Appearing on the telly is getting to be a regular occurrence for us here at Sing and Inspire, and we’re particularly proud of being involved in the Sing for Life campaign with Tenovus.  BBC Wales news did a piece on the choir and what it’s all about and it really brought it home how lucky we are to be involved in something so important.  The Echo are also covering the story of the choir, the more publicity we can help Tenovus get the better.

Remember we did a performance in St David’s Arcade over Christmas with the Admiral choir, well on the back of that the Arcade’s management have asked us to think about do some choir work with the Arcade’s residents so watch this space for more news on this opportunity.

We did a lovely team building day with Educ8, the fabulous thing about our jobs is that it’s not just our clients who benefit from the work we do, it makes such a difference to us to be involved with these amazing people and projects.  They did a fab rendition of Hit the Road Jack and the feedback we got about the session was really, really positive.

We met up with Fix training, another Cardiff based company who specialise in business and I.T skills training courses and sector specific training courses in the retail, early years and health & social care sectors.  Hopefully we’ll be doing some work with them very soon. 

For more info about Fix, please click on the link below.

 http://www.fixtraining.co.uk/drupal/index.php

Finally for this week, we’ve put together a new performance using the songs from the new TV shoe glee which has been described as a micky take of High School Musical.  Both the Admiral and Tenovus choirs will be getting involved in a bit of Glee singing in the not too distant future!

Well that’s all for now folks, in the immortal words of the sergeant from Hill Street Blues ‘let’s be careful out there’!  Have a happy week everyone.

 If you’d like to know a bit more about Educ8, please click on the link below:

 http://www.educ8training.co.uk/

Last time we told you about the ‘Sing for Life’ project we’re working on with Tenovus which is being filmed for the telly.  The Tenovus choir is made up of people whose lives have been touched in some way by cancer, some of the people in the choir have cancer and the point of the project is to see how singing can make a difference to people’s health.  Depression, fatigue and anxiety are just a few of the things that can have an impact on people affected by cancer and we want to get everybody singing loudly!    

The lovely Dave Westcott has written another great arrangement – this time it’s full of welsh songs as the choir may be performing at a gig on St David’s day, more to come on this in the next blog if it pans out.  This project isn’t just about the singing and TV programme though, Cardiff University are doing a research project on it.  This is one of the most personally inspiring projects we’ve ever worked on, the people are amazing and the singing is going to rock the Tenovus world!

More info on the project can be found at http://www.singforlife.org.uk/

Now it wouldn’t be a proper blog if we didn’t mention our first meeting of the year with the Admiral choir would it?!  The Michael Jackson medley is still going strong and we’re getting better and better at it with every practice.  We also started working on some new songs which the choir picked themselves – they came up with 90 yes nine zero suggestions so we’ve got plenty of song choices for 2010.

Sing and Inspire is not just about the singing though, at the end of the day we need to produce tangible results for the people we work with and prove our approach works.  With that in mind we kept statistics about the choir and what they themselves felt about being part of the choir.  The results are above and beyond what we expected and we’d like to share some of them with you.

It’s a good start that the choir members enjoy being a part of the choir!

• 100% of respondents look forward to the sessions
• 80% of respondents feel Inspire has helped them with their work
• 100% of respondents felt their customer service at work had improved

Motivation levels have remained high since the choir was formed, and the choirists felt that their confidence has increased since joining, they are generally more confident socially and within the choir environment.

The overall report summary states: Admiral has a group of employees who are clearly capable of high achievement.  The challenge for Admiral is to replicate the same level of motivation and team spirit as is generated by being a member of the Inspire choir – “it’s a team effort and everyone enjoys their part”. Hopefully this will be fuelled by Inspire continuing to run and develop the choir. Given a task which is perceived as worthwhile, and a leadership which is energetic and charismatic, people feel motivated and inspired. They are not afraid of hard work and rise to a challenge if it is presented correctly; indeed they are even willing to take on additional responsibility. Having the choir practises in working hours gives people time out from the stresses of work, without eating into their personal time. Effects on retention and attendance rates in the workplace are also important; “I have been feeling quite ill recently but I refuse to take time off work as I don’t want to miss the choir”, “If it wasn’t for Inspire choir, I would probably leave.”

