Member communications

Regularly review your activities to make sure you’re achieving what you set out to do. Having clear objectives helps you to ‘divert’ away from low priority messages others might think you should be sharing.

Here are some ideas: 

• Celebrate success and share best practice.
• Promote new growth opportunities.
• Add local flavour to national messages.
• Retention – thoughts on building a positive team.
• Volunteer recruitment.
• Youth recruitment.
• Programme delivery.
• Inclusion.

Find out who you want to engage.

• Are they all volunteers? Team leaders? Trustees? Programme teams?
• Be realistic – don’t have too many audiences.
• Create audience groups that are easy to maintain.
• Data is key. Make sure you know crucial information – such as roles and contact details.
• Only share what’s relevant to your audience’s role.
• Have you made it clear what you’d like people to do next?
• Have you given them enough time to do it?
• What should people do if they have questions?
• Is there anyone that needs to know about this communication in advance?

Key messages are essential tools in all communications work and are created to help achieve your objectives. By choosing one, you can make sure all your stories provide an opportunity to explain Scouts’ focuses and, in doing so, influence actions and culture change.

Try to demonstrate these messages in every part of your story from the written word to the images and quotes used.

Try to link all communication back to your local focus. Spell out how anything you communicate will help achieve your goals. Consider using local development plans as a framework to help you identify your key messages and think of ways to weave them into your communications.

Every piece of communication should have a key message. If a story you’re writing doesn't have a key message that demonstrates Scouts as a modern, growing, adventure-based organisation, ask yourself why you’re writing it.

When you’re story gathering, try to focus your time on finding good case studies that illustrate your key messages. Work closely with the volunteers in your local area, they’ll help you to uncover the stories, quotes, photos and video that properly show the Scouts’ projects and schemes that are having the biggest impact. Work alongside managers on compiling lists of development plan success stories, making sure these are communicated widely using external and internal channels.

Examples of key messages: 

• By 2023, we’ll have prepared more young people with skills for life, supported by amazing leaders delivering an inspiring programme.
• We’ll be growing, more inclusive, shaped by young people and making a bigger impact in our communities.
• As Scouts, we believe in preparing young people with skills for life. We encourage our young people to do more, learn more and be more.
• Each week, we give over 460,000 young people the opportunity to enjoy fun and adventure while developing the skills they need to succeed. We’re talking about teamwork, leadership, and resilience – skills that have helped Scouts become everything from teachers and social workers to astronauts and Olympians.
• We believe in bringing people together. We celebrate diversity and stand against intolerance, always. We’re part of a worldwide movement, creating stronger communities and inspiring positive futures.

How are you going to reach your chosen audience and keep your messages consistent?

• A channel is a designed way to communicate, and a tool is what you use to do it.
• Try to select channels and tools that are appropriate for your message.
• Examples of channels: blog, newsletter, news article, social media post, webinar, poster, planned meetings (online or face to face).
• Examples of tools: email client, WhatsApp, website, Zoom/Teams for online video calls, Facebook, Instagram, Canva, SharePoint, Dropbox, all social media, phone calls.
• When designing your channels consider your audience’s preferences. Be clear on frequency, content, structure, and purpose of your content.
• Agree on how can people engage/respond/follow up?
• Try using the resources available in the Brand Centre, the 'Running things locally' section of the Scouts’ website, and our 'Four-week challenge' adult recruitment materials (posters, images, key message information).
• Useful information on amplifying your message can be found in the social media toolkit.
• Additional guidance can be found on scouts.org.uk in How to work with local elected officials, How to organise a community event and our Media toolkit.

• Schedule planned activity into your local communications calendar. 
• Create a ‘rolling plan’ of local dates and assign team members to support this.
• Try to keep your communications plan simple. Don’t overcomplicate it, make sure it’s clear for others to understand.
• The templates shown below will help you capture the key information you’ll need for your plan:
  • Your objectives.
  • Your overarching messages.
  • Your key dates, messages, and audiences. 
• We plan our communications in campaigns. A campaign is a burst of activities that all relate to the same objective or outcome. Some campaigns are short (just one message), others are very long.

We've made some communications campaign templates you can use.

Work with other volunteers to reuse existing content and share resources. Potential sources are:

• Email and data management.
• Photography.
• Video content.
• Graphic design.
• Writing and editing (talking to people about what is going on).
• Website.
• Social media monitoring and posting.