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.

Social Impact Camp is back! We are happy to announce the details of the next Social Impact Camp. A big thank you goes to the London Early Years Foundation for hosting the event..

• Date: Wednesday 14th April 2010
• Time: 6:00 – 8:00 pm
• Location:  London Early Years Foundation, 121 Marsham Street, Lonon SW1P 4LP (Google Map)

You can reserve your place by signing up on the Social Impact Camp wiki.

Social Impact Camp is a monthly meet up for people to discuss different ways of measuring social impact. We compare tactics, think of ways to improve it and wonder if there will ever be a standard set of metrics against which to judge success by. It’s a friendly place, we don’t try and sell to each other; instead we’re honest, pretty and will never wear name tags.

To get a feel for what has happened at past events, take a look at the fantastic blog posts by Rob Greenland of The Social Business and Max St John of Nixon McInnes.

We look forward to seeing you all there for some great conversations…and lots of tea and biscuits.

This post is part of SHOUT OUT for Social Enteprise, a month long campaign where UnLtdWorld invited social enterprise leaders to write a blog post, which looks at social enterprise from an array of different angles and perspectives. You can read the original post here or discover the rest of the SHOUT OUT posts here.

PR – or public relations – is all about reputation. It’s the result of what you do, what you say, and what others say about you. It is used to gain trust and understanding between an organisation and its various stakeholders, whether that’s employees, customers, investors, or the local community.

PR isn’t just for big companies using national newspapers or television. Even the smallest start up or social enterprise can use PR opportunities to catch the eye of its local audience. But PR is often misunderstood, its practises are often unclear and how to ‘do’ PR is a mystery to many people.

I’ve pulled together some top tips to help make the practise of PR a bit clearer, help you generate some positive PR with limited resources, and offer some simple advice to get your organisation’s own PR and communications activity up and running.

What is Public Relations?
As I mentioned before, PR is all about reputation. Public relations professionals use many different techniques as part of their PR campaigns: from media relations and lobbying, to speaking at conferences, and more. PR is different from marketing and advertising, because with PR you do pay the newspapers and TV channels for the media exposure it secures. It’s the credibility of third-party endorsement that gives PR its power. For more information on the background of PR and its best practices, take a look at the free guides that the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) has put together.

The Media is a Channel
Many people misunderstand that PR is all about engaging the media and using the coverage generated to put a spotlight on your organisation. But should be made clear is that the media is just a channel, a way to reach your stakeholders. This means that your organisation needs to have its messaging right, its proposition and the impact it makes clear, before you undertake any PR activity. The basics of getting a PR campaign together are covered by Striding Out’s useful guides here.

The Rise of Social Media
Understanding that the media is just a channel to reach your stakeholders is especially important to understand with the rise of social media. Social media cuts out journalist and media organisations as a channel to reach your stakeholders.  Organisations can now interact and engage directly with their stakeholders, using sites such as Facebook and Twitter, in an affordable but effective manner. A blog is also an effective way of getting your organisation’s messages, news and recent announcements out to a wide audience. There’s too much to cover off on social media here, but here’s a fantastic video from Common Craft that explains what social media is in plain English:

There’s too much about using social media to cover it here, but if you’re interested in creating a social media campaign but don’t know where to start, take a look at Content & Motion’s excellent guide here or PR 2.0’s free ebook here.

Get Your Descriptor Right
To help with your messaging, it is worthwhile creating a descriptor for your organisation. A descriptor is a short sentence, no more than a few words long, that captures what your organisation is and does. This acts as an introduction for any press releases you send out and is often used by the media to help categorise your organisation and provide a neat intro into any stories they might write about you. For example:

“Bright One, the volunteer-run communications agency, announced today that it had written a fantastic descriptor for its latest PR campaign.”

