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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

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PR Advice

PR Top Tips:
  • Always start by thinking “what do you want the result of this work to be?” “why do you want to be on the front page of this publication or featured in X?” Is it to get investment, recognition, sales, your name out there?  Answering these context questions can really impact who and how you approach people and will change between each contact you have the relationship you strike up with them.
  • PR is most often about the social entrepreneur, rather than about the social enterprise, but could be either
  • Don’t expect regular features from media sources.  You can expect to be published by them about once every 6-12 months max.
  • Think about the audience of each publication and media outlet.  Who are you trying to reach and why?
  • Everything can be news if you have the right angle.  Especially with more bespoke publications (or local news outlets that are often desperate for stories)
  • Doing this right does require time, resource, effort, consistency and good matches
  • Go through your network to establish warm leads to people that could get your story published
  • Opportunities are either reactive or proactive.  Think about what news is happening at that time, what the industry is doing and what message you want to share and how you might tailor the message to what they want. Often it’s best to approach people who have something in common with you
  • Be diverse in the types of media forms you approach (podcasts, papers, radio, TV etc)
  • https://muckrack.com/ is a useful website to use to find journalists
  • If you want to make this a sales-y process:
  • Plan who you want to approach
  • How to approach them
  • Have a common and proven method of approaching them (e.g. copy and paste from last successful approach)

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YJ PRESS RELEASE TEMPLATE

Immediate release**/Embargoed**** **(Think about deadlines) News Release E****nds Notes to editors: This is the section where you put your contact details for the journalist and any background information. Eg Statistics. (It costs £xxx a day for xxxx to provide its services) State who is available for interview Try to make sure you’re available if a journalist phones – they work to tight deadlines. Be conscious of deadlines. Consider phoning up the paper/radio station and checking they got the press release. **Take a ****good **photo FYI: Invite a journalist to your event/launch – but with smaller newsrooms this is not always possible and why it is best to give the full story in the press release along with a photo. *Need some help or a second eye to cast over your press release? Contact Grace at ** *
Heading: Make this exciting and attention grabbing and use it in the email subject and at the top of your email
Intro: this should give a concise summary of the story. Who is it about? Find the strongest story angle and sell, sell, sell.
Second paragraph: this is the remainder of the 5Ws, but with gradually less important details. Write objectively rather than written in the first person.
Quote: this is your chance to say exactly what you think. A journalist may well edit the first paragraph of your press release, but they won’t make major changes to your quote. Your quote should be personal and emotive and try to include a key message.
By the fourth paragraph, you’re giving a bit more background. If the journalist only has a small amount of space they may well ‘cut to fit’, meaning the first two paragraphs are published, but the fourth is missed out.
Finish off your press release with where more information can be found. Include a website or phone number.

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Downloadable Resources

  • [Choosing and Using a Graphic Designer](/marketing/assets/Choosing and Using a Graphic Designer.pdf) PDF
  • [Communication Cheat Sheet Complex Strengths](/marketing/assets/Communication Cheat Sheet Complex Strengths.pdf) PDF