We had an intense ideas session with “Steve and Steve” from the Merton and Lambeth Citizen Advice Bureau.
This Local Citizen Advice service provides free, independent and impartial and confidential advice to everyone within their community.

Currently they face a few challenges in a time of recession, namely the recruitment and engagement of more volunteers, giving an even better quality of service to Clients seeking advise on rights and responsibilities and the general awareness of what their services are all about.

Being a stand alone advice centre can be challenging with limited funds, so we suggested cost effective ways to get their messages out.

Once we started to focus on 3 key marketing channels namely PR, partnerships and social media networking, the ideas started to flow…
In order to reach a high number of people in the community CAB can partner up with local newspapers and address some key social issues in the form of a column. This will generate mass awareness and position them as a body that gives advice that makes a difference. Blogging is a very powerful medium where the community can engage and discuss on certains forums and CAB can facilitate these blogs on their own website. Another way to get mass exposure is to tap into events in the community and act as a partner or sponsorship. We explored multiple ways to maximize the web as a tool to engage with both Clients and volunteers. Lastly we thought about using more video content to expose CAB in a positive and real way to the community, as this will help inform the public about the projects handled and what kind of services CAB offer.

Ideashop will follow up with a few local contacts established over the 3 day session in Brixton and recommend CAB to partner with them and make sure that there will be some element of networking taking place to leverage one another’s profiles. Using partner companies will be key to CAB’s future success. www.mertoncab.org.uk:

Tags: Awareness, blog, Idea Shop Brixton, PR