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.
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).
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!
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
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)