Campaign Progression August 2012

Over the past few weeks of the Choose Life Drop the Knife campaign we have been promoting our campaign all over the place. 

Here is an update on our progress: 

   Arrangements are being made for us to present in youth clubs, schools and partner organisations to educate others in regards to our campaign, The Staying Safe Project and knife crime in general. The article we wrote from the 99% campaign blog received lots of positive feedback and Lee Jasper (who is a leading social justice campaigner) placed our article on his blog; which was very encouraging. We have since linked with him on twitter and are looking for meet with him soon. We attended the CIH Housing Conference in Manchester in June to promote our campaign further. We were able to showcase our work to other housing associations, councils and youth organisations. We gathered feedback from the conference attendees using the ipads. It was a great opportunity to promote our work to other organisations who are looking to carry out similar work with young people.

Over 337 companies took part in the exhibition attended by delegates, visitors, sponsors and young people from Peabody special projects. The aim of the conference was to share best practice with housing professionals and provide an opportunity for organisations to promote their services whilst gaining insight of other services through networking that might benefit stakeholders.

Robert Mannion, head of services Willow park Housing was very impressed with the way in which we presented and our professionalism. 

He explains: 'Sayim and Abu are the most inspirational people I have met at this event with more young people like these knife crime will be solved in no time.' A total of 70 surveys were completed for Staying Safe gathering feedback and future contacts. 

        We also attended The Urban Classic, Waltham Forest Town Hall Complex, organised by Bigga Fish. The event featured musicians including UK urban stars Fazer, Miss Dynamite, Devlin and Skepta. The Historic art deco Town Hall was used as a backdrop for what was considered one of the most entertaining outdoor events of the year. The event was well attended by young people - over 3,000 were in attendance. Although this was not necessarily an opportunity for campaign leadership members to promote their campaign, members of the team still felt the need to speak with some young people about their project and what they aim to achieve.

We are planning to attend Notting Hill Carnival in collaboration with Bigga Fish this Sunday to promote our campaign. We have ordered promotional material including t-shirts, whistles, lanyards and flyers to present ourselves professionally and strengthen our campaign. 

Session 17 - Action Planning And The Future Of Our Campaign - 21/3/12

Today's session kicked off with Katy Dawe from Art Against Knives updating us about what she has done to help our campaign get out there.

- Footlocker have received our letter and Frank from PR will be in touch with us and Katy shortly. They also represent a lot of other brands like Nike and DC which Katy will forward our letter on to.

- Katy would love for us to showcase at her Art Against Knives event at Richmix. It is an anti-knife crime showcase which will be 27 May 2012. We will be there all day and do some kind of presentation to tell others about out campaign. Brooke Kinsela and other well known people will be there, so this will a brilliant opportunity to get our campaign really noticed.

-  Canoo PR loved our poster. They have agreed to send it out and help us get media space for it. This is really exciting news for us all! Katy will send our one pager along with our poster over to them. Katy will ask Canoo to send us a list of who they have approached for us.

- katy suggested that we take photos of everywhere that we have put our poster so that we have some visuals.

We discussed what we should all do to help put our campaign out there even more:

- Approach Live magazine - Katy will do this for us!
- We need to work on our written and video pieces for the 99 Percent blog.
- Khalis is going to speak to the local newspaper.
- We will tweet Brooke Kinsela about seeing her at the AAK showcase.

Updates of events coming up for us - that we will attend with our campaign:
- 27 May 2012 - Art Against Knives anti-knife crime showcase - Richmix - we will do a presentaion and promote our campaign for the whole day!
- 21 April 2012 - We Are The Future - Imperial War Museum - we have been invited to do a 5 minute presentation!

Jess will be going to a conference next week and will be promoting our campaign, which is a really great opportunity!

We spent a little bit of time checking our emails and responding to comments. We are very happy that overall everybody's feedback is very positive and they want to support our campaign.

We worked on our action plan for the next month and set ourselves goals that we will have to complete by our fortnightly sessions that we will continue to have.

We did a run through of our workshop for Katy Dawe to get her feedback:



Feedback from Katy:
- Tell them why they should help and how they can?
- It should be unscripted and natural
- You NEED factual stats
- Info graphics are a good idea for stats to make your presentation more visual and interesting
- Keep practicing in front of other people
- Personal stories are hard-hitting and very effective
- More visuals
- More personality
- Perhaps start and finish on a personal story so that it keeps the audience engaged throughout
- Add in three examples of knife-crime in the last month so that it can illustrate the different things that happen and that they are real!

