TASK:
To ask the public to donate good quality products to the RSPCA shop in Wymondham. This was because we watched Mary Queen of Charity shops and found some shocking news about lack of quality of donations (over 755 of donations made can’t be sold!)
First Contact:
In order to help the RSPCA we had to call them or make first contact with them. Beth and Charlotte in our group volunteered to do this but unfortunately they weren’t there so Beth rang them back when she was at home.
Meeting them:
We went to the RSPCA in Wymondham for the first time the week after and learnt what kind of products and help they needed. Unfortunately they were too many of us to fit in to the shop so half of our group went in. We learnt that sometime the donation came from families who had a relative that had recently passed away. This meant that many of the donations where to dated an old to be sold, but for our shop it wasn’t the donations that they lacked but the amount of staff they needed to run it.
Ways to advertise:
After this we all had to come up with ways that we had to raise awareness and donations for our charity. We made a poster and a leaflet. On these we used a dog because the British public like dogs and because it was RSPCA it needed to be an animal. We also used the famous war time slogan “We need you” which was first of all used on the Kitchener poster during the war to get young men to sign up to the army. We also design a TV advert that was similar to the “A-Team” but instead featured the “CAM Team” (CAM standing for Creative and media) which featured to women in a charity shop talking about the poor quality of donation and lack of staff until one decides to ring The “CAM Team” who promptly come busting down the door and ask the pair what is wrong. They then go around Wymondham giving out posters and fliers advertising to everyone the good work that the RSPCA do for animals (additionally the fact that the profits made actually go to local RSPCA shelters etc.)
DID IT WORK?!
We put the posters up around the school; the TV ad that was due to be shown in forms wasn’t because we didn’t have enough time to edit it together and sort out possible copy-right with the music that we were planning to use. The posters didn’t work as nobody brought in any donations despite the fact that there was 5 posters per group and about 4 or 5 different groups (so 20 to 25 posters!) some of which I’ve noticed have since gone missing from where they were placed around the school. So we then had to change our target audience from the students to teachers, this proved no luck either because we still didn’t receive any donations. So in short most of this didn’t work.
TIE:
TIE stands for Theatre in Education and it was our group that first came up with the idea as we designed three letters to be sent out to the local primary and secondary schools- Browick Road, Ashleigh Infant, and Robert Kett Junior School. From there Miss Haythorpe got all of our different groups for different charities together and organised an email to be sent to the primary schools. We didn’t hear back from two of them but Browick Road kindly accepted out offer and we had an hour of workshops with the three year 2 classes.
This went well but we were expecting more donations than what we got (we got one donation). But that didn’t matter because we’d learnt a lot and managed to raise the profile of charity shops in the local area and hopefully gave them something to think about and go home to tell their family and friends.
WAYS THAT WE WERE SUCESSFUL IN THIS CAMPAIGN:
We managed to raise the profile of local charity shops with local people.
We managed to raise the profile of local charity shops with local people.
WAYS THAT WE WEREN’T SUCESSFUL:
We didn’t manage to get any donations or any volunteers to help out the RSPCA.
WAYS THAT WE COULD HAVE IMPROVED:
In my spare time I volunteer for a company called Creative Arts East and we were organising a local Film Festival in Wymondham at the time this campaign was going on, in order to advertise the film festival I went into assemblies but I didn’t mention anything about donating to charity shops because at that point I was concentrating more on the film festival, I hadn’t asked anyone in my group or any of the teachers weather it was ok and I didn’t want to overload people with too much information about a film festival and about diploma or donating to different charities.
We could have maybe given out fliers or something at lunch or breaks and put something into form boxes.
In all I think that it was a good try and a least we done everything that was expect of us in this task of cause we could have done better looking back at it but for our first campaign we managed to produce posters and leaflets etc and we were brave enough to work with infant school children and prepare a TIE workshop.
