The brief of the communications committee is to enhance communication within the Guild by maintaining and developing the Guild website as a hub of news and information, maintain and develop the e-mail lists and social media presence and connect to the wider bell-ringing community.
The pandemic has highlighted the need to improve communications with the Guild. The old system of cascading information down via posters to place on tower notice boards did not work well beforehand, and not at all during the pandemic. Like many other areas of life, the pandemic has given us the opportunity to look critically at what we do and accelerate change, before it is forced on us.
Membership and communications Database
In November 2019, the Guild adopted a GDPR compliant privacy policy. Since then we have been asking members to sign up to the Guild membership database, which is held on a secure server, and to which only authorised officers have access. Since June 2020 we have also started sending out quarterly Guild newsletters using the Mailchimp communications system, to those subscribed to the database. Training has been offered to District Officers, who can also use the system to send out communications to their District.
Later this year we will be adding additional functionality, so that members can subscribe to various ‘interest groups’, and only receive communications which match their interests. For example, those interested in surprise practices could receive communications about forthcoming surprise practices in their District (and any other neighbouring Districts that they add). However, they would not receive communications aimed at those learning to plain hunt - unless this was one of their interests - or vice versa.
We now have over a third of the Guild membership signed up. However, whilst in some Districts this is now over 50% of their members, others have 25% or less, lowering the overall percentage. When we collect subscriptions at the beginning of 2022, it will be a good opportunity to ensure that the majority of members subscribe, but in the mean-time please encourage anyone who has not already done so to visit the Guild website and download the latest Guild newsletter. This contains a link to enable them to subscribe to the database.
We do appreciate that some members may not have computers or may not be all that familiar with them. We do not wish to disenfranchise these members and still ask that District secretaries and tower correspondents pass on such communications to the members using traditional means.
Website
The website serves a different function, and Google analytics shows that it is not something that members view regularly. The website has also become cluttered, some members commenting that it has become difficult to navigate. Therefore, our plans for 2022 include a strategic review, critically examining the purpose of the website, redesigning the navigation and removing out of date and rarely accessed content.
e-mail lists and social media
Social media has its place, but is only part of our communications strategy. Win-Port has 210 subscribers. This was transferred from Yahoo groups to Google groups in early 2021, and we found a significant proportion of subscribers are either obsolete addresses, or duplicates, so the real number of members reached is probably less than 180. Similarly, our Guild Facebook group has 308 subscribers, and our Twitter account has 371 followers, but in both cases many of these people are members of Win-Port or live outside the Guild.
Together these three social media platforms probably reach less than 20% of the Guild membership. The issue is how to reach a far greater proportion. It’s not that these members are not interested. We have found that the communications database has reached many who were previously not actively engaged, and who have then gone on to attend the webinars and virtual ringing events advertised in the newsletters.
Strategic communications review
The ability to reach a far greater proportion of the membership, will be critical in aiding our recovery after the pandemic. There will also be a need to attract far more young people, so it is important that our communication channels are straightforward and give the right impression.
Some Districts have their own Facebook and Google groups, and whilst some are active, others are rarely used. The Guild website also circulates ‘Weekly news’ posts to these District groups, but even before Covid, there was limited fresh content, so weekly news became infrequent.
Some Districts also have their own Communications Officer, Webmaster, or Publicity Officer, but some have none. We also recognise that different users will want different content, and few will want to receive everything. Therefore, this spring, before we return to our towers will be consult with District and Guild officers and undertake a strategic review to look at the website, social media and communications tools, to see how these can be made to fit better together, and help with addressing the challenges of the new normal.
We will also be looking at how we can ensure that there is at least one person in each District who can help with District and Guild Communications. Offers of help with any facet are always welcome.
Roger Booth