Campaigning Tools for Grassroots Social Entrepreneurs
Campaigning Tools for Social Entrepreneurs The following content has been adapted from Patagonia’s book “Tools for Grassroot Activists”, in house tools from UnLtd and expertise gained through the Transform Ageing programme.This document “Campaigning Tools for Grassroots Social Entrepreneurs” should provide a simple approach to campaigning and provide a resource for you to complete or challenging your thinking. Whilst traditional marketing activities are well documented and will certainly be useful for selling products or services to your beneficiaries and customers aligning your business efforts to a cause and mission is more challenging. Following discussions on the Transform Ageing programme and the work that a typical Scale It award winner may face it is apparent that traditional marketing techniques only do so much, and campaigning methodologies will need to be introduced to help increase the spread of their operations. This could be due to a variety of factors such as the complexity of the service or area in which they are operating, helping beneficiaries navigate the service landscape and be drawn to them or create a social movement behind their work. Adopting these approaches is becoming every more critical, as stepping out of our echo chambers and accessing new audiences will help build momentum behind the solution. Whilst paid media is no longer a service that we need to rely on the increase in media channels has created a fair more challenging opportunity. Between our social media services and outreach techniques we can often create bubbles that are all to easy to live in. That said any communication we do must follow these sacred rules:
- Say what you mean
- Don’t take too long
- Be yourself
- Try to relate to people
- Being like everyone else makes you forgettable
- Don’t interrupt people Along with following these rules there are 8 useful steps that you need to make strategic decisions against in order to make your outreach as effective as possible.
- Positioning
- Tone of voice and look and feel
- Brand ID
- Targeting
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Building a plan
- Creative Development
- Tracking and optimization For each of these 8 sections we have included questions for you to complete, examples and were appropriate some supporting text.
- Positioning These days we live in a sound-bite world, you can’t expect people to read the book, what you should expect is them to just read the blurb. This is where brand positioning comes in, boiling it all down so that you can quickly articulate the following things: (please complete each one) Who are we? What are we trying to accomplish? Why and for whom? What will be the result if we succeed or fail? Why should people care about this? What makes us unique?
- Tone of Voice and Look and Feel