Connecting Communities for Social Change

Guest post by Sarah Thomas, PR and Marketing Officer for Octavia Foundation

The Octavia Foundation is a registered charity that has been greatly helped by marketing support through Pimp My Cause. We work to support individuals and communities in west and central London. Our vision is to help to establish strong and vibrant communities and to help to improve people’s quality of life. Our community work focuses on five key areas:

*engaging with young people and children

* supporting vulnerable and older people

* helping with jobs and training

* involving the community

* advising on money and debt

To achieve our ambitions means to actively engage with our community of beneficiaries, supporters, funders, charity shop customers and advocates. And to do that means getting really good at social media.

We had an old Facebook profile with around 500 ‘likes’. This page had a bit of personality, but it was lacking the professionalism that we wanted to convey. There were many places that we shared our news, stories from our charity shops, etc and we wanted to pull it all together in one place and begin to expand our online community. After having a look at the pages feature on Facebook I realised we’d need a bit of help with the back end and went looking for help.

One of our fundraising supporters, Bethany Cox, recommended Pimp My Cause, so we joined and posted a help wanted advert.

We were very quickly contacted by Jonathan Waddingham, the Product Manager for JustGiving. Jonathan was the perfect person to help. We were immediately impressed by Jonathan's level of experience and his senior position at JustGiving. He very quickly got down to work structuring the new page. After exchanging emails we met up at his office to talk through the project, he gave additional advice and installed the JustGiving app onto the new page. We greatly appreciated Jonathan's technical ability, understanding of social media and his readiness to give his time to our project. Many thanks to you Jonathan!

But our progress through Pimp My Cause did not end there. While we were working on the structure and content of the new Facebook page with Jonathan we were also contacted by Social Media expert Michael Thomas of Blue Eyed Digital in Warwickshire. Michael and the design team at Blue Eyed Digital were able to help us with the design of the front end of the Facebook page. He really understood our work and objectives and was able to advise a number of activities to suit our (limited!) budget and resources.

Around this time Facebook changed their pages design to the new timeline model and Michael was able to advise us about the impact that the changes would have and amended the materials accordingly. Our page is now live and we’re excited to see the positive impact that the redesign will have to engagement and support of the charity on Facebook.

I was so inspired by my experience working with Pimp My Cause volunteers that it gave me the confidence to become even more ambitious when seeking pro bono marketing support. The Octavia Foundation has pioneered the development of a new local credit union to make financial services available to low income families in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

With the inspiration from Pimp My Cause I picked up the phone and made a few calls to local marketing agencies and was amazed at the response I received. Branding and graphic design was supplied pro-bono by Avenue Design. Avenue are based on Portobello road, at the heart of the borough’s creative community. And with one of the agency’s founding partners, Paul Roughan, a K&C resident, Avenue have a vested interest in the success of the union; “we recognise the obvious advantages the credit union will bring to the area in difficult financial times so we’re thrilled to be a part of it. And as a fledgling young business we’d love to become known locally for our creative, effective design and reasonable pricing.”

We received an incredible service from Avenue and the branding of Your Credit Union has been a great asset as the new credit union receives national and local press coverage.

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