So there you have it!  Another fab couple of weeks in the wonderful world of Sing and Inspire and a fantastic start to the New Year – we can’t wait to see what February brings!  Have a positively marvellous week full of fun and laughter xx

Firstly, please accept our apologies for the lack of blogging during the Christmas period.  Unlike most we were busy as santa’s elves spreading the joys of music during the festive fun and frolics!

So what were we up to you may well ask!  There were so many highlights I hardly know where to begin. Once again we found ourselves rubbing shoulders in the world of celebrity stardom.  The Tenovus staff choir performed with legendary welsh super star Max Boyce to promote their great mobile treatment unit in Carmarthen. We have been working with them for a few weeks now and they are quickly turning into a lean mean singing machine!  Their Chief Executive said how happy she was that they have bonded so much as a team.

Here’s a picture of our very own Georgina Jones cosying up to Mr Boyce, and one of the choir practising for the Christmas events.

Their Christmas work didn’t stop there, both the Tenovus and Admiral choirs performed magnificently at the Tenovus Love Light concert at Llandaff Cathedral on December the 7th.  This was a first for us, two of our choirs performing at the same event!

The Queen’s Arcade in Cardiff was alive with the sound of music when the Admiral choir did a half hour performance in there.  They had some brilliant feedback from the Arcade who said they were the best choir they have ever had in there! Impressive stuff. Here is a photo of them after their great performance.

There maybe some more performances coming up in the not too distant future! The choir gets fan mail, one member of the public wrote to Henry the CEO of Admiral to say that they think the Admiral choir are amazing and they think it’s great that Admiral gives their staff the opportunity of participating in this unique training – and it wasn’t even us who wrote in!!  Great praise indeed for a worthy group of enthusiastic and talented people.

Sing and Inspire got confused.com in November when we did a team building day with them. They were so impressed they got us back in for a Christmas sing-along and some team building exercises. We have a lovely afternoon with crackers, mince pies and lots of carols, there are some great voices there too that we hope we will continue to work with in 2010.

A particularly inspiring experience for us over Christmas was working with Llamau which is a homeless charity, delivering services to vulnerable, socially excluded homeless and potentially homeless young people and women in South Wales. On Christmas Eve we held a carol concert where the staff and young people took part. We got some great feedback from them, everyone thought that it really made a great difference and lifted everyone’s spirits – especially ours.

if you’d like to find out some more about Llamau, just click on the link below:

http://www.llamau.org.uk/

We’ll finish this blog with some more exciting news!  Very soon we start filming a TV programme with Tenovus for a project called Choir for Life. More details will follow in our next blog, but suffice to say everyone involved is more than a little bit excited about it!

That’s it for now folks, wishing you a positively magic start to the new year, we’ll be back soon with more blogginess and Sing and Inspire smiles! xxx

We thought you’d like to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth so here’s the experience first hand from choir member Terri Griffiths: 

On Saturday 14^th November 2009, The Born Free Foundation celebrated their 25^th Anniversary and staged the ‘Wild and Live’ concert at the Royal Albert Hall. As elephant.co.uk has supported Born Free for many years, the Admiral Inspire Choir, who were known as the Elephant Inspire Choir for the day, were invited to join the likes of Bryan Adams, Peter Andre and Kiki Dee to sing at the event.

 The day started by leaving Capital Tower for London and we practised a few times on the bus on the way. We arrived at the venue and were taken to our dressing room and given performer passes. We headed for the stage for our sound check and the house band were performing on stage so we settled in next to them. When our turn came, we belted it out, and received a great round of applause from the stage staff, band and session singers. In fact, they said we were the best choir they had ever had in the venue. As you can imagine, this put us on cloud nine.

Next up, Karen Hardy, of Strictly Come Dancing fame taught half the choir how to salsa so that during her slot on the show, we could go into the audience and get them all up dancing.

