It is a known fact that the UK has seen a spike in youth violence, particularly knife crime, over the last couple of years. Sadly, the news has become all too familiar: another grinning picture of a lost kid, another grieving parent’s pleas for the violence to end, another youth worker discussing the impact of local government cuts, another politician with a soundbite playing to his or her agenda. Most of us, read these ‘by-numbers’ articles, feel a pang of sadness, anger or guilt – and then move on with our lives, much as we do when we hear about a famine or war in the global south. Sometimes however the reality of the situation is driven home a little harder. Last year a 16 year old was shot-dead one road from my house in Tulse Hill in South London. On this occasion it was impossible to ignore the deafening-silence of the neighbours and friends stood behind the police tape. Then, just a matter of days ago, my friend’s son, who is 15, was threatened at knife-point and interrogated about whether he had any gang affiliation. This happened just yards from his house - in broad day-light. My friend’s voice trembled as she told me that, what made this so hard was that this had happened in the very place that both she and her son had been brought up – the place they call home. Nowhere felt safe anymore. Like thousands of young people in London and across the UK, my friend’s son is now approaching adulthood in a state of fear and faces stark questions around how to remain safe in this environment. Of course, there is not single cause or single solution. The government, police and schools undoubtedly have huge roles to play, particularly when it comes to addressing the underling socio-economic issues at play. However, in many cases it is the people living and working in the affected communities who have the best understanding of the dynamics on the ground and therefore the best solutions for tackling these issues at the local level. At Localgiving we work with grassroots organisations across the UK who work tirelessly, to tackle youth and gang violence and its multiple causes. Many of these groups have been set up by people who have first-hand experience of these issues, some by parents of victims and some by former gang members themselves. These groups are embedded in their communities and are therefore, not only acutely aware of the specific dynamics of the situation in their area, but also find it far easier to gain access to, and the trust of those they aim to help. This is a particularly important factor, given that many of the communities most adversely affected by the uptick in youth violence have also experienced a break-down in trust with police and local authorities. The type and level of support offered by these grassroots groups varies considerably. Many services are tailored to the specific needs of the young people they work with and communities they work in. Some groups provide peer-to-peer support, some provide safe spaces for healing, some help secure safe, stable housing and provide their young people with training and education opportunities. One thing they all offer however is hope. Hope that there is a way out of the current cycle of violence and evidence of the tangible difference that people can make in their own communities – even when faced with the most painful and seemingly intractable social problems. Below are some of the amazing groups on Localgiving who work to tackle youth violence and its causes.  Jags Foundation (Croyden, London) Real Action (Kensington, London) St. Matthews Project (Lambeth, London) Aik Saath - Together As One (Slough) The New Cross Gate Trust – “carrying knives costs lives” campaign (London) Safe (Oxford) Newark Youth London (Newark London) Prospex (Islington, London) Copenhagen Youth Project (Islington, London) Lambeth Action for Youth (Lambeth, London) C2C Social Action (Northampton) Fitzrovia Youth In Action (Camden, London) Fast Project (Battersea, London) Sports4Health CIC (London) The Reasons Why Foundation (London) The Jan Trust (Haringay, London)

One question that we are frequently asked is how to develop a marketing strategy. To start with, we should be clear that a marketing strategy and marketing plan are different, albeit overlapping, things. Their relationship is similar to that of your vision and mission. Your strategy is about identifying your overarching goals and the tactics you will use to achieve these. Your plan is about the execution of this strategy – the actions that you will take to reach your goals. With that said, here are our top-tips for helping you develop your charity’s marketing strategy: Define Your Goals The first thing you need to consider is what you are trying to achieve with your strategy. Think carefully about how your marketing strategy supports your charity’s mission and vision. Are you looking to increase donations, raise awareness of a cause or reach new beneficiaries? Without clearly defined goals you’re not going to be able to work out which marketing channels you should and shouldn’t be using. Identify Your Key Audiences The next thing to ask yourself is who you are trying to engage with your strategy. This will depend on your chosen goals. If your goal is to bring in major donors, you should probably reconsider a strategy geared towards teenagers in socially deprived areas. Tailor Your Messaging Marketing is essentially about relationship building. As individuals, we naturally speak to different people about different subject – often (subconsciously or not) altering our vocabulary accordingly. We have our our literature friends, our football mates, and our political comrades (ok, just me). This is the way we should approach our audiences. Different demographic groups have different interests and consume and engage with content in very different ways. The messaging, tactics and channels you use to reach and ignite the passions of young people in central London will almost certainly diverge from those you use to engage older people in rural Norfolk (Hey Mum). Play To Your Strengths The last few years have seen some incredible charity campaigns using ground-breaking in-game advertising and VR campaigning.  Sadly, if your marketing department is a one-person team with a sub £1k annual budget you may not be best placed to take advantage of these technologies. Your strategy should seek to make the most out of the resources, time and skills that your organisation has at its disposal. In simple terms, you should begin by focussing on what you are already good at. If you and your team have specialist Social Media skills make this the fulcrum of your strategy. If you are a great, persuasive copy-writer – you may choose to focus more on email and content marketing. Data Counts (but not all data counts equally) There is a whole range of data that you can use to measure the success of your strategy and inform your work. For example, most social media platforms have inbuilt analytics tools that enable you to track and compare your likes , shares, opens.click through rates etc. The important thing is to identify and track the data that most relates to your goals – key performance metrics if you will.  In most cases only a couple of metrics really matter. While it may be interesting to explore why your latest newsletter was opened 7 times in Bishkek, your click-through rate on your Call-to-Action button will almost always be more important (ignore this if your goal is to increase readers in Kyrgyzstan) Learn From Other Charities Take the time to explore what other charities (similar to your own in size and cause area) are doing and don’t be afraid to replicate or adapt their ideas. We don’t all need to be great innovators all of the time. Borrowing ideas that have already been proven to have success can save a lot of time and resources.     

