Submitting an award application is an amazing opportunity to get the recognition you deserve. Sparrowly Group’s Justine Sinclair shares her top 10 steps to being award ready so you can demonstrate your strengths and achievements.

“I’d like to give you some feedback.” Seven words that can make a person feel uncomfortable or challenged. But how do you build your feedback muscle and how to run to it rather than run away from it? A realistic guide to accepting feedback and elevating your business and customer satisfaction by taking positive action.

The arts, culture and creative industries sector in NSW has the largest creative workforce in Australia. The creative industries are an important part of the economy, accounting for a fifth of services exports and 10% of the state’s workforce and with great potential to grow. Australia is facing a big issue with our creative trade – for every dollar we make by selling creative stuff, we end up spending eight dollars on importing similar things. This deficit shows the potential growth that the arts, culture, and creative industries could have to bring in a lot more money and boost our economy as well as the profile of the sector. To support this growth opportunity, the 'Creative Communities Policy was introduced by the NSW Government late last year to maximise the opportunity this sector presents and enhance the cultural and creative sectors. Sparrowly Group’s Justine Sinclair provides a practical framework for realising the opportunities of this policy.

By providing young people with exposure to the kaleidoscope of career pathways available in today's workforce, we equip them with the knowledge and confidence to make informed decisions about their futures. It's about empowering them to take control of their destinies and pursue paths that align with their passions and interests. Sparrowly Group’s Federico Moreno shares his personal and professional perspectives providing a guide to supporting the workforce of the future.

Discussions of whether or not one type of impact analysis - economic, social, or environmental - deserve precedence over the other are ill-founded and miss the fact that all three are necessary to inform good decision making and each other.

That said, economic analysis carries obvious advantages, being a robust way to weigh the impacts between different physical, financial, and subjective intangible effects for individual people, and then weight the balance of those effects between people. That dollars are only a convenient, but arbitrary, yardstick of relative preferences and therefore well-being is aside to the actual aims of economic analysis. Albeit one often poorly explained by economists, and therefore, commonly misunderstood by non-economists through no fault of their own.

Sparowly Group’s Senior Economist, Sam Miller provides a explainer to help demystify misperceptions.

The team at Sparrowly Group has witnessed travel trends come and go over the years some of which become mainstays. As we move into a new year, there are three key areas we recommend incorporating into your destination and business planning.  

While these travel behaviours are not the first to evolve and won’t be the last. What’s important is to be forward thinking, know your customer, understand their needs and listen to their feedback.

By making this an always on mindset in your destination development and experience design, you won’t need to wait to learn what the trends are…you will set the trend.

The ethical consumer demonstrates a shift in priorities in favour of purchasing from organisations that prioritise transparency and sustainability. Learning how to service this consumer will have lasting benefits for your business and the community in which you operate.

How we communicate as individuals and as a team has a significant impact on how we all perform. And it can be hard. Sparrowly Group’s Giovanna Lever provides insight into maintaining your communications A game.

In October, Sparrowly Group’s Giovanna Lever represented Australia at the United Nations World Tourism Organisation Gastronomy Conference. Here are her learnings and resources for colleagues in the Australian tourism, food production and hospitality industries.

Sensory Experience is the connection of physical senses including sight, touch, taste, sound and smell to an experience. In this article, Sparrowly Group’s Morgan Thorn explores how your every day activities or surroundings can be developed into a memorable sensory experience.

We as a society are moving into a new era of advancement, but one thing is for sure, if we don’t remain truly connected, we will never be truly connected; never be truly fulfilled. Sparrowly Group’s Giovanna Lever shares how she recognises and captures those micro moments to create meaningful connections and moments in life.

Social science delves into the complex and intricate realm of human behaviour, society, and culture. But it can be overlooked by many or avoided as being something that is hard to understand, boring or something left to the experts. Yet, without realising it, we are using it, or discussing it in some shape or form in our everyday lives.

The VET sector will play a leading role in Australia’s future economy and workforce. Sparrowly Group’s Federico Moreno unpacks why and how in reflection of this year’s National Skills Week.

Grant writing can be daunting but it doesn’t have to be. Sparrowly Group’s Naomi Farrelly shares her grant writing tips to help you put your best foot forward.

Perfectionism is unfortunately more common than we realise and resides in many of us. Sparrowly Group’s Giovanna Lever explores how it affects her as a leader and strategies she has implemented to overcome perfectionism and embrace growth.

My kids were her absolute motivation to take the plunge, start Sparrowly Group and become the maker of her own destiny. And, a lot has happened in 8 years. It’s not just Giovanna any more. Today, Sparrowly Group is a team of 7 individuals, all with unique, yet, complementary skills.

As we now move into our 9th year of business, Managing Director, Giovanna Lever wanted to share her 8 learnings with aspiring or current business owners.

“Going out at night”…this phrase can conjure up different images and perceptions. Typically these words more times than not are correlated with images usually involving dining, drinking and perhaps performances. The phrase “Going out at night” however, when linked to the night time economy extends way beyond just the ‘having fun’ sector. Sparrowly Group’s Justine Sinclair explains how to support vibrant communities by reimagining the night time economy.

The formalisation of data and algorithms has recently been the purview of computer science. And of course, the application of data and algorithms, in particular from the tech sector, has become essential to how we solve problems in our daily lives. We use data and algorithms to help us decide what movie to watch, or how to get directions in an unfamiliar city. But are there limits to the problems we can solve and decisions we can make by simply throwing an algorithm at a bunch of data? Sparrowly Group’s Ben Lever explores this.

As human-like and amazing as it is, is ChatGPT just another techno fad that will follow the same fate as the likes of Google Wave or Clubhouse? Or is it the beginning of a completely new paradigm in everyday life – a disruption akin to the launch of the iPhone? Sparrowly Group’s Ben Lever explores where the opportunities lie.

Program evaluation is a crucial component of many government interventions, initially designed as pilot programs. Evaluating the successes and failures of a pilot enables highly informed decisions to be made about the program, whether it continues and scales up or not. What do you need to consider to ensure program evaluation is truly objective? Sparrowly Group’s Federico Moreno explains.