Naim has agreed to be in charge of Twitter and will try and tweet a few times per week. Shabir/AJ will be in charge of Facebook and check it weekly.

The group will continue to meet weekly at Connexions so that more people will be able to come. We will all come together every two weeks at The Gateway centre to discuss progress and see where the campaign is up to.

Our next meeting will be at The Gateway Centre on 18 April 2012!

Session 16 - Evaluating our progress - 14/3/12

We started off this week’s session with an update on what we have done since our last session.

The local probation service will take the poster to their management and see if they can distribute our poster, which is really great news.

We have agreed that we will change our PowerPoint presentation,  add videos into it and write some session plans for our workshops.

We agreed that we need to create a toolkit to use to run our workshops.

We all have to commit to doing things for our campaign. We have all agreed that our campaign has got to the stage where we all need to push for success and try and get it out there and noticed.

We split up into two groups to do different activities. One group worked on writing out our workshop plan and the other group worked on our evaluation plan.

We need to get some copies of evaluation forms for our workshops and we have to remember that we need take them everywhere with us (mainly the schools where we run the workshops).

Another option we do have is the turning point tool which we may use at a later date, once we are a bit more used to using it.

Khadija came in to see how we are getting on and to give us an update. She told us that she has given our poster to the campaign, ‘Not Another Drop’. We will get in contact with the guy who runs the campaign, Patrick to see if he will promote our campaign.

We looked at the feedback from our Facebook and our website and sent response messages to the ones that we had received. Overall the feedback was very positive.

We looked through Twitter and followed some people more relevant to our campaign and sent a few tweets to promote our campaign.

We finished the session by working on our social networking and pr action plans.

 

 

Session 15 - Writing Letters And Looking At How We Can Improve Our Workshop - 7/3/12

Katy Dawe from Art Against Knives came in to run our session today. We started the session off by filling Katy in on where we are up to with our campaign.

We discussed what we wanted the young people in our workshops going away with:
- How knife crime affects others
- More of an understanding
- Awareness of the consequences of knife crime
- A postcard about our campaign

Katy spoke to us about the campaign, Lives Not Knives.
- She has worked closely with the lady who runs it, Eliza Reberio.
- They have a really well received anti-knife crime campaign that also offers youth mentoring.
- They produced a video that showed what they do and we think this is a really good idea.
- They got big people involved from within the music industry to help drive their campaign forward, which we all agreed was brilliant.



We agreed that short films are a powerful way to sum up a campaign and get the message across. It is a really good idea to showcase and give people an insight into what we do. Lives Not Knives is powerful because it's run by young people which is very similar to our campaign.



Katy mentioned that if you type in the name of our campaign into Google, then it shows up on the first page, which we are all really chuffed about.

Isabel Chapman from Peabody spoke to us about contributing a video and small feature about our campaign for the 99 Percent blog, which is really well known and can be a great way to get our campaign more widely spoken about. We agreed that we wanted to do this as it would benefit the campaign and spread our message to more people.

If we need to get in contact with her, we can email her on isabel.chapman@peabody.org.uk

At this stage we all agree that video footage is a lot more engaging than just images!

We discussed that we need to be on our campaign's Facebook and Twitter accounts a lot more and update the a lot more regularly.

Katy suggested that we can use our ripple effect group activity to take pictures of and put onto our campaign's Facebook. We felt that this would update people but also share other young people's opinions of who knife crime affects both directly and indirectly. This could potentially be really powerful!

We discussed how we can make more people follow us on Twitter as we agreed that the more mentions we get, will push our campaign forward and get us known to others.

We decided that we want to use an incentive to get people in our workshops to follow us on Twitter during our sessions. We will write a letter to Footlocker to see if we can get them to donate us a few pairs of trainers to give away each month to a selected follower. Katy has kindly agreed to give us a Lovebox ticket to get us started.

We worked on another letter to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Katy will email and post him a copy of the letter with the poster attached. We have given it more of a clout this time around so that he will help support our campaign.

We watched the Home Office's new video on their anti knife crime campaign. We agreed that it had a lot of impact as knife crime had destroyed the guys life in a way that meant he could barely move and had to be cared for. It was the shocking factor that made this campaign stand out and be heard.



We worked on letters for Footlockers, which Katy will send in for us and for schools about running our workshops, which Rujina will take care of.

Another suggestion was that we could tweet our letter at companies and people who may be able to help promote and be part of our campaign.

We discussed that it is important for us to speak about 'Joint Enterprise' as many young people aren't aware of it still and it is relatively new. By raising awareness of it to young people could reduce the amount of knife crime incidents in and around London.

