Marketing skills for Norfolk church activists
On 11th September Christian activists from across the county came together for two thought provoking training sessions in marketing and social media hosted by the Media Trust and Network Norfolk.
Delegates active in churches and Christian organisations in Norwich, Wymondham, Attleborough, Dereham, Holt and Great Bircham came together on 11th September to explore how to use marketing techniques and social media to promote their services more effectively, increase their fundraising and reach out to more people.
The free training hosted at the Wellspring Family Centre in Dereham was the first joint initiative between national charity the Media Trust and Network Norfolk. It follows the awarding of Beacon status to the Christian website to recognise the quality of its work in community journalism.
Alex Delaney, Community Outreach Manager for the Media Trust’s newsnet project led the sessions, providing useful tips, strategy guidelines and encouraging those present to share ideas and experiences.
Throughout the seminars Network Norfolk publisher, Keith Morris provided examples of how to use the Network Norfolk site more extensively as a way of increasing publicity and reaching a wider audience.
Delegate feedback was very positive with one commenting: “The training included a very good mix of teaching from the front, activities and thought provoking questions specific to our organisation.”
The afternoon session covered the topic ‘Marketing and Promotion of Community Organisations’. As well as thinking through the different mechanisms for promotion, the attendees were challenged to personify their brand and interview each other for newsworthy stories about their work.
The topic for the evening session was ‘Understanding and Using Social Media’ which provided an overview of Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and less well known sites such as Instagram, Pinterest and Google+. Everyone was encouraged to spend half an hour exploring a social media site that they had previously never used and to figure out whether it would be useful for their work.
The evening finished with a challenge to condense the content of four news stories down to an interesting 140 character tweet.
The Media Trust training was provided as part of its online newsnet project, which aims to create a UK-wide network of community reporters, citizen journalists and local storytellers, giving them tools and skills to get more from their local news.
Network Norfolk and the Media Trust plan to deliver more free training sessions for Norfolk’s Christian community in the coming year.
The slides and handouts for the session, produced by the Media Trust, can be downloaded below:
http://newsnet.mediatrust.org/