Before we knew it, the time had come to perform live to an audience of 5,000 people. We sang like professionals and received rapturous applause. At the end of the concert we went back on stage to sing in the finale along with Bryan Adams, Kiki Dee, Peter Andre and Rolf Harris. What an amazing end to an unbelievable day – we even received a standing ovation.

Choir member Shelley Davies said, “Saturday was the most surreal and fantastic day of my life. I LOVED IT! Being part of the choir gives a sense of belonging and the opportunity to perform which is my true passion.” Bridget Rendle added, “It was without a doubt one of the best days of my life. Our performance really got the crowd going. It was a truly magical experience that I would happily live over and over again.”

The choir would like to say a huge thank you to Born Free for having the faith in us and adding us to the bill. And to George, Andrea and Dave, it has been a pleasure singing in the Inspire Choir and we all hope to keep doing it for a very long time.

 Terri Griffiths

 So there you have it, another 15 minutes of fame for the choir – they’re getting to be very popular you know!  If you took part in the event, we’d love to hear what you thought about it and how it made you feel so get commenting people.

Have yourselves a fantabulous week friends xx

We’ve been working hard on our new promotional video with that master of celluloid Richard Shelton.  Don’t tell him but we are so delighted with the sterling job he has done, a little bit of wee came out when we saw the latest version!  The video features the Admiral choir, a great testimonial from head insurance honcho Henry Engelhart and lots of interviews we’ve given over the past year. It also includes all the press we’ve had in the last 12 months!

And talking of the last 12 months, it’s nearly our first birthday!!  We have had such an amazing year we figured the only thing we could do is celebrate by having a big birthday bash in Tiger Tiger – more details on what occurred there next week!

We’ve had two sessions with the Tenovus choir now and they sound flipping great, so great in fact that their first gig is going to be a concert in Llandaff cathedral with an audience of 400 people called Love Light (the concert that is, not the audience!).  Click onto the link below for further details: 

 http://www.now-cardiff.com/entertainment/events/tenovus-lovelight-christmas-concert/327/

We attended a dinner with the South Wales Ladies Business Networking Club, and did a taster session for a group of around 50 ladies. We all had a great sing song and it was fab for ladies in business to see what we do and how we do it. We must have made a bit of an impact as one lady said that it relaxed her so much she found networking much more enjoyable!  We also managed to make some great connections that should help us in the future.

Surprise Surprise the Admiral choir produced another outstanding performance when just out of their pjs at the Arts and Business breakfast awards launch.  They got up super early and sang two songs in public before 9 am rather than their usual shower sing fest and they went down a storm.  Rachel Jones the MD of Arts and Business said

 “The guests were extremely impressed and found the obvious enthusiasm and commitment of all choir members truly inspirational.  There was much interest from other businesses wanting to follow your lead! “

 You can’t get a better testimonial than that for your business.

Our Vocal Power course just keeps on getting great results.  Diane Seaborne, our extremely talented trainer has improved the course no end with the introduction of 1-2-1 NLP training.  Not many call centres can say they have NLP trained staff listening for ways they can improve communication with the customer – but they should do!!  The Renewals department in Admiral are thrilled with the impact the course has had.

Well that’s all for this week folks, our next blog will be full of tales of hob nobbing with celebs at the Royal Albert Hall!!!  Have a fab, positively inspired week and come back and visit us soon.

So what’s been happening in the wonderful world of Sing and Inspire lately……well George has had a lovely haircut and used it to full flicking back effect when Inspire spoke at the Welsh Contact Centre Forum, along with Ceri Assirati, People Services Manager for Admiral.  We talked about what an amazing journey the Admiral choir have been on and we even got the attendees of the forum to sing a little song at the end of the session – well done to Andrea who did a fab job at getting any form of choral sound out of them at 9.30 in the morning!

On Friday we were ladies that lunch when we attended another networking event in the Vale Hotel.  Unsurprisingly we met some really interesting people there, one being the governor of Swansea prison.  Think about it – Sing and Inspire do the musical version of Prisoner Cell Block H – behind bars!!!

