Category: Charity

Utilising National Holidays in your Strategy

If you were to look it up, the chances are every day is a national, international or awareness day of some kind. Some are serious, the intention to make us think – such as World Diabetes Day on the 14th Nov 2019.  Others are just fun and often a little bit whacky such as national wear your pj’s to work day  (It’s on the 16th April if you’re interested!)

With over 1,000 of these days and months, plus bank holidays and religious holidays, your calendar is jam packed, you could have a theme for each day!

In recent times, lots of companies have jumped on some of these national days and used them for their own marketing, and it proves to be a great way to add some personality to your brand image.

Depending on your business and industry, you can host marketing promotions and events for certain days that are relevant to you. For example, if you have an optical business, National Glaucoma Week could be your opportunity to run an event to educate your customers on the effects and causes of Glaucoma.  Run a bakery?  Then National Donut Day may be the one for you!

There are, of course, more well-known holidays that most businesses will use, like Christmas Day. Utilising the lesser-known holidays are a good way to stand out, though. Why?

– On a national day that is smaller and more unique, you won’t be trumped by huge corporations with an unlimited marketing budget

– The quirkier days can put a smile on your customers faces or brighten up their day, this can put you in a positive place in their minds

How can you use national days in your marketing?

– Create some interesting and relevant content for your blog or website

– Share this content on your social media – remember to alter the content to suit your platform though!

– Don’t forget to use the official and unofficial hashtags which are being used around the day’s theme so that you join in with the conversation

– Add a special sale or offer that relates to the national day – this will entice people to purchase

– Hold an event with a theme for the national day. If it’s a fun and quirky day, then maybe you could hold more of a party style event, if it’s a serious awareness day, then you could hold an educational event

To save you the time in hunting out all the relevant national days that you could jump on board with for your marketing, we’ve put together a handy document for our clients. Not every national day is on there, we’d have to publish a book for that, just some that we think are handy to know. Download the pdf, print it out and stick it up in your workplace, then you’ll know when there’s a date coming up that’s worth shouting about.

Download printable PDF here

Charity Begins at Home-Start

At LimeGreen Marketing we love creating multi-channel, all-singing, all-dancing digital marketing campaigns, but we know that not every organisation has the budget for this.

For all of our clients the main objective is predominantly the same, to promote their business, engage with their target audience and maximise the potential of their online presence.

LimeGreen can provide different levels of consultancy and support to suit all budgets, but what if you have no budget? That’s exactly the problem Home-Start Monmouthshire had come up against.

An independent registered charity, Home-Start Monmouthshire supports struggling families, with at least one child under five, living in the county. The scheme is managed by a board of volunteer trustees, but the day to day running is administered by a small staff team of four. The small but dedicated team then recruit, train and supervise 45 volunteers, each typically giving two hours of their time each week. The charity is responsible for raising all its own operational costs.

Home-Start Monmouthshire wanted to raise the profile of their local charity and the great work they’ve been doing, but weren’t quite sure how to make the most out of the free social media resources that were available to them.

Their aims were to recruit volunteers, attract potential donations and engage with service users, while utilising the skills of their recently appointed ambassador, author Julia Gregson. Raising awareness of their work would be paramount in order for them to fundraise and continue helping families in the area.

LimeGreen were only too pleased to visit Home-Start Monmouthshire and provide their staff and trustees with a crash course in marketing and a few hints and tips on using Facebook over a cup of tea and a well-earned biscuit.

We put together a quick guide for making the most of the Home-Start Monmouthshire Facebook page, most of which the team were already doing.  Here’s what we had to share…

  • Post regularly. An active account will always receive more interaction.
  • Include images with every post if you can. This makes them more eye-catching and therefore it’s more likely that people will engage with them.
  • Try to use images of people where possible, real personalities where you can see a facial expression are easier for people to relate to and this humanises what you do which is especially important given your charity work.
  • Don’t forget to include links to relevant pages of your website, in your Facebook posts from time to time to drive traffic to your website.
  • Don’t be afraid to add some personality to your posts – where appropriate. Celebrate your team. Your work is important but it doesn’t all need to be a hard-hitting serious stuff.
  • Mix in some facts and figures every now and then to show what Home Start Monmouthshire has achieved. Infographics are a particularly useful way to communicate this without using masses of text.
  • Join as many relevant Monmouth/Monmouthshire groups as possible so that you can like and share your page information and reach out to more people.
  • Share industry relevant content and engage with similar organisations.
  • Look for national days and awareness weeks to engage with on social media.

We also shared some great links to free resources to help make their Facebook posts more engaging…

Canva enables you to create visual content for social media and print using pre-designed templates. It is a user friendly platform with lots of great free content and, if your requirements are basic, can prove to be quicker than using a design tool such as Photoshop.

There are lots of websites with brilliant high quality imagery which has been authorised for reuse and is completely free. This Hootsuite article has a list of 20 of them. – https://blog.hootsuite.com/20-free-stock-photo-sites-social-media-images/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=owned_social&utm_campaign=social_hootsuite&hootPostID=da6a94b470da2fbdf64cad03cb39e4af

You can follow the team at Home-Start Monmouthshire on Facebook here.

To find out more about our consultancy services head over to the Digital Support page of our website. Alternatively, if you’d like to speak to one of our team about your own social media goals, get in touch.

Let’s eat cake!

Let’s eat cake!

Helping to raise money for local hospices in the Monmouthshire area, LimeGreen hosted an afternoon tea party at our client Mewscraft’s brand new showrooms at Wyastone Business Park.

Part with a Pound Day, in association with Sunshine Radio was attended by a variety of businesses who generously donated money and enjoyed an afternoon of tea, cakes and conversation. In all we raised well over £50 which was collected on the day by Sunshine Radio’s roving reporter, Sam. 

 The charity event also provided a great networking opportunity for a variety of local companies and the chance to get to know other businesses based at Wyastone Business Park.  

 LimeGreen are dedicated to supporting local events and PWAP is one of several fund raising activities on the LimeGreen calendar in 2016

Sunshine Radio at Wyastone Business Park