Monday, 20 February 2012

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.



Thursday, 9 February 2012

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!

Monday, 30 January 2012

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.






Wednesday, 18 January 2012

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!




Monday, 16 January 2012

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.





Friday, 6 January 2012

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.