sounddelivery

#soundtalks – The Power of the Radio 4 Appeal

sdadmin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:59:03 +0000

sounddelivery and the Third Sector PR and Communications Network hosted a Q&A session with Sally Flatman, the producer of the BBC Radio 4 Appeal. She talked about what makes a successful appeal and how she’s now using social and digital media, such as Twitter and audio slideshows, to extend the reach of the Appeals beyond the radio audience.

The sounddelivery year

Mark — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:47:07 +0000

sounddelivery has just passed an important milestone – our fifth birthday. And as we start 2012 we’ve been reflecting on our achievements to date and what we hope to achieve in the future.

In 2006 Jude Habib became a Fellow of the School for Social Entrepreneurs and created sounddelivery with a vision to enable not-for-profit organisations to tell their stories with greater impact and to give a voice to people and issues rarely heard. We continue to do this through our training programme and outreach projects.

But while the opportunities for captivating storytelling have never been better, making the most of stories is still a challenge for many organisations. Our hope for 2012 is that managers and leaders across the sectors recognise the importance of demonstrating impact through effective storytelling.

We’ve compiled our highlights of 2011 below and you can follow the links to our end of year newsletters: for the charity and cultural and heritage sectors.

Charity Cultural and Heritage

Leicester Hospitals Charity – Our Space Appeal

Mark — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:55:10 +0000

To support the Leicester Hospitals Charity’s Appeal for a new teenage/young people cancer ward at Leicester Royal Infirmary we were commissioned to create this video. We prepared all the interviews and then worked with an in-house cameraman. We then crafted a narrative from all the raw footage.

Leicester Hospitals Charity, with support from the Teenage Cancer Trust, and the Robbie Anderson Cancer Trust, needs to raise £1.4 million for the project to go ahead. If the money can be raised in time, work on the new unit will start in summer 2012.

Currently, children are treated in the children’s hospital. Young adults have specialist treatment in adult oncology and haematology wards and outpatients. Other treatment is spread out across different areas of the hospitals. This can be particularly difficult for teenagers and young adults both when first diagnosed and treated for cancer and if they need to make the transition from children’s to adult cancer services.

The new integrated unit will totally transform the environment in which children, teenagers and young adults are treated. The careful use of design, lighting and colour will turn an ordinary hospital ward into a space that children will find stimulating whatever their age.

To support the Appeal please go to: justgiving.com/cancerappeal

Top class multimedia masterclass at the Guardian

Mark — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:44:00 +0000

People Powered Change – a real movement, or another talking shop?

Mark — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:53:53 +0000

Blog post from Mark Ellis, sounddelivery Senior Producer

What do you get if you cram a bunch of social entrepreneurs, charity funders and all round do-gooders into a small room in central London? Well it was all there to see at the People Powered Change Event organised by the Big Lottery Fund and facilitated by David Wilcox and John Popham, aka the social reporters. sounddelivery was invited to join a select group including representatives from UnLtd, NESTA, the Nominet Trust, Your Square Mile and the Young Foundation (to name just a few) to discuss BIG’s challenges for the future.

After a presentation from BIG’s Director of Marketing and Communications, Linda Quinn, we were tasked to examine a range of ideas to enhance BIG’s current operation. Everything from Network Building to creating a Social App Store were tossed into the air and either grabbed by an unsuspecting delegate or dumped in the bin. I gravitated towards a number of issues – improving Internal BIG comms and Socialising Evaluations. It might not look like much but the picture to the right is what my group came up with: a model for making the evaluation process much more transparent. It was a challenge to pull all our ideas together and of course people were coming from different perspectives. The funders amongst us were slightly reticent to allow the evaluation to be so open and visible to the world, while accepting this would be useful for applicants and could lead to less paperwork.

Alice Casey from NESTA talked about one of her pilot projects which involve projects blogging their way through the ups and downs and highlighting success stories along the way. She argued it was a trial but has been fantastic to get real stories from the frontline and content has ranged from written blogs to pictures and video. sounddelivery recently ran a social reporting project for Nesta’s Neighbourhood Challenge project to encourage storytelling in the field.

What I think is important with an approach like this is that funders recognise the need to train their funded projects in these social media skills and tell their stories in their own ways and in their own words. Not everyone is twitter-savvy and ready to jump into a wordpress blog. At one of the recent training courses I ran at least half of the delegates had never seen YouTube let alone sent a tweet. I feel this is where organisations like sounddelivery have a role to support and train people in using these tools so they can feel confident to contribute to the many online conversations.

The People Powered Change project is soon coming to an end and all the research from the many workshops will be gathered together into a full and comprehensive report. The aim is that BIG then discusses this in 2012 with an aim of working out how to take on some if these ideas. We look forward to being part of this conversation. So watch this space!

Child’s i foundation and the Power of Social Media

Mark — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:31:15 +0000

As part of our continuing #soundtalks series of events, run in conjunction with the Third Sector PR and Communications Network, we were delighted to welcome Kirsty Stephenson from the Child’s i Foundation to talk about their use of social media. This small charity runs a transitional home and family support centre in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Their aim is to ensure every child in their care grows up in a loving family.

Kirsty talked about the charity’s success at engaging with its supporters worldwide using social media and the power of video. As a surprise extra we were joined, via the power of Skype, by Lucy Buck the founder and heart of Childsi from her home in Kampala. She spoke passionately about why she had started the charity and how their approach seems to be working. The Storify below provides a collection of tweets, pictures, videos and an AudioBoo from the night:

We need to be sharing more stories about young people

Mark — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:25:54 +0000

Blog post from Jude Habib, Director - sounddelivery

I don’t know whether it is the grey days or the early nights or the challenges of running my own organisation but I have to be honest, I’ve been feeling out of sorts recently and in search of inspiration.