Katy discussed an issue that has arisen with schools and anti-knife crime projects:
- They don't want to be associated with it
- They have had a high number of knife crime problems in their school

The way that we will approach this is:
- Sell our workshop as that we will be going to all schools
- It isn't just for people who use a knife but also for people who aren't to raise awareness, as it affects everyone in some way, shape or form.

We have a target of contacting five secondary schools by our next session.

Session 14 - Workshop Run Through And Feedback - 29/2/12

We kicked off today's session with introductions to Khadija. Khadija also runs her own anti-knife crime campaign, U.N.I.T.Y (Understanding Negative Issues Towards Youths).

Khadija told us a bit about her and her campaign.
- She was part of Brent Youth Parliament
- She writes updates about her campaign for The Brent and Kilburn Times every 5 months
- She wants to run workshops to young people about her campaign, this is her next step
- Her campaign is very successful and she has a lot of followers on her Facebook

Her campaign:
- U.N.I.T.Y is her campaign name
- U.N.I.T.Y is a social networking campaign to make a change against knife crime

Khadija had a few questions for us to find out a bit about our campaign and how she can help us alongside how we can help her.



We asked Khadija a few questions back:

What made you do your campaign?
I am passionate about making change and knife crime is something that I feel strongly about.

Who supported you?
Nobody to start off with, it was all me. I was determined to make a difference and carry on running a campaign that I am passionate about.

We discussed with Khadija what we can both do to help one another:
- Khadija will take our poster along with her to some of her meetings and promote us on her campaign page.
- We will work together and support each other's campaigns - two campaigns about the same focus are even more powerful.
- We will let Khadija sit in on some of our workshops so that she can get some ideas for her workshops.

We worked on preparing for our workshop run through. We put a PowerPoint presentation together of stab wounds to shock our audience about some of the consequences of being involved with knife crime and how much damage it can do. We then had a run through of our workshop and got feedback on how we did.

Session 13 - Planning The Overall Structure Of Our Workshops - 8/2/12

We discussed what we will need and want to take into schools for our workshops.

We agreed that we wanted to use the postcards from the launch to hand out after our workshops to offer both information and a reminder of links to our campaign. We will have the Twitter and Facebook details added onto them and make a few text amendments before getting them re-printed.

We discussed that wanted to add an extra feature to our website - an order form for both the workshop and the posters.

We added some more details to our distribution chart of posters that we had handed out over the last few weeks.

We decided that it would be well worth us re-sending Boris Johnson another letter with a copy of our poster included so that he may pay attention to it this time around.

Things that we may take with us to the workshops in the future are:
- A PowerPoint presentation
- Postcards to hand out at the end

We all fed back on the workshop that we did at Acland Burghley School:
- It went really well, we got feedback and gave them an idea on how to build their campaign
- We learnt how to interact with students and other young people#
- Don't leave too many posters next time
- Young people work better in smaller groups

We discussed what we wanted to go into our workshops this time around. As we would be talking about our project rather than our previous workshop about campaigning, we had to plan out the workshop more about our campaign and poster.

- 1 hour sessions
- If we have extra time then we will show Pressure 1 and tell them to go to the website to watch Pressure 2
- We will show them pictures of stab wounds
- Talk about Joint Enterprise
- Turning Point is awkward so it would be easier to have paper feedback forms.

We finished up the session feeling a lot more prepared for our workshops. We will run our workshop for Katy Dawe in the next session, who we can get feedback from and advice on how we can make it better.

Running Our First Workshop For Year 11s At Acland Burghley School - 2/2/12

Today we ran a workshop on 'how to create a campaign' for year 11s at Acland Burghley school. They are currently working on creating their own campaign and wanted to find out about how we created ours.

We used our plan for our last session to set out the workshop:
1. Introductions and our story
2. Show the poster
3. The steps we took to create the poster
4. Poster feedback and questions
5. Group activity - create an idea for a campaign - what is your campaign? what is your message? how will you promote your campaign?
6. Questions and answers
7. Finish up and feedback

Overall we felt that the workshop went really well and the feedback was generally positive. It was brilliant that we could help others to create their own campaign, with our experiences and knowledge.

Session 12 - Preparing For Our First Workshop In A School - 01/02/12

We started off the session with a guy called Michael talking to us about how to use the 'Turning Point' Tool. The tool will enable us to get feedback through audience interaction, pressing a button to choose their answer to the questions that we will ask them.

There are two ways that you can use the tool, these are through Powerpoint or Turning key.