Other examples of social enterprises with good descriptors include Divine Chocolate (“The Fairtrade chocolate where the cocoa farmers own 45% of the company”) and MyBnk (“The education charity working with young people to build the knowledge, skills and confidence to manage their money effectively”). UnLtdWorld.com’s is very neat too – “a networking site for social entrepreneurs”.

If it helps you to keep your descriptor clear and succinct, try and keep it to a 140 character, twitter-style description. You could even post your descriptor in the comments below this post and we can help refine it for you.

Register on askCHARITY
askCHARITY was set up to help organisations in their work with the media. It is an online contacts book which lists organisation’s details including their key media contacts. It aims to make it easier and faster for media professionals to get in touch with charitable organisations. askCHARITY also aims to open up, hard to reach sections of the media, so by registering your organisation (which is absolutely free) you’ll stand a much better chance of journalists, broadcasters, researchers, freelancers, and every kind of media professional finding out and taking an interest in your organisation. Find out

Get Professional Help
There are lots of PR professionals out there who are looking to give back to the community and help organisations such as yours tell their story effectively. If you’re interested in bringing on some PR support, I would recommend taking a look at the Media Trust’s Media Matching service, which brings together media and communications professionals (advisers) with charities and voluntary organisations that want to improve the way they communicate. Also take a look at Bright One, the volunteer-run communications agency, who are on hand to offer charities, social enterprises and other not-for-profit organisations affordable yet effective PR and communications campaigns. Bright One helps organisations get their messages heard and offer resources so they can focus on core activities, so find out more by going to www.brightone.org.uk.

Further Reading
The PR industry has developed a fantastic culture of knowledge sharing, which means that there is plenty of information available for you to learn more about running your own campaign. As a starter, I would recommend visiting Volunteer Genie for advice on using the media to recruit the volunteers you want, reading the guide that Business Link have put together, or visiting the askCHARITY blog for lots of advice on communications.

The SHINE UnConference for Social Entrepreneurs took place last weekend at The Hub Kings Cross in London.

We were there for the first day and had what can only be described as an inspirational time. Being surrounded by those both interested in engaging with and supporting social enterprise gave the event a momentum that we’re sure many took back into their everyday lives – many of whom will be running social enterprises.

We were on a panel in the morning called ‘Question Time’, which was billed as  “a question-and-answer session with some inspirational social entrepreneurs”. The panel was hosted by Cliff Prior, CEO of UnLtd, who did a great job of facilitating the discussion between Ben Ramsden of Pants to Poverty, Davina Roberts of Punch & Juicy,and Annys Darkwa of Vision Housing. Needless to say, we were honoured to be sat alongside such fantastic social entrepreneursand hope that we gave out lots of useful advice from our own jourey so far. You can read what Nick Temple, one of the ’social reporters’ at the event, thought of the panel here.

We even got to do a bit of social reporting ourselves, helping people to find their way around Shine and letting people who couldn’t attend the event follow along via Twitter.

We also hosted a session in the afternoon. Called ‘Social Media Media Easy’, the panel session brought together a group of online social media champions and saught to answer any questions from social entrepreneurs on how to use online communications tools to strengthen their messages. On the panel was Steve Bridger, Rachel Beer from Beautiful World, Jonathan Waddingham from Just Giving, and Nicola Jones from UnLtdWorld. The panel faced some tough questions, but when asked if they found the session useful, the resounding cheers of ‘yes!’ from the audience showed that the panel gave incisive answers using their years of experience in the field.

It’s a shame that we did miss the second day because we could have joined David Wilcox, Amy Sample Ward and Andy Gibson for the Social Collaboration Game. They were showcasing a new event format based on the content of their forthcoming book Social by Social. Luckily, David has put up a comprehensive set of notes so that we can all join in the fun.

All in all it was a fantastic event. It was a particularly special occassion for us as it was at this event in 2008 that the seed of an idea for Bright One was first planted and we haven’t looked back since.

Who knows where we’ll be next year, but one thing we can be sure of is that we’ll be first in line to attend Shine10!