Re-Evolve Website!

This week we finally succeeded in getting a website started for Re-Evolve!

It's based at Ning.com, which is a free website which offers loads of lovely features for us to use.  We can have a site blog for communications, a forum to talk to the young people who will hopefully use the site and facilities for photo and video hosting.  This is all very good and exciting, it's quite a work in progress at the moment.

I've spent most of the day working on branding it towards Re-Evolve by changing the colours around to match our logo and putting up a header.  It actually looks quite good already and after only a day's work.  Once it has more information and photos on it I'm sure it will look great!

Volunteering for the RSPCA

I've been volunteering to the East Finchley branch of the RSPCA for a couple of months now as part of their newly created marketing committee. The branch does do a lot of good work in the area and runs a clinic to provide reduced rate pet care for people on income support as well as working with fostering and rehoming programs. Since vet fees can be very expensive it's an important resource for the community how have them around.

However, there are also a lot of issues with people not knowing exactly what it is that the branch does and how they work. Their clinic is small and they can't keep animals over night, much less run an animal shelter! The main thing I've been doing for them recently is to create a couple of different flyers for them to distribute in their clinic and for more general publicity. It's a simple project, but has given me good experience in communicating information and presenting it in an attractive way. I also drew up a little dog graphic for use on the flyers, which makes me happy. I want to do some other animals as well, but the dog is all that's needed for now.

Questionaire

Anybody out there who wants to fill in one of ReEvolve's careers questionaires? Feel free to contact me to get hold of one. They don't take very long to fill out and you get to be part of ReEvolves project. Since we mention your name you could think of it as free advertising!

Forum3

I went to Forum3 this weekend, which is sort of like a careers fair for charities looking to find people to volunteer or work for them. Actually it was much nicer than most of the careers fairs I've been to in the past because there were far more companies exhibiting and everyone there was really keen to talk to the visitors. At careers fairs I often get the feeling that the people running the stalls are there under duress (or maybe I just felt alienated by the fact that all of the careers fairs at my university seemed to focus on careers in law and finance).

Anyway Forum3 was a nice experience and I met a lot of charities which sounded like they would like people with my skills to volunteer. Given the huge variety of charities exhibiting there if you were interested in volunteering anywhere it would be a great place to go, and from the large crowds there was obviously a lot of that interest present. If nothing else it was a great way for the charities to raise awareness about their work.

Useful Marketing Blog

This blog looks like it will have a lot of useful information for me to learn from. To be honest I've yet to read it all yet, but what I have is pretty thought provoking.

Even better you can subscribe to a set of email marketing lessons. I've had a look through the first one and the advice seems really good. All of it is based around internet marketing so it's relevant to the things I'm interested in as well

Internet Marketing

So I've been looking into Internet Marketing recently to try and figure out how to get that big old bundle of interwebs working in my favour. Considering how much time I spend surfing on there you'd have thought I'd have picked something up by now, but wouldn't you know it there's more to it than knowing how google works.

All of this is why I spent a good portion of yesterday reading Internet Marketing, Strategy Implementation and Practice by Dave Chaffey, Fiona Ellis-Chadwick, Kevin Johnston and Richard Mayer. With all those names you know there has to be some good ideas in the book! And there were, but more importantly it was well written. That's not to say that every page held me gripped, it's probably not possible for any reference book to do that, but the ideas and concepts were clearly explained and the writing style was easy to read. You can find out more about the books at www.pearson.co.uk/chaffey. I was reading the third edition, but there's a later one now too. Either way there are some good links on that site.

Most importantly the book gave me some ideas for things that Vital Re-Evolve could do to raise their profile. I love information that I can use (for good, not evil).

Some thoughts on the British Museum

Talk about your grand marketing schemes! There's nothing like a poster as tall as your already considerably large museum to draw attention.

Actually I'm not really very keen on what the British Museum had done here. Sure it's impressive and you definitely notice that they have an exhibition on Hadrian on. But blocking out part of the facade of your beautiful historic building with what is primarily an expanse of black? Can't say I think that was a particularly great decision.

Then again it does fit with all the other marketing materials the British Museum produced for the exhibit, so at least the expanse is consistent. I have to admit that it does fit rather nicely with the museum's theme of presenting important and significant artifacts. I don't have any arguments as far as the appropriateness to the brand is concerned! By making the advertisement the size of the museum itself it does give the exhibition a sense of importance. The sombre colours also reinforce the significance of the exhibition. It would be hard to take any billboard that size covered in rainbow hues particularly seriously. It would look even worse next to the classic British Museum facade too...

Researching Museums

I’ve been researching how various London museums market themselves these past few days. I have to say that I do love these museums, mostly because I like the concept of learning for its own sake. Very rarely do I go to one of these places because I need to research a specific subject anymore, it’s normally because I want to see the assorted pretty and cool objects or art on display. My tastes are pretty eclectic too, I’m just as interested in the fashion display at The V&A as I am in the dinosaur skeletons at The Natural History Museum or the combination of art and medicine at The Wellcome Collection.

However, not everyone has the time or the inclination to see every London museum so it’s important for these places to provide information to potential visitors on what they offer. This is what made me think that the marketing produced by museums would be interesting to explore. Each one has a different feel and theme to it which might appeal to different age groups, genders, nationalities and other variables. The need to attract both tourists and local visitors was one that I found particularly interesting. Not to mention that when you consider the different campaigns for different exhibitions within the same museum there’s a lot of information available from even a small selection of museums.

Incidentally The Science Museum and Natural History Museums are my favourites. I love the interactive displays and their subject matter. Not to mention the Natural History Museum has a gorgeous building. Then again most of the old places do. The British Museum is very impressive. Since they all have posters on them they’re part of the marketing as well!

Marketing Presentation

Last Wednesday I went to a marketing presentation on "How to Market your Business" by Stephen Campbell at the Westminster Reference Library. To be honest it was something that I needed to do to improve my knowledge of marketing, but it was also very useful for finding out about strategies to promote yourself. That's what I really needed to learn about, simple ways to make yourself more visible on the web.

It also made me aware that there are a lot of useful course out there to that you can take advantage of in order to improve your knowledge of something. I'm going to have to try and find a few more of these sorts of things to go to, especially if they are free like this one was.

On a side not the Westminster Reference Library is a good place to start finding things out as well. It's stocked with books for any research project, and if you work there there aren't any other things to distract you. Perfect if you get distracted by shiny objects like I do!

Most curiously the Westminster Reference Library is located just off of Leicester Square, which means that I must have been around it many times before, and yet never realised that it was there.

Sarah's Opening Post!

Hi there!

The idea of these blogs is to provide a log of what volunteers on Vital Regeneration's Vital Re-evolve project are up to. The goal of Vital Re-evolve is to provide a resource to young people looking to get into business and to do this we volunteers are researching various aspects of our chosen interest.

I'll be looking at marketing, and have so far been looking at the type of media produced by museums in order to market their exhibitions and facilities. The aim of this is to break down the techniques used by them to attract customers, in this case tourists and researchers. I'll be writing up my finding soon, so keep checking back for this and other developments.