Hi there, I’m Simi, Junior Web Developer at Localgiving. We have been working on making improvements to our Search Interface. We’ve thought very carefully about how to improve the way our users will interact with the platform on both desktop and mobile devices.   You can now search from the home page and you will be taken straight to the new search page where you’ll immediately find the results. This will save you the time it would take to navigate to different pages. You can see all the results neatly packed in the sidebar of the page while still having a full view of the map. Your results will be split between 4 tabs located at the top of the sidebar (similar to the old search interface). From here you can navigate to the charity page or make donations directly to your charity of choice.  To get a better view of where charities are on the map you can use the orange arrow button by the side of the sidebar to toggle the search results siderbar open and close. Results can be narrowed down by area and causes using the filters tab. We always want to provide our users with the best experience on Localgiving. We are therefore looking forward to getting feedback from you so that we can continue to improve the site!   

Senior managers and trustees of charities and social enterprises face a myriad of challenges. Managing a business is difficult enough. Running a social enterprise or a charity, which obliges you to search for innovative funding opportunities, deal with budgetary pressures caused by Government policies, put together engaging fundraising campaigns (often on shoe-string budgets), help clients who are suffering from complex issues and a complete a cornucopia of other tasks; can put enormous strain on your personal life, relationships, and mental well-being. Here are a few tips on how to reduce this strain and make your team happier and more productive. Train Your Team To Prepare For All Eventualities No organisation wants a stressed member of their team to slip and break their leg while contributing to an outreach programme. Your team could lose that colleague for months while they recover. In the same way, these organisations should ensure that the emotional challenges experienced by their workers and volunteers every day, by cases involving complex issues like drug addiction and violence, do not leave them feeling forced to withdraw from their roles due to mental ill-health because of these experiences. By training your senior management to give staff the tools to manage stress effectively and recover emotionally from traumatic experiences, you can reduce the risk of losing valuable staff for long periods due to sick leave caused by mental ill-health. Turn Your Work Team Into A Sports Team Exercise provides a fantastic opportunity to reduce stress. The positive endorphins released by the brain whenever you engage in physical activity will help you to put everything into perspective and approach the issue at hand from a different perspective. It’s difficult to stress about Monday’s emails while you’re trying not to get hit in the face by a squash ball. Plus, sports can foster a fantastic team spirit among your staff. What’s not to love? Eat And Sleep Well Being tired and hungry is hardly going to make you feel less stressed. Healthy diets and sleep patterns are essential for your colleagues’ mental well-being. Write Down How You Feel Sometimes you just need to let everything out. Particularly if you have had to deal with eight gruelling hours of difficult situations. Your notepad provides a brilliant outlet for these feelings. Writing can also let you detail the brighter aspects of your role. Writing and reading out funny stories about your job will help everyone to feel less stressed.   How We Can Help At Altruist Enterprises, we can sit down with you and create strategies to help your team manage the stresses involved in their day-to-day responsibilities, so that minor issues do not develop into emotionally draining crises. We have helped organisations across the country to increase their staff’s mental well-being and consequently, their motivation to boost that organisation’s growth. For more information on how we can help your team to eliminate stress, please click here.   Katie Buckingham is the Founder and Director of Altruist Enterprises; a passionate and caring provider of Resilience, Stress Management and Mental Health at Work training to organisations nationally. Find out more here www.altruistuk.com   