Last week I found it in buckets at the House of Lords when I was attending the charity London Youth’s launch of Hunch: ‘A vision for youth in post austerity Britain’. This was a vision of a Britain that invested in the capabilities and character of the next generation.

There was a stellar line-up of third sector leaders including the CEO of London Youth Nick Wilkie and Lord Victor Adebowale, all championing the role of youth work and young people. As Lord Adebowale argued: “During a recession – youth services are first to go. We should be investing in young people.”

But it was London Youth trustee, 21-year-old Francis Augusto, who was the highlight of the evening. He came to the UK from Angola with his family to start a new life. But life was challenging and at the age of 13 he was going off the rails and was arrested for GBH. However, his life was turned around thanks to a special youth worker who supported him and encouraged him “to be the best he could be”.

He describes himself as “a prime example of what makes youth work such a great profession”, but says young people’s voices need to be heard. He is now a student of sociology at Roehampton University – a mentor, leader and social entrepreneur, but most importantly an example of a voice that needs to be heard.

But, if I was feeling inspired so were many others in the room…

I wanted as many other people to hear his story. So I picked up my trusty iPhone, managed to grab Frances from the crowd and recorded my own audioboo interview with him, uploaded it and tweeted it out. Simple, immediate, straightforward and free.

Francis Augusto London Youth Hunch launch (mp3)

And it was that example of sharing a story to a wider audience which reminded me why I do what I do. There is still a real need to for charities like London Youth to tell their amazing stories to the broadest possible audience. At sounddelivery, our aim is to give organisations the skills so that they can do this themselves, but on occasion they might need a helping hand and I felt privileged to be in that position last week.

Give Us A Break – a project supporting carers in Hampshire

Eric — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:02:19 +0000

There are six million carers in the UK with many of them experiencing social isolation and unable to take time out from their caring role. Caring is a subject that has always been close to our hearts and this led us to set up our charitable arm, soundinnovation.

soundinnovation’s first project, Give Us A Break, aimed to tackle the feelings of social isolation that are often experienced by people caring for an ill, frail or disabled family member, friend or partner and to ease the burden of caring by providing a few days away from day-to-day responsibilities, as well as ongoing support over the phone and online.

At the end of June 2011 23 carers came to London for a two night break, staying at a network of Bed and Breakfasts across the capital. A host of activities were organised including a boat trip on the Thames, an open-top bus tour of London’s sights, a night out at the theatre and a trip on the London Eye.

84% of the group were full-time carers, with the remainder worrying constantly even when they are not caring. One out of three of them hadn’t had a break for at least a year and several of the carers had never had a break. All believed that a break of this kind would be “extremely beneficial” wanting to feel relaxed, released and supported.

This short slideshow brings together some of the amazing images from the project with thoughts and feelings from the carers involved.

To find out more about the Give Us a Break project please check out our soundinnovation micro-site.

Where will you be for Britain in a Day?

Mark — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:07:22 +0000

Blog post from Jude Habib, Director - sounddelivery

The BBC needs you! And I wanted to give you the heads-up on an exciting film-making project that you should all know about which launches today.

On Saturday 12th November the BBC is inviting us to be part of a self-portrait of Britain by turning the camera on ourselves and recording something significant in our lives. This footage will then be used to create a time capsule of Britain, as well as a feature-length documentary, which will be screened on BBC2 next year in the run up to the London Olympics.

The idea is based on Life In A Day, the global, user-generated feature film, which included 80,000 videos that were submitted to YouTube by people all over the world, wherever they were and whatever they were doing. The result was a powerful and inspiring portrait of the world on a single day.

The production company behind it all, Ridley Scott’s Scott Free, has teamed up with the BBC and multi award-winning director Morgan Matthews in order to capture a snapshot of Britain in a day.

And that’s where you come in. The production team is looking for honest, personal films that provide a real insight into life in the United Kingdom. I know you have access to amazing storytellers and this is their chance to get their voices heard.

They won’t need professional equipment – just the video on their phone or video facility on a digital camera. If they don’t have this, think about how you can help them get access to a camera.

So how should you get started?

Think carefully about the story you are trying to capture and who you think would be the best person or people to capture that. Then focus on the story they are trying to tell and how they use the camera to capture that story. Encourage them to think about how they can show the story rather than just tell it. As the final result is a TV documentary, pictures are as important as words. Make it personal, meaningful and in the present tense where possible.

So, for example, if you know an asylum seeker who can show what is meaningful about Britain to them or if you are working with carers who can show the truth of their day by filming it fly-on-the-wall style, please do encourage them to film their day on the 12th November.

The Britain in A Day website provides hints, tips and ideas to inspire you to get involved.

And if you use Twitter you can find updates from the project #britaininaday

I for one cannot wait to be part of it and I’m hoping that many of you will be approaching your own networks to get involved.

Good luck!

CharityComms – Audio Reports from the Digital Communications Conference

Mark — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:57:56 +0000

Charity Comms, the professional membership body for charity communicators, recently held a Digital Communications conference exploring the opportunities digital media offers to reach key audiences, build profiles and demonstrate impact. The conference aimed to show how charities are using the latest technologies and demonstrate how anyone can make digital communications work for their charity.

To support the conference sounddelivery created a number of audio reports with delegates and speakers. These were recorded, edited and uploaded online at the event allowing sharing and promotion to take place almost instantaneously.

Melanie Andrews, Digital Comms Manager, RSPCA: Bringing Activisim into the mainstream (mp3)

Zoe Williams, Columnist, The Guardian: Media Relations in a social world (mp3)

We also created a highlights package from the day combining many of the main speakers and common themes.

CharityComms-Digital-Communications-Conference by sounddelivery

If you’re interested to find out how this could work for your event or conference, please do get in touch.