I’ve been managing the digital strategy for the Philip Lawrence Awards. This awards scheme has at its heart an online network of young people’s organisations and individuals called PLAnet. Nacro is managing the Awards this year with the aim of increasing nominations from hard-to-reach groups, young people in custody who want to get involved in projects to improve their communities, and areas such as those recently hit by the riots.
I’m working with a small team of staff and volunteers together to target our existing networks of young people and organisations and Nacro’s young people’s projects, as well as these new audiences. We are relying to a large extent on social media marketing so the challenge is to create a buzz, set it apart from other awards and get the message to the large networks of young people’s organisations and Youth Offending Teams who can, in turn, get the message to potential Award nominees.
There has been no shortage of positive feedback but we’re up against an array of other awards trying to target similar groups. We are relying to a large extent on social media marketing, using:
- Twitter, primarily, to target young people’s groups and professionals
- Facebook past winners group
- YouTube channel
- Facebook page
- Redeveloped website incorporating social media features and blog to help increase traffic – in WordPress to make the admin as easy as possible.
We’re on the steering group, managed by the Home Office, which is working on a new format for the Awards. We are working with Philip Lawrence’s widow, Frances Lawrence, to give the Awards ceremony a more local and meaningful focus and to make the prizes more practical.
Nacro planned to kickstart improved internal communications with the development of a new intranet. There was a need to reflect its new structure and focus and a new brand was developed to reflect, but not duplicate exactly, the external brand. Using some limited pre-existing online design, I commissioned an in-house brand and contributed to the concept and implementation of the intranet. This intranet project had to be delivered in three months from concept to launch. Working with an in-house designer and IT team, it achieved its goals due to close co-operation and communication.
The structure needs a lot more work but the user interface is not bad, given the adaptations that were made at short notice to the Sharepoint system. There is even some social media integration agreed by the Board even though the organisation that does not allow open web access to staff – a difficult political negotiation.
How to represent an organisation’s new strategic focus, without misleading people who are expecting ‘old’ messages? I began a project to showcase Nacro’s annual report statistics which turned into a full-scale relaunch of the brand, aimed at commissioners and influencers. It sports a new, interim, brand. It features:
- Case studies of Nacro’s areas of work, focused around the transition its service users can make into rehabilitation
- Annual report accounting information, making the organisation more transparent in its finances
- Campaigns: the Change the Record campaign is now focused on parliamentary audiences due to the need to target legislative change
- Success proven through statistics.
It’s accessible through the main Nacro site via a new home page feature, with the idea being to subsequently review the main site and incorporate it.
The Change the Record campaign by Nacro aims to improve the employment chances of the tens of thousands of people in the UK who have a criminal record through a change in the law. I’ve commissioned a microsite on which people can sign up. Many people don’t even realise they have a record so another campaign objective is to raise awareness of the issue and provide advice for employers as well as ordinary people.
The microsite includes:
- rich media, gaining hundreds of views via YouTube
- a quick poll feature which is proving popular
- a comments feature, which has encouraged many people, including people we already work with, to leave their own personal stories – and organisations have been pledging their support.
Social media activity aims to reach:
On launch Third Sector made it their digital campaign of the week. The next phase features celebrity tweets and videos, as well as user-generated content.
Information management I delegated team members online campaign tasks which kept information flows and interaction constant and managed.
Scheduling A key objective in the specification was that the microsite should be easy for designated campaign team members to administrate, due to the tight deadline. If this hadn’t happened, there would not have been enough time to add content before launch.
I just launched Nacro‘s new website. It’s designed to fulfill several functions.
- Promote Nacro’s whole ethos of helping people in trouble to make positive life choices
- Fully represent its work through depth and accuracy of information
- Show what it’s like to work alongside Nacro as a partner and convincing funders of how well-qualified they are to run contracts
- Tell the stories of some of the people Nacro have helped through short videos
- Become the leading website in the sector for design, content and navigability.
I project managed the development with fantastic support from the Head of Communications and, during the last intense phase, from several other team members who were trained on its simple-to-use content management system. Other key data checkers and project workers across the 1500-strong organisation sent detailed information as part of a mass data-gathering exercise which I organised through an internal communications push.
We chose our web company, theOTHERmedia, because of their knowledge of other sectors such as museum and retail as well as proven accessibility credentials. They responded with flair to the brief and I think have produced some of their best work on this project. What do you think of it? You can leave comments on this page or on the site itself by clicking Give Feedback on the bottom right of its pages.
www.nacro.org.uk
Older people are the fastest-growing group taking up social networking and Independent Age are using social media with and for the older people that they help. I started with a Facebook page focusing on their fundraising events and press interviews which they publicise through their numerous social connections. I also encouraged them to sign up to LinkedIn to raise their professional profile.
They also blog about their events and activities with connections to their Twitter profile. Social media is a collaborative effort and the organisation has collectively taken up the challenge of raising its profile and reaching out to new audiences.
A social media approach to their Born Free from HIV campaign. This was way back in the mists of time in 2007BT (Before Twitter).
I used the project’s objectives as a basis to identify the most appropriate forms of interaction with Unicef’s target groups through social media. There are so many potential uses for social media to charities – but equally so many ways of getting sidetracked into faddish but fairly pointless forms of interaction with people.
Facebook set out to change this when its launched its ‘Causes’ section, specifically aimed at fundraising for charities. The direct financial gains to be made are usually tiny. You’re more likely to raise awareness in an indirectly just by being on the site and promoting your page to friends and contacts.
I’m managing the redevelopment of online activities for Nacro, the crime reduction charity. I am:
Nacro is refocusing its online messages around the needs of its users. The objective is an accessible website that anyone from Joe Bloggs to Joe Blogger will be able to navigate easily to find what they’re looking for. Plus maybe a few other useful things they didn’t know about before.
Behind the scenes, a simple-to-use content management system helps designated staff to manage pages. This site will have to stand out from the crowd. In its competitive sector, Nacro has a really strong track record. It should now be able to shout about it.
I like this project. It’s a challenge to work on communications in unpopular subject areas such as rehabilitating ex-offenders or helping young people. As soon as you start to dig behind the headlines you find the surprising stories of how some people manage to battle against huge odds to avoid getting into crime. I commissioned top web company theOTHERmedia to develop the new site and they worked with me with maximum efficiency, flair and teamwork.
Back in the day, The King’s Fund was just another dewy-eyed health and social care think tank. In recent years, it has become increasingly influential. This is due to large extent on its communications strategy, which is focused around digital interaction with its audiences. I worked on web project management which included:
With time-poor audiences, the challenge is to not over-communicate, especially by email, because this is worse than not communicating at all; instead, to achieve a balance. This is only possible when targeting audiences effectively and this was done by means of market research and with the use of a system that became part of its CRM.
