Engaging your community in a meaningful way
This toolkit provides techniques to help voluntary organisations engage their communities.
Top tips & quick links
Marketing your charity or Mutual Aid group successfully can be the key to reaching new users, engaging funders or bringing in donations, building local partnerships and much more.
Getting started with marketing your work can seem daunting. Moreover, it is rarely considered a priority by smaller organisations, particularly when focussing on providing emergency, frontline support.
The guides, tips, and tools in this hub are aimed at making marketing as easy as possible for you - from building your social media presence to engaging your local press.
Before you start, think about the following marketing basics:
Are you looking to increase donations, raise awareness of a local issues, or bring in new volunteers? Without defining you goals, you’re not going to be able to work out who your audience is, or what marketing channels are best for you.
Ask yourself ‘who am I trying to reach and why?’ Are you trying to reach service users or funders? Politicians or potential volunteers?
Think about how best to inspire, gain the trust and motivate your audiences. Remember, different groups have different interests and engage with content in different ways and through different channels.
Human stories are incredibly effective. Try to find simple stories that explain the work your organisation does and its impact. Whenever possible, include quotes and images to bring your stories to life.
Make the most of the resources, time and skills that your organisation already has. If you have excellent Social Media skills, put these at the centre of your strategy. If you’re a great public speaker, consider how to give this skill a platform.
Think about how to measure your success. This could be as simple as asking people how they found out about your group. However, these days we also have a lot of useful data at our fingertips. For example, most social media platforms have inbuilt analytics tools that let you to track and compare the performance of posts.
Look out for what other charities and community groups (similar to you in size, cause, location) are doing and don’t be afraid to borrow their ideas.
This toolkit provides techniques to help voluntary organisations engage their communities.
Building effective relationships with the press and media
Find out some top tips to get the best results from your community engagement work.
Understand how to engage local journalists so they cover your story.
We connect to people’s stories better than facts and figures.
How you can measure and show the impact of your work.
Just tell us what you need and why. We'll give you trusted advice and resources from the best in the community sector: