We had so much fun at the first Bright One Summer Party last year, that we’re going to throw another one!

This time it will be taking place at 6 St Chad’s Place (near King’s Cross) on Thursday 29th July from 6:30pm.

Whether you’re a volunteer, a client, an organisation looking for support, have been involved with us before or want to get involved, or if you want to support the work that Bright One does, then sign up now on the link below:

http://brightonesummerparty2010.eventbrite.com/

It will be a cash bar, so please bring along your pocket money.

Feel free to get in touch if you want any more details about Bright One or the party, but otherwise we’ll see you all then!

Lots of love,

- Ben & The Bright One Team

We’re delighted to announce that Bright One has been awarded the Social Enterprise Mark, which identifies us as an organisation trading for social purposes.

What’s even more exciting for us is that the Social Enterprise Mark is also a client, as we helped launch the Mark in February 2010 and have been working with them to develop their online presence and engage with social entrepreneurs through social media.

The Social Enterprise Mark is the brand for social enterprises, businesses that have a socially driven mission. Social enterprises are working to make a difference across the UK and beyond, but not enough people know what they are or how they work. The Social Enterprise Mark aims to raise awareness of what social enterprises do in order to get more people to buy from, engage with, start up and work for social enterprises.

You can find out more by watching the video below:

Ben Matthews, Founder of Bright One, said: “Bright One is absolutely committed to supporting charities, social enterprise and other third sector organisations in their communications activities, allowing them to raise awareness and much needed funds for their causes. We’re really proud to have been awarded the Social Enterprise Mark, which shows that we have created a sustainable organisation that makes a real impact to both volunteers and charities.”

Lucy Findlay champion from the Social Enterprise Mark Company, added: “We are delighted to award the prestigious Social Enterprise Mark to Bright One. Social enterprises come in all shapes and forms so it’s great to see a vital voluntary organisation understanding the importance of being part of the wider social enterprise brand.”

You can find out more about the Social Enterprise Mark at www.socialenterprisemark.org.uk.

We’ve had a great reaction since Bright One and CharityComms launched the CharityComms 2020 initiative a few weeks ago.

The presentation has had over 1600 views on Slideshare (not quite at 2020 views just yet!) and created plenty of buzz on Twitter with the hash tag #cc2020. It’s also been great to see people writing about CharityComms 2020. You can read reaction from PR Week, Brand Republic, Just Giving, School for Social Entrepreneurs, and the blogs of Steve Bridger, Darragh Doyle and Amy Sample Ward.

We’ve even received additional entries, bumping up the number of contributors in the presentation to 21. Thanks to Stuart Witts of Marie Curie Cancer Care, Rob Dyson of Whizz Kidz and Susan Farrington of the MS Society for their five predictions.

The updated presentation is embedded below:

Rob Dyson even recorded his five points in an Audioboo, which you can listen to here:

Thanks also go to the original contributors: Jonathan Waddingham from Just Giving; Steve Bridger; Vicki Browning, Director of CharityComms; John Carnell, Founder and CEO of Bullying UK;  Gail Scott-Spicer from The Scout Association;  Sue Fidler from Charity Email;  Gideon Burrows, Editor of ngo media; Adeela Warley, Head of Communications of Friends of the Earth; Lynda Thomas, Director of Externall Affairs for Macmillan Cancer Support;  Zoe Amar from Lasa; Julia Cream, Head of Communications for Timebank;
Jaz Cummins, Web and New Media Manager for Amnesty International UK, Amy Sample Ward;
Rachel Beer, Founding Partner of Beautiful World;  Victoria Rae, Head of Communications of UNICEF;
Jude Habib from Sound Delivery,  and Joe Saxton from nfpSynergy.

And a special thanks to Vicky Browning at CharityComms for agreeing to work with Bright One on the project in the first place!

We’re excited to announce that Bright One has recruited its first ever intern – Alisha Ramos.

Alisha is a third year student at Harvard University who has bravely crossed the pond and has joined Bright One. She will be based at Bold Creative, an award winning creative agency that Bright One works with, as a digital communications and PR intern.

“During my eight week internship, I’m hoping to gain an insightful and exciting experience in the world of digital media and public relations,” Alisha said. “At school, I study History and Sociology, but in my “free” time, I enjoy blogging, navigating through social media, graphic design, and generally poking around the internet. I’m looking forward to many adventures while exploring London, although it may take some time for me to look right instead of left when attempting to safely cross the street!”

While at Bold, Alisha will be working on two projects specifically. The first is called Tag Map, an interactive, geo-tagging networking site for sharing ideas and opinions. The second is a website called Forest Flava, which has been designed and developed by Bold in collaboration with young people from Waltham Forest. When she’s not working on these projects, Alisha will be turning her skills to Bright One projects.

You can also check out Alisha’s blog, Bows and Ivy, or follow her on Twitter – @alishalisha

Welcome aboard, Alisha, and best of luck with your internship!

