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.