Celebrating community impact
The Changemaker Portrait Project
Active Gloucestershire, a local charity that supports people to be more active, wanted to celebrate some of their Changemakers – people in the county who support others to be active – whether that’s through running a club or activity, hosting a community event or connecting people together. To highlight their contribution, we ran a competition, asking for communities to nominate those who they think should become one of the top 10 changemakers in the county. The finalists would then be photographed, filmed and have their portrait and biography displayed at our annual we can move event – an event that brings all members of the movement together to inspire, connect and enable people to move more.
The Brief
To start off, we needed to launch a competition and gather nominations from the community about who should be our finalists. In addition to that, we needed to judge the entries, learn more about the finalists and organise filming and photography to be developed for each. Once that had been captured, we needed to organise printing and the display. It was my role to make this happen – from raising awareness of the project, promoting the competition and encouraging communities to make a nomination, manage all entries and write the biographies and film and edit their promotional videos. The project was carried out over three months.
The Approach
A holistic campaign from start to finish.
Firstly we had to put together a criteria and launch the competition. Then we had to raise awareness of the project which we used a multitude of channels to do. Once the entries had been gathered and judged, the content development began which was primarily biographies for print and web and video content. Photography was carried out by a local photographer. When the portraits had been completed, we set up the reveal event and then organised a roadshow of different venues for it to be displayed in, including the local museum.
The campaign blended digital channels with face-to-face engagement to create momentum across the movement.
Social media campaign
We ran a social media campaign that targeted core groups and activity clubs in the county. This allowed us to reach not only our own followers but others with interests in physical activity in the area. We also shared the stories of the finalists on social media too as part of the celebration.
Community engagement
We already had many relationships with groups and clubs as well as community spaces which host physical activity sessions. We directly engaged with them providing posters, information and flyers to share with their participants.
Local PR
PR was not only used to promote the project but to celebrate the finalists once they had been picked. We targeted local media outlets such as BBC Radio Gloucestershire, So Glos and Gloucestershire Live to gain their support in celebrating the community members helping people to move more.
Examples
The following examples give an overview of the type of materials used to support ongoing communications and marketing activity. They illustrate the tone, structure and approach that will help build visibility and consistency across all channels.
Poster campaign
The posters were displayed in local areas and physical activity spaces and included a QR code so making a nomination was easy and hassle free.
Video
content
The videos were used to showcase the finalists and were hosted on our website. We then made short versions for social media which we posted across all our platforms. The videos were then sent to the finalists for their use.
Press release and media pitch
We targeted the local media by sending out a three press releases at different points of the project. Firstly to announce the project, then to announce the finalists and again to share more information and the final portraits and videos to tell their stories. We pitched this to the media as a package.
Public
displays
To ensure more people got the chance to see the portraits, we worked with local venues to display the project. They were revealed at our annual event and were then moved to Eastgate shopping centre for two weeks, followed by the Gloucester museum for 2 months.
Results
Over 100
entries
Over 100 people were nominated which allowed us to choose 10 individual finalists and 1 club.
Wide-reaching video
The videos were viewed over 12,000 times on social media.