Here at Bright One, we’re delighted to announce the launch of CharityComms 2020, a unique and intriguing snapshot of the most significant communications trends of the coming decade.

Participants were invited to write down the five trends they see as the most significant in the coming decade. These points are accompanied by an image that reflects their vision, giving a very personal view of what each contributor thinks lies ahead.

Charities represented in the initiative include Amnesty International, Macmillan Cancer Support, UNICEF, Friends of the Earth, The Scout Association, and many more. There’s also a host of influential thinkers in the charity comms space who have contributed, including Jonathan Waddingham at JustGiving, Rachel Beer at beautiful world, Steve Bridger and Amy Sample Ward.

Bright One has been working on the initiative in partnership with CharityComms, the professional body for charity communicators.

Ben Matthews, founder of Bright One said: “The combined vision of so many influential thinkers in the charity sector has produced a unique insight into the future of communications. We hope CharityComms 2020 will provide ideas and inspiration to enable charities to tackle the challenges of the coming decade with confidence.”

And you can take part!

You’re invited to add your own five trends and an accompanying image to the presentation by sending us an email and we’ll update as further submissions are received.

We hope you enjoy CharityComms 2020 and find it useful in helping to tackle the challenges of the coming decade. We’d love to hear what you think, so please leave your comments below.

What are your five trends you see affecting charity communications in the next 10 years?

This is a post about Bright One’s series of training sessions held exclusively for Bright One volunteers and clients. Please get in touch if you are interested in running a training session for Bright One. We’d love to hear from you!

Following last month’s inaugral Bright One training session on ‘Talkability’, a group of Bright One volunteers and clients were given an exclusive training session by Melanie Seasons, Social Media Strategist at Onlinefire, all about ‘Social Media and Online PR’.

During the session, Melanie described why Audience Mapping is important (Understanding who your target audiences are and what they ‘do’ online, as you need to know what platforms are best to engage on and if you already have advocates) and some of the tools you can use to find them. These tools included paid-for services such as Radian6, right down to free tools such as Google Blog Search, Addict-o-matic, IceRocket, and BlogPulse.

She also took the attendees through the basics of Social Media Relations, where organisation engagee with their audiences through Social Networking (Twitter, Facebook), Pro-active outreach (e-mail, newsletter, events) or Online press offices (blogging, video).

The attendees were also left with a few final thoughts to take away with them:

• Starting from scratch can be tough – establishing a social media profile does not happen overnight
• Expect growing pains – you’ll figure out as you monitor where your audiences are online
• Sign up to it all, but don’t expect to be able to do everything – concentrate on what works for you, and build a strategy from there

All in all, it was a fantastic session, so many thanks to Melanie for giving us a superb insight into Social Media!

This week, a group of Bright One volunteers were given an exclusive training session by Andrew Bloch, Founder and Managing Director of Frank PR, on “Talkability and the power of word of mouth.”

Talkability was described by Bloch as “the buzz that takes over and does the best marketing for a brand, product or service.”  Talkability is a registered trade mark of Frank PR and has its own proprietary methodology for helping generate ideas that will kick-start word of mouth, to often magnificent results as shown by well known campaigns for CompareTheMarket.com and Kit Kat.

The case studies that the volunteers were shown demonstrated how they can take this way of thinking into the charity work that they’re doing with Bright One, using Talkability to achieve cut through for clients and help them to make the most of limited resources through kick-starting word-of-mouth.

It really was a fantastic session, so a big thank you to Andrew and all at Frank PR for hosting Bright One’s volunteers!

We’re planning to do these training sessions on a regular basis, so please get in touch if you’d like to run a training session on an element of PR for Bright One.

Not long ago Bright One volunteer Keri Hudson signposted us to the Backing Young Britain campaign, and we’re pleased to announce our support for it.

Backing Young Britain is a cross-Government campaign calling on all organisations across the country to create more opportunities for young people. Times are tough for young people who are leaving school or full-time education. Yet they are the future of our workforce and it’s vital that they get the help they need now, to find a job, get training, or build their work skills and experience.

Supporting young people has always been central to our goals here at Bright One. When we set up, one of our aims was to help students of PR and media gain valuable work experience in providing PR support to organisations in the Third Sector, in the hope that this experience would aid them in their search for employment after university. To date we’ve had some fantastic students volunteer with Bright One who have worked alongside experienced PR and communications professionals to provide innovative support to a wide variety of Third Sector organisations and campaigns.

But don’t just take our word for it – PR student Alex Judd, a volunteer at Bright One, tells more about how Bright One has helped him:

“I would thoroughly recommend volunteering for Bright One to any student. The guys you’ll work with are incredibly helpful and will gladly answer any queries you might have. As you’re working for clients in the third sector, you also feel like you’re helping a worthwhile cause. Not to mention the great experience in PR, meaning if you’re looking for a placement year or seeking employment after you graduate there is no doubt that this experience will mean you’re one step ahead of the competition.”

