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VAWD Home > Support for groups > Publicity > Top ten tips

Top ten tips

  1. Marketing is the catchall term for all branding and promotional activity from media releases to advertising.
  2. Tie back your activities to your objectives in the business plan. This helps with budgeting and managing what you don’t need to do – if it isn’t the plan you don’t need to do it.
  3. A campaign is the name given to the activities used to deliver an objective. The campaign includes branding, advertising, promotion, direct mail and monitoring.
  4. Branding is important as it does more than brighten up your documents. It becomes associated with a service in a way that creates preferences and loyalty.
  5. Targeting the message with the right language and images is key to success. We need to be clear about what our marketing is trying to achieve with whom.
  6. Mixing up promotional activities is a good idea: leaflets, flyers, notices and direct mailings together with online advertising on websites, e-newsletters and texting are all available tools that we can use fairly easily. Different ones reach different people.
  7. We need to put together good contact lists of the people we need to attract and manage the information in a database – ideally using specialist software such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
  8. We need to make sure we use an incentive to encourage people to respond to us, and to monitor the responses so we know how well things are going and why.
  9. We can use press releases and editorial to both promote new services and to celebrate a success. We can publish press releases on the organisation’s website news page.
  10. We also need to capture feedback on our activities to make sure we have not excluded important groups, and build our organisation’s experience base of successful marketing.

Information from the Building Resilience Resource Pack produced for the West Yorkshire Local Development Agency by: Bradford CVS, fit4funding, Voluntary Action Leeds, Social Enterprise Support Unit, Leeds Community Foundation, West Yorkshire Community Accounting Service and the Holistic Partnership Limited.