Planning

Again, this doesn’t need to be War and Peace and is commensurate to the type of project you are undertaking. It could be a very simple side of A4 used as an aide mémoire. For broader scale things it may need to be a little more formal and for some purposes, such as part of your grant submission documentation for example, you may need to flesh this out a bit.

Start with an overview of the project including the challenges you may face that your PR campaign is designed to help you overcome. This could be that you don’t have sufficient bell ringers to ensure the continuation of bell ringing at your church, therefore you intend to approach a number of interest groups for recruitment purposes and part of that recruitment activity may be the hosting of additional have a go sessions.

Your goal therefore is not only to increase the number of ringers you have but you might also be looking to raise for funds to help you purchase a simulator to avoid annoying the neighbours with ringing every evening. Insert SMART objectives from your research and goals stage here.

List the methods by which you will achieve your goals, this could include press releases, interviews, articles, advertising, giving presentations at interest groups and so on.

Think about your target audience, as before, are you connecting with young people, university groups, the 20-40 age bracket, or the WI or men’s breakfast club?

What are the specific places you are going to target with your message? Face to face, print, radio, TV, social media….

Don’t be afraid to jump on a band wagon, if there is something already going on in your area or church, could you be part of it? The Ringing Remembers campaign was exactly that. It would not have been anywhere near as successful as a stand-alone recruitment campaign, but because of the anniversary of the centenary of the end of the First World War meaning so much in the public consciousness, a lot of the publicity was already there for us. Other band wagons might be a Patronal Festival, the Flower Festival, Heritage Open Days, a local community event. Something that you can tap into being a part of.

The next steps is basically your action plan for getting on with it....a list of tasks if you like. Who is going to do what, when and how?

Vicki Chapman, CCCBR PRO