More hard work was done with the wonderful Admiral choir as we finished off their Born Free medley in preparation for the Royal Albert Hall appearance.  They are sounding absolutely brilliant, we’re already really proud of them and they haven’t even performed yet!!

So Admiral choristers, are you getting nervous about the big gig?  Please leave us some comments telling us how you’re feeling about it – only 12 days to go guys!!!

That’s it for this week my friends, lots of love, song and positivity to you all xx

We took part in an unusual creative networking evening in the Millennium Centre called Ignite.  Loads of speakers get together and have 5 minutes or so to talk about any topic they fancy.  Our talk was called WE LOVE SINGING.  Bet you’re not surprised to hear we got the audience to  sing the Killers I Got Soul but I’m not a Soldier!  It was a great experience.  For more information on Ignite, which is a bit of a world wide phenomenom, click on the link below:

http://ignite.oreilly.com/show/

We also had a meeting with Tenovus about an exciting new project, the details of which we have to keep under wraps for now, but suffice to say we’re very excited about it and it’s going to be amazing!

You might remember us mentioning that we’ve revamped our Vocal Health training course. Well we did our first session of Vocal Power which combines NLP, Customer Service skills and vocal health.  It was a huge success, we had some great feedback and are really happy that we decided to make changes and therefore offer our customers a better service.

On the 14th of October we dusted off our posh frocks and attended the South Wales Business Awards at the Bear Hotel in Cowbridge as we were nominated for the New start up of the year award! We were delighted to be nominated in just our first year of business, a brilliant feat.

Well that’s about it for this week folks, have yourselves a positively fabulous weekend and a very productive week.  We’ll be back soon lots of love all of us here at Sing and Inspire xx

Perhaps even more exciting was the fact she got to spend the morning with Australia’s own Rolf Harris!  Here’s a pic taken outside the press call which is jam packed full of celebs:

And here’s the official blurb which is going on our website about it:

Sing and Inspire are proud to announce that the very first choir we started working with, from Admiral Insurance, have been chosen to perform at the Born Free Foundation’s Wild & Live concert in aid of wildlife, on Saturday November 14th at the Royal Albert Hall.

The choir was set up in October 2008 to help improve staff motivation, increase productivity and improve business results, and from the modest beginnings of their first gig at the Christmas Winter Wonderland in Cardiff, just one year later they are performing at the world renowned 7000 seat concert venue the Royal Albert Hall!!! The choir will be in good company with megastars such as Bryan Adams, Rolf Harris, Virginia McKenna, Rachel Hunter, Kiki Dee and Joanna Lumley also performing at the gig.

Admiral, and in particular their online car insurance company elephant.co.uk have enjoyed a long relationship with the Born Free Foundation, working together to help save animals’ lives, stop suffering and try to protect rare species. It seemed like a match made in heaven when, to celebrate their 25th anniversary, Born Free decided to host a concert to raise money and awareness for their cause, and Admiral just happened to have a ready made choir who would obviously be perfect to sing at the event!

The choir is made up of around 40 people from across a number of departments within the insurance giant’s organisation. It has really helped bring them closer together and improved communication, not to mention singing abilities throughout the company. The choir members have reported an increase in confidence, self esteem and in one case a reduction in blood pressure medication which was directly linked to being a part of the choir. Results such as these were the reason Sing and Inspire were able to secure a 12 month contract with the Admiral group, no mean feat for a start up company less than a year old.

Sing and Inspire have been working with Dave Wescott, an extremely talented composer on the arrangements for the performance. Dave has helped us to put together an amazing set of songs which the choir is already performing to very high, professional standards.

The concert takes place at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday 14th November at 7:30pm and features a line-up of top stars from the world of music and entertainment. So far Bryan Adams, John Altman, Mark Austin, Mutya Buena, Gabriella Cilmi, Martin Clunes, elephant/Inspire Choir, Beverley Craven, David & Carrie Grant, African Drummers, Karen Hardy, Rolf Harris, Ruthie Henshall, Lady Victoria Hervey, Rachel Hunter, Nick Knowles, Rula Lenska, Kiki Dee And Carmelo Luggeri, Joanna Lumley, Michael McKell, Donal McIntyre, Virginia McKenna, Tony Mortimer, Graham Norton, Sharon Osbourne, Fire Poet, Robert Wells, Catriona Wiles, Helen Worth have signed up to support this worthy charity.

