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!

The  “Hear All About It!” audio trail project, which was funded by the Renaissance East Midlands ‘MuBu‘ scheme,  involved young people creating an audio trail to guide visitors through the museum’s restored period village streets. A key part of the project was to give young people the skills and creative ability to produce the audio trail themselves. The production process included a series of intensive workshops in scriptwriting, storytelling, audio production and drama skills, which were run by Mark and Linda Kempton, the creative writer who was also involved in the project.

The young people then created a series of short audio-dramas based around different features including a stench pipe, tram shelter and a police phone box. The audio guides were made available to download from the museum’s website and are accompanied by an interactive map pinpointing their locations.

The judges were impressed by the engagement of the young people and the potential new visitors that the project would encourage, saying;

“It was an admirable project that engaged a notoriously difficult group (teenagers) and that they demonstrated genuine enthusiasm for the project.  Hear all About It took a creative approach to developing interpretation of street furniture on site which will encourage people to visit.”

Listen to one of the dramas created for the trail, this one focusing on an on-street urinal.

Urinal by Crich Tramway Village

You can download the PDF Press Release announcing the award here.

This is our second heritage award, after our Podcasts From the Past project with the Museum of London won the Digital Access Online Jodie Award.

After many months of working in various locations – mainly Jude’s flat – we have finally taken the plunge and moved into an office of our own. Our new base is in Aldgate in East London and we’re neighbours with Happy Computers where we run most of our training courses. To mark our arrival, and to tie in with social media week, we decided to run a Social Media Taster Day inviting people to drop in and see us, and receive some informal training and consultation. We had a great day and were delighted by the turn-out and the number of people who came to visit. It was wonderful to see some old friends, and make acquaintance with new friends too! The core sounddelivery team were in situ giving one-to-one advice as well as running sessions in video, podcasts and social-media applications. Not to blow our own trumpet too much, but this is just one of the emails we received after the day:

“Take a bow guys, you’ve got the plot and bang on at that! I enjoyed my time with you yesterday and it was so hands on and useful – thank you for that! I think the tech phobia is well on its way out! It’s now up to me to put in the rest of the work to seal the deal! And you’ve inspired me to do just that.”
Saritha Thomas, People’s POWER {Participatory OWnership Empowerment Radio} Collective

We’re considering running another Social Media Taster Day in the future – so watch this space!