to batter any candy bar the customer brings in, free of charge, as an exclusive, secret perk.
There’s a real opportunity for businesses to have some fun with this, while providing exclusive benefit for customers and encouraging them to support local.
This would be free for businesses to sign up. The public would pay a small membership fee.
Share your thoughts
Thanks for reading. Our goal is to provide the foundations to help our local businesses and community maximise their potential. We want to live in a vibrant, thriving town, and we know you do too.
A project like this will only work if we have a good level of buy-in and commitment from our cultural enterprises. We firmly believe that this platform could become an essential resource - encouraging the public to venture out and support local more often, providing collaboration and support opportunities between businesses and bringing excitement and energy back to our high streets.
The town council have offered funding to build the initial platform but it requires evidence of interest from our community. Whether this is something you would be interested in joining, or if you have reservations about the platform, we would love to hear your feedback.