Snips of clips of dings and dongs

Every Sunday during lockdown C and I have been ringing 2 bells at our tower ahead of the live streamed service. I record these on my phone camera and upload the video to my youtube channel, which has a grand total of 15 subscribers, mostly family! I only really do it for my own interest and to link to it on our #bellringing Twitter page so that the church and community can see what we do and that we’re doing our bit to keep the bells going. It always gets retweeted by the city community radio station and the diocesan account.

I send a link to my personal Facebook profile so that my #bellringing friends can watch it if they want to. I suspect no one is really bothered, but again, it’s just about keeping #bellringing out there.

Over the last couple of weeks it’s been surprising to hear that a number of people actually look forward to me posting our exploits. One of the first times I posted a clip of C and I making places and dodging, someone commented on our ringing as being a “master class in bell control”. I don’t know about that. Someone else said that they look out for the post every week and watch it. I guess it might be helping some people feel connected and offering something when so many other people can’t go out and ring their bells yet.

Off the back of all of that we’ve just been asked if an extract of one of my clips can be used as a training aid and a demonstration of good bell control. I’ve never really considered my bell control as being worthy of such interest.

Sometimes, our Sunday morning #bellringing isn’t so great. It can be surprisingly difficult to count to 3. We swap places for a whole pull, hand and back stroke, then back again 1,2,1. Then we dodge so the 2nd bell pulls in at hand stroke and the 1st bell holds off, then at back stroke the now 1st bell holds up and the 2nd bell pulls in. We do that 3 times so that the bell that started off life in 2nds place is now leading first, so we go back to making places, whole pull swap, then swap back again. Then we dodge the other way around so that the pull in and holding up is done the other way around. We do that 3 times, so now we’re back to where it all started. We continue doing that until it either starts to sound a bit scrappy, we lose count or we get bored.

We tend to fit in 3 sets of about 5 or 6 minutes each time. If the first attempt goes well, I won’t bother recording any more, but if it sounded rubbish, or the organ starts blasting part way through, or something else happens that means it wouldn’t be a good sound / visual, I’ll record each time and then pick the best one to upload.

If you go back to the beginning when I first started recording, I had to balance my phone on the table, or the cabinet in the corner, keep it propped up with something so it didn’t slide about or fall over, and put it on selfie mode so that I could see what it was focussing on and make sure everything was in the image. That meant that it looked like the bells had be rehung anticlockwise. Last Christmas C bought be a gimbal so that I can mount my phone steadily and have it record the right way round even with the screen facing you, it’s not on selfie mode that way. It also makes it easier to zoom in or position the view higher or lower, left or right. It would also mean that I could set it to track something moving, or have it perfectly balanced even if I was walking around holding it. At some point I’ll get some decent footage of the bells themselves.

It’s good to hear that my recording are being enjoyed, even if only by a few, and that someone feels that they are good example of bell control. I don’t think I’m in for a BAFTA or Oscar anytime yet though.

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.

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.
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.

Top tips

I’m on LinkedIn, the professional network on the internet that allows you to connect and strengthen professional relationships and learn new skills. You can follow organisations and groups in much the same was a Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites.

One of the groups that I follow for interest and to support #bellringing activities, rather than work related, is about Public Relations and in particular this group focuses on internal communications. In fact its called The Institute of Internal Communication. Each week a contributor called Carole Searwert, a copywriter and newsletter writer posts an article called Top Tips Tuesday which gives you some pointers that you might find useful. Admittedly, most of it relates to the business world rather than the small, social charity, activity type world, but occasionally there’s something that make sense.

This week’s top tips were all about How to Grow Your Newsletter List. In the #bellringing community, we tend to use newsletters quite a lot to keep in touch with our ringers, let them know what’s going on and what’s been coming up. We have them at all levels. Some districts do their own. Most association’s probably have one. The Central Council of Church Bellringers (CCCBR) and the Association of Ringing Teachers (ART) are currently issuing a joint one on survival and recovery strategies. ART have two of their own, Tower Talk and ART Works for slightly different audiences.

Most newsletters are usually quite well done. Lots of uplifting news and case studies, information that may help, updates on what’s been going on and useful contacts or diary information. Hopefully they come with lots of bright shiny photos too. Invariably these days they come in digital format, but some are still produced in paper, and some are both.

I contribute to many a newsletter and have at some time or other been featured in all of the above. But how do we know whether what we produce gets read? How can we increase our readership?

The article offers 10 suggestions, some of which are business orientated, but the things that I picked up that might be useful in a #bellringing newsletter context were:

Offering an interesting “lead magnet” as a sign up incentive. Now, this relates particularly to getting new business sign ups, however, the suggestions offered actually could form part of your regular newsletter offering e.g. “how to tips”, a cheat-sheet (in our case maybe an article that explains a particular method like the way I learned Double Norwich Court Bob Major as first, treble bob, last, near, full, far) accompanied by some diagrams.
Include a sign up link in your email signature. This I thought was interesting mainly from a Central Council perspective and I shall be offering it up to see if it works.
Add a “forward to a friend” button (obviously for digital newsletters). Again, I’m thinking Central Council and local Association websites News Page at the bottom of every article so that if someone likes it and thinks that a friend ought to read it, they can easily forward the link.
Promote your newsletter on your social media to raise awareness. Sounds a bit obvious but do we actually do it? Probably not consistently.

A two minute read at lunch time has now just turned into an evening’s work to see if it’s feasible.