Tickets are already on sale, so go to www.royalalberthall.com or call the ticket hotline today to buy your tickets for WILD & LIVE.  Alternatively you can call 0207 589 8212. Tickets start from £45.

Well we hope you’ve all had a fabulous week and don’t forget to come back and visit us for more news on the gig of the year!  Have a most positively lovely weekend, with love from all at Sing and Inspire

We’ve been working with the lovely Diane on our Vocal Health course and like a phoenix from the flames it has risen and been reincarnated as VOCAL POWER!!!!  We like to see it as the course that looks at customer service skills in a whole different way!  It’s the best voice training we have ever come across. In it are elements of NLP, service, positive language, brand awareness, ownership and vocal health, giving it a much broader and in depth feel. Unsurprisingly we think it’s amazing!!!

Had a great meeting with Tenovus however that’s all we can say on this for now, we’ll let you know if anything develops on this front.

An event we did with Cardiff Community Housing gave us a fantastic challenge. With 70 people to work with, we rallied the entire Sing and Inspire troups plus some willing volunteers and totally kicked ass! The numbers swelled from Andrea and George, with the addition of Dave the composer, Diane Seaborne, Louise Bamford and Kirsty Roberts . The team work was incredible, the best team we could ask for. Their energy and passion was brilliant and they really represented Sing and Inspire with pride!

The day itself was great.  We took 70 people, got them singing in three part harmony and then the session was recorded with the help of Space Studios. They sang ‘Our House’ by Madness.

That’s it for now folks, have a very prosperous and positive week, with love from the Sing and Inspire team xx

The IOD lunch was a screaming success from a business point of view.  We met lots of new companies who loved the choir and are interested in letting us help them with their team building needs. Thank you to the IOD for a great opportunity.

Now here’s what Lizzie had to say on the matter:

Singing in front of the crème de la crème of the Welsh business world…no mean feat! Particularly as the audience would include Ruth Badger of “The Apprentice” fame. But the choir really rose to the challenge. Despite being on stage for only a matter of minutes, we definitely made an impact on a somewhat sombre group of businessmen and women. 

 The choir kicked off with the mighty “Somebody to love” (a personal favourite!) which really surprised and pleased the audience. This was followed by a rendition of the theme tune to TV’s “Wonderwoman” (learnt in two rehearsals no less) which despite a slight hitch with the opening few bars, went down a treat, particularly with The Badger herself, who looked delighted.

For a number of people this was their first gig and by all accounts they really enjoyed themselves. We just seem to be going from strength to strength and the gigs just keep coming!

Lizzie James

A happy happy happy belated Birthday to our very own Georgina Jones who was 32 years old on September 21st.  Suffice to say we celebrated in style!

The Born Free medley harmony recording for the 25th Anniversary gig in the Royal Albert Hall has been completed and it’s fan blinkin tastic!! We are very proud of it – a massive thanks to Dave the composer for all his hard work in putting this together.

And more Born Free news – Sing and Inspire has been invited to the 25th Anniversary celebration global press call on the 7th October outside the Albert Hall. There will be lots of celebs there promoting this worthwhile charity.

We attended a lovely Rising Stars dinner on Tuesday night and Andrea was one of the 25 stars!  To us she was the only star in the place.  We had a great night and again made some good contacts within the local business community. The event took place at the Park Hotel in London, it was a grand affair and well worth the trip to the big smoke.

Finally, more fantastic publicity for both Admiral Insurance and Inspire – Admiral has been contacted by BBC Wales news asking about the choir!  They are going to cover the story and interview some members of the choir as well as one of the Inspire girls.  We’re putting on our Sunday best for this performance.

That’s the news for this week folks, we hope your week has been as fantastical as ours and next week is even better!