22 years ago the world changed forever. Nicola, a daughter, sister and one of my best friends sadly passed away. She was beautiful, so popular, funny, warm, and caring. We had so much fun growing up and I miss her very much. From that day I said to myself that I would try and live my life to the fullest because Nicola was no longer able to. Running the London Marathon was always on my ‘list’. When I entered the ballot this year I never really thought I would get in, but what happened? I got in first time and I am now entered to run 26.2 miles round London in April next year. I feel incredibly lucky to be given this opportunity and so I wanted to run for a charity that meant a lot to me. After doing some research I found a local charity called Solve It which is based in Northampton. Solve It was set up in 1988 by a woman who lost her son in the same way as Nicola. The charity works with teenagers, parents, carers and other organisations to educate people about the consequences of new psychotic substances (aka NPS or former legal highs) and in particular solvent abuse. Nicola is still missed and loved so very much. I am running in her memory and would love any support to help this small charity keep up the amazing work it does. Running a marathon is going to be a pretty big challenge for me as, although I ran the Oxford half last year, I have not run much since. I also have a slipped disc to contend with! However, knowing I am running for a wonderful charity that is reliant on fundraising is motivating me enormously. No one has run the marathon for Solve It before. I am so honoured to be the first. I will keep you updated on my training progress HERE and if you would consider sponsoring me that would be great. Thank you for reading; both myself and Solve It really appreciate your support.   

Let me set the scene: We are in Israel, around 3,000 years ago, and a fight is about to go down between the Philistine’s mightiest warrior, Goliath and an unknown shepherd named David. Standing at 9 feet and 6 inches tall, covered head to toe in heavy bronze plates and carrying a sword the size of his opponent, Goliath is a thing of nightmares. In comparison, David is small and slight, wears no armour and is carrying just a few pebbles and a slingshot. The Israelite bookies aren’t anticipating an upset here, and the crowd are clamouring in the heat.  For the 80% of UK charities who generate under £100,000 in revenue each year, the charity landscape is beginning to feel as dangerous as that dusty battlefield. Weakened by decreasing funds, increased demand for services, volatile public trust and growing competition, these organisations have their work cut out. More than one in four Chief Executives of smaller charities feel strongly that they are ‘struggling to survive’. Despite making up 80% of the charity sector, these organisations bring in just 3% of total income. Let’s call these guys David’s. You can see where I’m going with this… On to the competition. Who are our metaphorical David’s up against? Well, they aren’t mighty in numbers - the charity sector’s Goliath is made up of a mere 1% of a total 168,000 registered UK charities. However, just like the Philistine warrior himself, they are enormous. That 1% generates a whopping 72% of total income to the sector. As you likely know, the fight does provide the Israeli crowds with an upset. David; the crowd behind him, more agile, and armed with different tactics, fells his opponent. So how can smaller charities learn from David’s success and continue to survive in an arena of Goliaths? Get your ‘crowd’ involved More than half of small charities income comes from individual donations. This means our David’s have a strong connection with their donor-base and can communicate with a personal touch. Goliath’s can find this trust very difficult to replicate. In one poll nearly half of the respondents said they trusted small community-based charities, whereas just 29% said they trusted national charities. This directly correlates with giving. The same proportion of people who trusted smaller charities were likely to donate to them, however only 17% said they were likely to donate to national organisations. Use your agility to your advantage David is small and nimble. Goliath, weighed down by his heavy armour and his size, moves as if coated in molasses. How can this same agility serve a charity’s mission? Well, put simply, a smaller charity equals a smaller team, and therefore a flatter hierarchy. Use this to your advantage, take bold, creative decisions to your board of trustees. In a world in which technology is fuelling growth, promise and incredible opportunity, the pace of organisational change is vital. Introduce new tactics Ultimately, David won the battle because he stunned Goliath with a new method of combat: his slingshot. The new method of combat for smaller charities? Technology. Technology has levelled the playing field across all sectors, and the charity world is no different. In fact, Goliath’s are more likely to cite ‘new technology’ as one of their top challenges in comparison to David’s. New tools on social media such as the donate sticker on Instagram is making it easier than ever before for charities to reach individual supporters. Plus, free services are available from other industry Goliaths, such as Google For Non-Profits. Contactless charity donation boxes allow charities to maximise their fundraising on the ground by tapping into a whole new donor base who just don’t carry cash anymore. Through this methodology, my very own ‘David’ TAP London, has raised over £100,000 from over 35,000 Londoners. So, to all the David’s out there. Don’t lose faith. Be personal, agile and most importantly – embrace new technologies. Polly Gilbert is the Marketing Director at GoodBox, a tech-for-good company which helps charities of all sizes better connect donors with charitable causes. She is also the co-founder of TAP London, a ‘David’ raising vital funds for London’s homeless.