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The Brixton Pound is a local currency. It’s money that sticks to Brixton. Brixton Pound’s creators hope that it will encourage use of local businesses and produce as well as ensuring money that is spend in Brixton, stays in Brixton.

The challenges Brixton Pound faces are 1) Get more businesses to take B£ 2) Get consumers to “ask for their change in Brixton pounds”.

Before the brainstorm descended into a very interesting debate on economics, these are the ideas we had

1. B£ Bling jewelry design competition. (Think big blingy rings and pendants with the B£ sign, instead of a dollar sign)

2. A poster campaign with the line “A Brixton Pound is worth more than a pound” and this month’s offers – lots of the businesses who accept B£ have money off deals if you use the local currency. These posters would work best in on community noticeboards and the like.

3. Get community leaders involved – ask local vicars and religious leaders to ask for next week’s collection in Brixton Pounds, then distribute leaflets as people are leaving the service.

4. Get children involved in a “Ask for your pocket money in B£” campaign.

5. Make more of the brilliant B£ logo by improving the “B£ accepted here” window sticker – something round (pound shaped) with the dots and grooves of a pound around the outside would be more instantly recognisable and would stand out from other window stickers.

6. Make “I asked for my change in B£” stickers available at the cash register – if people can see that others have supported Brixton Pounds, they are more likely to do so as well.

7. Capitalise on the existing community support for B£ by creating t-shirts for people to wear – this allows you to use your supporters to spread the word. The B£ imagery and logo are really appealing and would create very desirable clothing.

8. Look at ideas for stalls you could set up at community events so you can have a presence there; the Windrush Square opening party later in Feb; Lambeth Country Show and Streatham Festival. This would be a great place to start the B£ Bling competition. Or to give away “Ask for your pocket money in B£” money boxes.

9. B£’s first birthday is coming up – there should be a party to celebrate. We discussed a few money related themes for this. Brixton Pound Bankers Ball, The B£ Stock Exchange and so on.

10. There’s an existing leaflet aimed at businesses and consumers. We recommended having one leaflet for businesses and one for consumers because they both need different information and will respond better to different kinds of communication. The exisiting leaflet lists all the places that except B£ by area. We suggested creating genre specific flyers – B£ Dinning, B£ Pubs, B£ Style and so on. These flyers can be leaf in restaurants, pub, fashion store etc, respectively.

11. Change dishes, bills, till stickers and menus are an ideal place to remind people to ask for their change in B£. We suggested creating materials for these points, including round pound shaped “Ask for your pocket money in B£” stickers to go in the bottom of change dishes in pubs, bars and restaurants.

Find out more about the Brixton Pound and where to get/spend yours here http://brixtonpound.org

Youth Worker and Consultation and Participation Officer Le N Ho had become frustrated with the negative perception of young people in contemporary society – particularly in her local borough of Newham; just next door to Idea Shop’s mother ship in Canary Wharf. After a submitting a winning application for a £3,500 grant to develop a community campaign, Le came to Idea Shop to see how to make the money work hardest.

Knowing that at the source of the misconception is a lack of understanding and awareness, Le had planned to run a series of workshops and develop a magazine to highlight the achievements of hard working young people. After discussing the benefits of intergenerational activities it became clear that in order for these to work the negative perceptions of young people must first be challenged. Rather than investing in the production of a single magazine, using newly affordable and flexible production services such as Newspaper Club would allow newspapers to be produced and distributed to a dispersed audience, especially one with varying access to the internet. Also collaborating with successful young people such as designers, photographers and writers would allow for co-creation and provide role models to draw other young people engaged with the project. By capitalising on the popularity of basic digital tools such as camera phones the idea of co-creation could be extended to the wider audience.

Successfully accessing and communicating to young people is a challenge major brands with multi-million pound budgets are struggling with, let alone individuals with money & time pressures. Involving young people themselves in the creation of the communications and activities will help draw in others and help further elevate success stories from local area – such its track record in providing successful sports professionals and cultural icons such as Jermaine Defoe and the late Alexander McQueen – eventually providing a reason for the wider community to reconsider their views.

