Working Group: Comms and Branding (Sheffield Gathering)

Hey everyone,

I’m up for helping to coordinate a working group on comms and branding. Who’s in?

My personal feeling is that this should be geared towards getting more clients and partnerships into the network - so really about how we sell ourselves and talk about ourselves externally, rather than looking into internal comms. That said, happy to work alongside people who want to do internal stuff!

I know that last time some great work was done by @Lucinda @CatAinsworth @decentral1se (and others I’m sure), so we’d be picking up where they left off.

This is a bit of info about what they looked at: CoTech Gathering: Branding, comms & marketing - #5 by Lucinda I’ll reach out to them and read up on what got done at the last gathering.

Please post here if you want to get involved, or if you have some ideas for what needs to be discussed.

Thanks!

Hey Polly
Great thinking
Away on holiday now but count us in at media co-op
Luc x

Hi Polly.

Provisional ‘yes’ from GS - work dependent. (If we can’t make Sheffield, we’ve been around this topic from the get-go of CoTech, so happy to remote in or share history & thoughts in advance - zoom eg).

I would be interested in discussing think about:

  • external communications: how do we talk about CoTech and the value it brings our clients? How should this be reflected on our website?

  • who do we have in our network? can we (do we want to?), share these contacts or leads?

  • thinking strategically about our pipeline - who should we be actively and collectively targeting (cities who are wanting to become co-operative cities springs to mind), large funders, think tanks, government bodies and departments, big companies and charities?

  • internal communications: we need a way of contacting everyone who is part of each of the co-ops, not just the main movers and shakers (lets set up an email list?)

  • Social media - do we want to have a blog or sort out our Twitter?

…If others have ideas, post them up here and we can start building the agenda!

Hi again Polly

That’s great you are up for coordinating a working group.
I agree with you it would be fruitful to focus on how we sell ourselves and talk about ourselves externally

We never did a full write-up of the marketing hack in London back in Nov 2018, but in summary:

We started with the ides of rustling up more business for CoTech members, specifically making the website more outward-looking to attract clients

The conclusion was that there’s not currently a mechanism for CoTech to have clients; so the priority is to inspire CoTech members about the possibility of working together by sharing stories of collaboration.

We made some suggestions for updating the website, including case studies of CoTech members collaborating… but the suggested updates weren’t made in the end, and I have to confess that life took over and none of us followed up actively.

Our draft re-vamped content for the ‘what we do’ page is here

We did a quick survey of 9 people at the Co-tech hack in Nov 2018 to try to gather examples of collaboration between co-tech members - we couldn’t find many examples. We also asked what they thought about the current co-tech website
Here’s the results
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oK1aB-qyia_Ei2PLsSMrgyJEJ6vEdlBtlYvMJXn5RPI/edit#gid=0

@CatAinsworth shared masses of great stuff she’d created for a pitch by a bunch of Co-tech members to Co-op Group in Jan 2018

Polly I’m still not sure if I can make it to Sheffield next week, but if I’m there I’d love to work with you on this. Luc x

PS re your social media question:
at the November gathering, no-one had the capacity to look after CoTech’s Twitter; but co-ops did agree in principle to writing one blog post a year, which if it happened would add up to a good amount of content on the CoTech website

I have previously offered to co-steward the CoTech twitter account. I run/contribute to several accounts on a pretty much daily basis as it is, so helping with another wouldn’t be a major issue. As I recall there was concern about sharing the password which bogged things down, although as I use tweetdeck it isn’t necessary to share the password. I remain happy and willing to assist with this work (my main Twitter account = @upperholme)

As with Graham, ditto on the twitter account.

that would be brilliant Graham, thanks for the offer !