Find out more about our volunteering opportunities here, check out the Bright One entry on the Backing Young Britain website and find out how you can support Backing Young Britain here.

The Pixel Project, a global Web 2.0-driven awareness and fund raising organisation working to end Violence Against Women (VAW), will launch The Pixel Project Wall of Support on 8 March 2010 to coincide with International Women’s Day. The Wall of Support will be a thought-provoking gallery of YouTube video endorsements from people from all walks of life who support The Pixel Project and its mission to inspire men and women to work together to prevent, stop and end VAW.

The Wall of Support is the latest innovation from The Pixel Project in a series of interactive and interconnected social media-based community initiatives intended to unite people from all walks of life to speak up against VAW. The video endorsements are uploaded to YouTube and displayed on the Wall of Support page in the Community Buzz section of The Pixel Project’s website (http://www.thepixelproject.net). Guidelines for making and submitting a video can be found on the website as well.

Read more on Bright One’s social media newsroom >>

This is a guest post from Zoe Amar, a Bright One volunteer and Lasa’s Marketing and Business Development Manager. This article originally appeared on the CharityComms blog.

Lasa has just celebrated its 25th anniversary with a campaign that generated a return of investment (ROI) of 94:1; this means that for every £1 we spent on the campaign we earned £94. I’m going to talk about how we did it and the lessons I learnt along the way.

You can also use many of these tips to help create a successful relaunch or repositioning.

1. Be clear about why your organisation needs this campaign

Make sure that your reasons to celebrate your anniversary pass the ‘so what?’ test. Unless you are celebrating at least a centenary or more, there’s a risk that you could launch an expensive campaign for its own sake. You need to ask yourself: what’s in it for your audience?

For example, the ultimate aim of Lasa’s 25th anniversary campaign was to tell our stakeholders how our services could help them. To get to the stage where they were receptive to this message, we needed to use the initial phases of the 25th anniversary to:

• rebuild our reputation after a recent restructure
• demonstrate the business case for our services (in our case, increased need for advice about welfare benefits)
• reach influential stakeholders in our market (e.g. Chief Executives and Directors in the charity and public sector organisations who use our services)
• reposition ourselves as a leader in the fields we work in

2. Get buy-in

So, you’ve had a great idea for your anniversary/ relaunch/ repositioning. Now what? You’ll need to get buy-in and support from your board and directors. Make sure that you involve them early on in the planning stages. I found that even when budgets were tight, the board and directors were still supportive if I could show the business case for what I was trying to do.

3. Plan, plan, plan

Who are your target audiences? We invested time in thinking about who we were trying to reach with our 25th anniversary campaign: what kind of people were we targeting? You need to consider what their job titles are, what kinds of organisations they work in and what processes they go through when deciding whether or not to use your services. You also need to think about creating simple but effective key messages that will cut through the ‘clutter’ to reach your audience. What do you want them to do after they’ve experienced your campaign?

In my view, charities should be careful about how they use nostalgia in anniversary campaigns. Sure, what your charity has achieved is important and it’s made a big difference. Celebrating that will reward the loyalty of long term supporters. But keep the focus on what you’d like your audience to do now- e.g. donate or, in our case, fund or use our services. And build into the planning stage how you are going to track the success of your campaign. For example, you can suggest that a donations target should be hit.

4. Choose the best tools for the job

Once you’ve got a business case, buy-in and a broad plan for your campaign, you need to think about how you can find the best tools to reach your target audience. In Lasa’s case, we needed a low cost tool that our stakeholders trusted. We focused on PR, using a mix of press work, sponsorship and two carefully targeted events with speakers that we knew would attract our target audience. We planned the events so that they were as interactive as possible; for example, we launched a survey on the theme of the events a few weeks beforehand, and announced the results a few days before the final ‘flagship’ event.

5. Build the right team for the campaign

Whether you are using staff from your own marketing and communications teams, external suppliers or pro bono help, take the time to choose people who know the tools you want to use, and who can use them well. I was fortunate enough to work with Luica Mak of Bright One and Jo O’ Rourke of Keynote Consulting, both of whom have many years of experience in PR and events.

6. Keep a close eye on costs

With a big campaign, like an anniversary or a relaunch, costs – especially design – can spiral beyond your original estimates. It’s also easy to overlook VAT or other ‘hidden’ costs.

The main lesson I learnt from our 25th anniversary campaign was not to spend a penny of our budget without thinking about what the return on investment would be. As a result, our final campaign costs were less than 40% of our original estimate.

We also were fortunate to have some very good sponsorship opportunities, including from one of our funders, City Bridge Trust.

7. Measure your results

Looking at your original key performance indicators of success for your campaign, how did it perform? At Lasa we achieved some significant press coverage and, as direct result of some networking opportunities from our 25th anniversary event, also won a new contract with a government department.

Keeping these tips in mind, you should be able to generate successful return on investment from your anniversary campaign.