Post by Keiran Bradshaw

Over the three days of Idea Shop we spoke to countless small businesses, charities and social enterprises with teeny marketing budgets and a need to reach more people. Where they had interesting stores or an area of expertise that could turn into an agony column in the local press we recommended they get in touch with Lambeth Life, and other local papers – The South London Press, The Wandesworth Guardian, The Mitcham, Morden, Wimbledon Post etc. As our PR guru Kevin say, journalists have space that needs filling with stories, to get in the paper you just need a good story.

Here’s an updated version of our original write up of our Idea Shop session with Lambeth Life. I’ve changed it a bit from the original post which said they had a ‘perception problem’. As Lambeth Life have pointed out, was a bit of an exaggeration.

Lambeth Life is a free paper, published by Lambeth Council. Their challenge is to get local people involved in producing the content of the paper, so they feel more like it’s their paper.

During our brainstorm we came up with the following editorial ideas.

Feature guest editors from the community.

A parenting column from Loughborough Children’s Centre.

Build on the successful letter page by giving the star letter a prize, donated by an advertiser.

Leave comment cards in the local cinema asking cinema goers to write mini reviews for the film they just saw. The reviews are then collected and published in the paper.

Make it easy for people to write to the paper: Get a mobile number for texting in views and photos: Use stickers in key public places to encourage people to text in views when they are out and about.

Offer key local bloggers columns.

Ask reader to pose the questions for the fortnightly councilor interview page.

Create a schools or young Lambeth page with content created by pupils from local schools.

The star letter tends to be something positive about Lambeth. Introduce a Big Moan letter to give the letters page more bite. Councilors can write in the next week to address the issue raised.

The Herne Hill Society is an amenity group for the Herne Hill area. Now, it might just be me, but I had no idea what an amenity group did.  Apparently they do a whole bunch of things including: organise talks on topics of local interest, write books about Herne Hill history, monitor planning applications, encourage improvements in local amenities, etc.

Their problem was that their membership was skewed towards older, white, middle-class residents – and so wasn’t representative of the local area.  They wanted to broaden their membership base and encourage more active involvement from their members.

We suggested that the first thing they might think about doing if they wanted to broaden their membership base was get rid of the word “amenities”.  You’re not going to find many people who, on a sunny day, suggest “exploring the local amenities”. It seemed an old-fashioned way to talk about what they did.  Which was a shame because what they did – bringing people together to learn about and improve the local community – wasn’t old fashioned at all. It was something very relevant to people’s day-to-day lives in the area.

Currently the Herne Hill Society promotes itself and seeks out new members by distributing leaflets.  They also send out a newsletter 4 times a year. Rather than just passively tell people what they did through leaflets and a newsletter we recommended they enter into conversations with people, so people became involved right from the beginning:

We suggested they:

Foster good relationships with local estate agents – who could then tell prospective Herne Hill residents about all the great things the Society was doing for the neighbourhood.

Donate some of the books they’d written to local cafes as coffee-table pieces – in exchange they might be able to leave membership leaflets in the cafes.

Get the community to talk to them about what they’d like to see happening in the area – this could be through postcards left in cafes.

Get local schools involved: get kids to write short pieces on local history and this publish it in the Herne Hill Society newsletter.  Every parent wants their kid published!

Compile a list of case histories of interesting projects they’d done. Pitch some of the best case histories to local papers like Lambeth Life.

www.hernehillsociety.org.uk

Streets Ahead came in to see us about their brand. The group plan to turn a largely disused street into a green space for the local community. The site is positioned between two primary schools in Lambeth, so transforming it into a green space would provide a safer thoroughfare for the pupils and their families, as well as providing a recreational space.

They have already achieved so much by securing funding and council support. However they still need to involve the local community. And for that they need a brand or identity that local residents can relate to.

As Van Gogh had lived in the area they had considered naming the campaign in his honour in some shape or form. We felt that there was a possibility that local residents may not consider him to be representative of their community. There was also the concern that this direction wouldn’t be descriptive of the campaign’s function or say very much about what the group was trying to achieve. Sunflowers and iconography related to the artist have been used by so many groups and have so many connotations that it wouldn’t be doing the campaign any favours.

After working through the ideas behind the campaign we suggested the name ‘Grass Routes: Streets for People’. We also offered some ideas for a logo, which involved grass growing up through concrete, tarmac or between streets. Both of these suggestions were well received. So much so that at the time of writing, they have already adopted the new brand. How’s that for a speedy turnaround?

We wish ‘Grass Routes’ the very best of luck in their campaign.

Post by Tracy Brown