We all agreed that we did not want to use the Turning Point tool in our first workshop as we needed a bit more practice using it first.

We have a workshop booked in for 2/2/12 (tomorrow) with the year 11s at Acland Burghley School. We agreed who was available to run the workshop: Sayem, Inaj and Kaium.  The session will be for an hour so we started work on planning it.

What do we need to bring to the workshop?
- Posters (2A2s, 4A4s and 3A3s - Andrew and Rujina to bring along)
- Questionnaires (16 - Lajaune)
- A laptop

(We had an idea that we may want to have some wrist bands made up to hand out at our workshops, but we have agreed to wait and see how we get on a a few first of all.)

What will the structure of our workshop be?
- Introduction
- a bit about us and the campaign
- Show the poster
- Feedback, questions and answers on the poster

- Group activity - The main topic will be knife crime - What would you do as a campaign? What websites would you use to promote your campaign? How would you get your message across?

- The purpose of a campaign - a planned effort to make change and a method to get your message across
- Finish - Questions, answers and feedback

The main purpose of the workshop:
- How to make/create a campaign
- Raise awareness of our campaign

Everyone left the session feeling a lot more confident about running the workshop tomorrow. Good luck everybody!

Session 11 - Looking Back At Distribution And Preparing A Presentation To Take Into Schools - 25/01/12

Everybody was really excited to be back and arranging distribution of the poster now that we had launched our campaign before Christmas.

We began with a recap and a catch up of how everyone was getting on with the poster distribution.

We discussed:
- We are due to do a one off presentation at Acland Burghley School about putting together a successful campaign, which we need to prepare for.
- We will refer back to the blog to look back at our steps along the way of the campaign.
- We will have our distribution plan shared through Google Docs so that we can all update where we will distribute the posters and where we already have distributed posters.

How far have we all got?
- Stop and search meeting in Southwark where a few of the group went and showed their poster off and got some feedback from police, etc.
- A local secondary school want some copies of the poster
- The probation team want some posters to put in all of their offices
- Some members of the group are going to ask if their colleges will put some of the posters up
- Lambeth Y.O.T are happy to put some of the posters up to
- We still have to approach some of the other Y.O.Ts in London

We discussed:
- We need to add 'Potential Audience' heading to our distribution plan
- We will get feedback from forms, a poll, having something to hand out to give them more information and taking them to our website

We got some of the feedback from our poster launch and the comments were overall very positive. Peabody are currently collating the feedback from the feedback forms from the launch so that we can get all of the information together - we will look at this in the next session.

We will send out an email via Mail Chimp to say thank you and to update all of the people who signed up for our mailing list at the launch.

We wrote a list of priorities for over the next week:
1. Create our poll
2. What happens next week when we do our presentation?
3. Create a order form for the website so that people can order our posters

We discussed the questions that we are going to put into our poll:
- How effective is the poster?
- Where did you see the poster?
- What is your age range? (u13, 13-19, 19-25 or 25+)

The face to face feedback will be of a better quality. When we do our presentations in schools we will get some qualitative feedback.

For the school presentations:
- We will need somebody to make notes for us
- The turning point tool which is an interactive way of collecting feedback and will be a lot more fun to collect feedback.

Group activity:



We discussed the structure of the school presentations:
- 1 hour sessions
- Background about everyone and how the poster idea happened
- Steps and professional help
- What's next for the campaign

How are we going to make it interesting?
- Give some statistics through a fun quiz
- Give them a group activity and ask how they would have done it differently? and what their idea would be?

The presentation structure:
1. Story, show poster and what's next
2.Questions and answers
3. Poster feedback
4. Group exercise
5. Feedback
6. Questions and answers

Katy Dawe from Art Against Knives came in to speak to us about a large agency in London who will help us get our poster where it will be seen more and have a larger impact.

We all worked on a one pager that Katy will take to the agency so that we can tell them what we want from them and what our poster is all about.

Your Choice Your Future Poster Launch - 12/01/12

Today everybody was really excited as it was our official poster launch. Both versions of our poster are going to be exhibited in the Art Against Knives shop in Boxpark for the next two weeks which we are all really grafeful for from Katy Dawe.

We all helped to add the finishing touches to the exhibition and it looked really great. Everyone who gave speeches practiced and the rest of us were preparing for people to arrive. We even had a chance to take a few photographs before it all kicked off.

We showed the two short films that some of the group worked on about the amount of pressure that there is on young people to get involved with gang culture. They were called Pressure 1 and Pressure 2. The films looked really great and everybody commented at how professional they looked. After the short films, it was time for everyone's speeches and they were really great.

