A short update from our Greater Creative project photographer and documentor Dean Leivers.
"I've been working on documenting all of the fantastic Greater Creative project activity over the last year or so. This has involved me being out and about in Blackwell parish, taking photographs at events, capturing video footage and also recording audio feedback from local residents to really get a feel for what they think of the activities provided so far on the project. I have to admit this task has been made a little more difficult during the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdown but I've been collecting feedback and photographs from the Greater Creative Working Party (Steering group of local residents) to keep content up to date and relevant on both our blog and Facebook page. With everything going mostly online it has been a challenge to get people to engage with our digital content, so I was very grateful then when our funders Creative Civic Change put on a training seminar session entitled 'Telling Your Story'.
It was a great opportunity to discuss with other groups the challenges and successes we've met so far when communicating our projects aims and activity to the local area. Some of the highlighted areas of discussion from the session and for more in depth sessions in the future included;
Getting the most out of social media
Community branding
Storytelling with Local Trust’s 'Journalist at large'
Developing communications strategies
Something of particular interest to myself was the discussion around writing press releases for local news outlets which is something I think that I'm going to pay particular attention to going forward. Grace and Jessie from CCC provided a list of useful resources for us that will definitely help with putting together content for local news in future so we can help spread the word about all of the positive creative work taking place in Blackwell Parish."