If you’re looking at promoting and growing your organisation so that it’s sustainable you need start creating, collaborating and co-producing content. These may sound like ‘just’ buzzwords but having a collaborative model is vital for your marketing, your organisation and those they wish to serve. For this reason, the world of business is shifting to empower ‘clients’ and ‘experts by lived experience’ to inform their products and services.
Sophie Mei Lan set up Sparkle Community Media CIC to help organisations to connect, grow and serve more people beyond their current reach through co-producing raw, real and relatable content for their own platforms and to be featured in the mainstream media.
They do this by co-creating written and digital content and training their organisation in a range of communications skills. They also encourage them to collaborate with their customers to create content, develop products and their services, or better still create user-generated content. Not only is this vital for community organisations who are delivering essential services to hear the voices of those they work alongside but it is vital to promote what they’re doing and to develop on their strengths.
Some tips to start building collaboration into your schedule:
- Look at what's strong, not what’s wrong with those you work with: Play to your strengths as a team. “I am co-running a Digitally Active project to enable neurodivergent digital entrepreneurs to gain employment through media training. We have witnessed first-hand how much talent is being missed by organisations overlooking someone because of their ‘disability,’ rather than looking at how their organisation could be disabling their team to thrive,” said Sophie.
- Collaboration is key: Collaborate with others with complementary skills. This may be internally within your team or using external partners. Depending on your offer, onboard key partners to deliver.
- Build a community: Engage people with your mission, your product or service. Use this online community to support and listen to your customers. “We recently rebranded our influencer marketing group to Sparkle Content Creators Collaborative because we’re a community and we want to support those we work with to prosper not just feel like ‘numbers of followers.’ We’re passionate about making media content with meaning and encouraging others to do so. We realised how influencers are at a high risk of mental health problems, so we want to help them feel as well and confident as possible when making content though a supportive peer-to-peer platform,” she added.
- Co-produce your services and content: Coproduction blurs boundaries between those delivering and receiving products. See people as the assets they are and by working together you can achieve a collective and better outcome.
Whether we’re developing our own media platforms, delivering media services or communications training, we always try to engage a range of voices to deliver the best outcome possible.
We are a social enterprise, so profits are re-invested back into delivering community media projects alongside marginalised communities to improve mental health and wellbeing.
To collaborate, follow @SophieMeiLan and go to: https://sparklecommunications.co.uk