After speeches the public started to leave so we all headed out to Boxpark and handed out some of the flyers that we had specially made for the launch to draw more people in. We followed the night on Twitter, taking photo's and tweeting them as the launch went on.



There was a great show of people and the launch was an all round success. The exhibition will be running for the next two weeks at the Art Against Knives gallery in Boxpark, Shoreditch (Nearest station: Shoreditch High Street).

Thank you for all of your hard work everybody!

Setting Up For Our Poster launch - 11/01/12

This session we all met up at the Art Against Knives shop in Boxpark to setup for our launch tomorrow evening, 12/01/12.

Everybody was really looking forward to the launch and excited to see the final creation of everybody's hard work.

We all helped to put the poster into the frames to go up at the launch. We decided that we wanted both versions of the poster displayed, the one with Niall's photograph in the background and the one with just a grey backdrop.

We sketched out a diagram of where we all wanted everything to go on the day of the launch.

After we had all discussed where everything would go, we discussed what we may need for the launch and worked on speeches.

Session 10 - Finishing All Campaign Assets And Setting Out An Evaluation Plan - 04/01/12

We started the session with a look at the final draft of our poster, put together by Aaron our graphic designer/illustrator.

We all gave feedback on the poster:


Brief feedback of all of the designs (In order of slideshow)

1.

- Too stereotypical with the background (i.e. looks like people who carry knives only live on council estates)

- Doesn’t work with background as the images are so strong

- It’s more about the boy so the background adds to much noise

- Background doesn’t really add anything to the message

- The last two images aren’t clear what’s going on

2.

- Like the background

- The grim reaper looks good

3.

- Like how it is darker and fades

4.

- Too bright

- Faded out too much

5.

- Do not want to use

Final Decisions

The Words
Is this the life you want? (at the top instead of your choice your future)
Choose life drop the knife (underneath the question)
You choice your future (at the bottom of the poster)

Background
To use background 3 (the darker one that is light in one corner and gets darker)

Final Images (6 and 7)

- The gravestone is too big – so make it a bit smaller (7)

- Put Adam’s hands behind his back in cuffs and standing (like original sketch - 6)

- Turn the gravestone around so that it is facing away from him, but so that you can tell it is a gravestone (take the skull off) (7)

- Give Adam more of a rugged beard and a bald head (6)

For The Launch/Exhibition
We have decided to have two of the different posters for the exhibition to show the progress. So we will get 1 (With the original photograph background) printed large and our new poster with the adjustments and background (3).

The Poster Launch
Katy came in from Art Against Knives to speak about the launch.

On: 

Thursday 12th January 2012

At: 

Art Against Knives

Unit 55,

Boxpark,

Bethnal Green Road,

E1 6JJ

From: 

6-8pm

We all discussed:
- We should get the poster's printed at A0 to go on display at the launch
- We will put the final draft and final poster together at the launch to show how our ideas have progressed
- Offer two options of the poster to TFL and Boris Johnson
- Get everybody to sign a poster so that we can keep it for reference and achievements
- Send out VIP invites for the opening
- Send out other invites for the rest of the week as Katy has agreed to let us have the posters up for a week after the launch
- Have something written next to the poster's and a quote from all of the group (an A4 campaigner)
- Have some postcards to hand out to everyone to take away with them at the exhibition
- Take tonnes of photos during the launch
- Have the QR code easily accessible so that it will divert everyone to the website
- Have the film that the boys created playing at the launch (Pressure 1 and 2)

Looking At The Website
We have created a temporary website for the poster campaign so that people can see what the project is about. Everybody fed back on what they wanted to be featured on the site.
- Two key statistics to stand out
- Make the logo in one image
- Links to all of the project pages (Facebook, Twitter, etc)
- Logos for everyone involved
- Have a sign up to a mailing list
- Tagging up to date
- A counter for views
- A Facebook like button
- Short pieces about everyone

Evaluating Our Progress

We discussed how we would evaluate the campaign, so we know what people think and if things are changing.

- Have a poll

- Face to face evaluation

- Paper based questionnaire (take to the launch)

- Constantly collecting feedback

- Look at the strategy to take the project forward

Looking At The Distribution Plan

We looked at our distribution plan and discussed the final amendments and what we may be missing so far.

- Art Against Knives will take 20 posters

- Always mark down the location of where you have taken the posters and when

- Look at taking it to hospitals (Whitechapel, Kings, etc)

Everybody filled in their feedback forms for the session and left excited about the poster launch next week.