This is the first of a series of posts about my work for clients. Several of my first projects are coming to an end and so I shall be posting about them and what I have achieved.
Assessment
This project was an assessment as promoted on my site. Hope for the Future planned a campaign within the churches throughout the UK in the run up to the General Election in May 2015. The plan is to persuade churches to write to the candidates in all the parliamentary constituencies about their climate change policies. They want climate change to be a major issue during the General Election campaign.
I intend to follow their progress to see how they implement my strategy. Circumstances will change as they respond to a developing campaign but hopefully it will be possible to see how the assessment has been helpful.
I am going to say very little at this stage about my recommendations. The campaign has its plans and it is not for me to reveal them. I shall say more as the campaign goes public and plan to develop further and publish some of the tools I’ve developed for their use.
This client was remarkable as I had almost nothing to do with their website. I never had access to it. I have made recommendations for changes to the site and at the time of writing these have not been implemented.
Resources
In common with many similar small groups and campaigns, Hope for the Future is very short of resources. They number 4 or 5 volunteers working in two Anglican Dioceses. They have 11 hours of paid administration and very little more. One of the things the Internet can do is amplify the voices of a few people, so long as they use their resources effectively. There are plenty of stories of one-person businesses that have accessed a massive market, for example. Is it possible to launch a nationwide campaign from such a small base? Yes, it is! Will Hope for the Future do it? We shall see! If they are successful it will be through many hours of hard work carried out by a few dedicated people.
Today I shall outline the assessment’s content and in future posts, as the campaign develops, I shall explain some of the elements in the assessment in more detail.
Report
The assessment is a report with six appendices. The report suggested a new approach to their campaign. One problem was getting feedback from my clients. I started with a questionnaire and then drafted a few documents. Getting feedback for these first drafts was difficult and this is something I need to think about in the future. Towards the end I had a very productive one to one meeting, that actually transformed the assessment. It was an example of a generative conversation.
Appendices
The six appendices were tools to enable Hope for the Future to carry out the report. I drew not only on my understanding of online marketing but also my experience as a community development worker and working nationally with mainstream churches. The appendices included:
- A template for assessing potential partners. A campaign like this, with very few active volunteers needs to build networks of partners. So they needed a ready method to find and assess partners. This template will help them select the most productive potential partnerships and name key contributions they might make to the campaign.
- Guidelines for rolling out the campaign nationally. Sheffield Anglican Diocese is the pilot for the campaign but it needs a strategy to cover four nations and all Christian traditions.
- A review of the website and recommendations for changes. This included some wireframes, new and rewritten copy and an outline script for a video.
- Recommendations for the campaign in local churches. The campaign was already accumulating experience in local churches and so there was not so much to do here.
- A campaign schedule, particularly for the website. It is crucial to be ready to add new material to the website as the campaign develops. By planning ahead it is possible to ask partners to prepare website content as the campaign develops. The schedule shows the campaign how to plan ahead; they will need to fill in the detail as the campaign develops.
- A task list enables the planning team to identify the work that can be completed in-house and the tasks for partners.
The report showed how these various documents can be used together to support the campaign.
Testimonial
Finally, here is a testimonial from Revd Michael Bayley, who was my main contact with Hope for the Future:
Chris’ great gift in helping us work out how the website could work for our campaign most effectively was to ask the really searching questions about what we wanted to get out of it. He questioned us persistently and skilfully until we had really sorted out in our own minds what we wanted and was then able to suggest ways in which we might do this most effectively.
He used the technical questions of website design to make us think about the fundamental questions and he was also good at asking questions from “outside the box”. In one instance this led to a radical and extremely fruitful alteration to the way in which we organised the campaign.
We valued Chris’ careful and thoughtful approach; the way he listened carefully to what we wanted; the way in which he pressed us to make ourselves clear about what we wanted. We were grateful for his help which enabled us to develop the website much more quickly and effectively than would otherwise have been possible.
If you are running an online (or offline!) campaign, would this approach help you? I’d like to hear from anyone who thinks I may be able to help.
