Re: CSA Network UK Open Day evaluation

[CSA Network UK]

Hello

This is the final call for responses to our Open Day evaluation survey - it should only take 5 mins to fill in - and it is very helpful to us as we are applying to the Big Lottery for funding for next year's event and we need to apply by 21 October. We also need to include info from the survery is our report for the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation - and for our Annual Report for members. Apologies if you have already completed the survey but as it is anonymous I can't tell who has and who hasn't.

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/69VYSNG

Also I thought I would give everyone some feedback, based on your feedback, on what we did to promote and support the day.

We started thinking about organising the Open Day about March 2016 and circulated info via Facebook, Google Groups, etc. to get feedback on the event and there seemed to be a lot of support for the idea. We decided on 1 October, as we wanted to choose a memorable date and also chose October so it didn't clash with school holidays or other events and so there would be quite a lot of produce about, eg apples, pumpkins, etc. although obviously not as much as in the Summer.

We contact a designer and started working on the designs for the materials and deciding what to get printed. Very sadly our designer suffered a bereavement and so this delayed getting everything finalised but despite it all she kept working and got everything done in time and did an amazing job.

We set up a web page so farms could submit their events three months before the day but most of our time in August was spent phoning everyone to find out if they were taking part and asking people to fill in the form on the website, and then uploading the details. This took up a lot more time than anticipated, and delayed us producing the publicity materials as we needed to know approximately how many farms were taking part so we'd know how much to print, and also what dates events were on.

We also sent out a national press release about 3 months before the event, this was mainly to the farming press and lifestyle magazines and other food & farming organisations, and we also sent it to the Soil Association press team to circulate for us. Unfortunately it's very hard to get coverage for this type of event from the mainstream national press as it's not really newsworthy enough.

We sent out tailored regional press releases about 2 weeks before the day in all the regions where we had a number of events. This included regional newspapers, radio and TV.

We also produced a press release template for CSAs to use, as it's usually easier for local groups to get local media coverage than national organisations.

Finally we did targetted advertising on social media on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. The ads were targetted based on key words e.g. organic farming, and also with 50 miles of each of the farms in the event listings on our website. The total number of people who saw the ads was 31,479. Facebook advertising is also picked up a lot by other media.

As most publications don't necessarily reply if they are using the press release we don't know exactly everywhere it was covered, also we don't know if these are due to national press releases or local publicity but it was definitely featured by Sustain, WWOOF, Shared Assets, Indie Farmer, Good Things Magazine, HeyEvent, Bristol Food Network, Carlisle Council Localism in Action, Brighton & Hove Food Partnership, Stanmer Organics, Spire FM, Transition Town Farnham, Transition MK, WhereEvent, Organic Growers Alliance, Western Morning News, Power to Change. If you know of any others please let us know.

We had a few disasters in the last weeks before the event including the Royal Mail not turning up to collect the two big sacks of parcels we had spent the last day packing up! Luckily my friend took them to the post office for me the next day. Our website was also hacked and the hacker tried to blackmail us for money! At least this shows that our publicity must have been working if he thought it was worth the effort.

Also unfortunately the weather was terrible this year, which is very bad luck considering most of the rest of October has been great, but there is not really anything you can do to predict the British weather.

In order to ensure that next year's event is even more of a success it would be great if you could put the date in your diaries now and start thinking about what you're going to do, so we can publish events on our website well in advance, as this means we can get much more publicity and send out packs much earlier.

Thanks

Maresa

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 10:26 AM, CSA Network UK <csanet...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi

CSA Network UK open day is now over (well for most of you), so I just wanted to thanks so much to everyone who organised an event.

I hope it all went well despite the rubbish weather, although those of you who decided to do something on the Sunday instead got lucky!

I would be really grateful if you could fill in this short evaluation form https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/69VYSNG as we need to write up a report for our funders the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation. If your event has happened yet, please fill it in as soon as you can after the event.

We would really like to carry this on as an annual event so it would be great to hear what other support may be useful.

We had hoped to be able to provide more resources this year, and also other helpful information on our website e.g. ideas for activities, but due to various disasters including my laptop dying and our website being hacked unfortunately we didn't have time.

However, hopefully for next year's event we won't have to spend so much time signing up farms and posting up event details, so will have more time available for other activities.

Also apologies to anyone who didn't get a publicity pack, we did try to contact everyone who spoke to Gini on the phone but did not hear back from all of you and did not have everyone's postal addresses, so to be sure you are included next time please make sure you submit your event via the website.

Thanks

Maresa

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Maresa Bossano | CSA Network UK Co-ordinator

www.communitysupportedagriculture.org.uk

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Maresa Bossano | CSA Network UK Co-ordinator

www.communitysupportedagriculture.org.uk