Theatre Hullabaloo is a charity which believes that creativity should be a part of everybody‘s childhood.
We have a broad portfolio of creative activity focused on children and families, mainly based at our home The Hullabaloo, which opened in Darlington in 2017.
When we were forced to close our doors during the pandemic, in the first few months we were contacted by lots of families in our local communities who felt that they didn’t know how to do positive things with their babies in the way that they’d hoped.
We created Hullabaloo baby play packs with support from the Tees Valley Combined Authority and partnerships across South Tees, which we were able to roll out to 3,500 families across the region.
We clearly had a product that was of interest, but we didn’t have the expertise in the team to exploit that fully – we took that challenge to Creative Fuse to find experts in product development and scaling of the product
"There’s a digital revolution underway, creatin a huge opportunity for digital businesses to co-develop with industrial partners here in the Tees Valley, especially with the Tees Valley’s digital strengths in areas like data and immersive technology.
At the IDTC, we give senior leaders in those industrial businesses - engineering, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, energy – the opportunity to get hands on with technology, so they really understand it and can have confidence in their investments.
The businesses we work with don’t need to look beyond the Tees Valley to find support and the right partners, DigitalCity are a vital part of that." David Hughes,
Teesside University’s Industrial Digitalisation Technology Centre
We faced a similar problem around our digital presence, where we didn't have the skills in-house, and we worked with DigitalCity to connect with an agency who carried out a digital audit for us.
Creative Fuse helped us to decide that scaling of the baby play packs in that model at that time wasn’t the right decision for Theatre Hullabaloo, but once we were able to engage with people in real life again, the packs became an integral part of a socially-prescribed play programme which is answering a real need in our communities and proving to be a valuable collaboration with health partners.
What I was able to access at a really crucial point was a whole skillset that I just didn’t have. Not only was that really useful to the development of our business, but it became a really interesting, creative dialogue as well.
Website: theatrehullabaloo.org.uk
