Budding growth

As Public Relations Officer for both my local #bellringing Association and for the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers I’m always on the lookout for ways to get our messages out there and increase awareness of what we do.

I was reading an article online the other day about growing followership and there were two amazingly simple tips that could make a world of difference.

1. Include a sign-up link in your email signature.  So, my emails signatures for both now carry not only a link to our website, but also to our social media pages, and for the Central Council a link to our mailing list sign up page. That was easy.  My signature is now quite large, but I hope it will draw people I correspond with to find out more about us.
2. Include a “forward to a friend” link on each page/article on the website.  As it happened, we had a local Association Comms team meeting last night and I mentioned it.  I have no idea how complicated it is to set up or not, but before the evening was out, our Webmaster had added a link in the footer of our website and emailed me to test it.  I clicked on the link, up popped a blank email with a link to the relevant page ready for me to forward to anyone I might think would be interested.  I’ve also sent a request for a similar link on the Central Council website.  Hopefully, it will be just as easy.

Two simple tips that have potential to increase awareness, get more engagement with our social media and spread the word.

It was also quite good fun having a look at some of the analytics from our website for quarter 1, again appealing to my inner nerd.  There needs to be a bit more work on extracting relevant ones and interpreting them into meaningful data, but given that we only set it running recently, it will be great to track hits to the website during promotional campaigns.  I can get the analytics from our social media sites and its all encouraging.