Last week PVM joined UNICORN Project partners in Berlin to take part in a 4 four day training event.

The training, delivered by Vensenya, focused on four key aspects of communications and marketing – Audience Design, Storytelling, Distribution and Audience Building – and how these can be applied to NGO sector organisations.

The training was an opportunity to see how marketing methods and communications strategies traditionally used in the business sector can be applied to smaller, grassroot level, non-profit organisations. Partners were able to reflect on their organisation’s purpose, audience and aims, then think about how these strategically link to approaches to marketing and communications. The training was a success and provided lots of inspiration as to how PVM could improve in terms of the content we share and how we engage with our audience.

The next training will take part in Liverpool in July – stay tuned for more updates!

Since May 2021, People’s Voice Media have been partnering with Ideas Alliance on Not Another Co-Production Project.

The aim of the project is to move co-production from a buzz word into an embedded practice within grassroots organisations across England. We want to facilitate a knowledge exchange which ensures local people become active citizens, are involved in decision making and can shift power in their community, creating equitable partnerships between residents, services and local authorities. We want a future where policy, research and service design are informed by the lived experiences of local people and where collaboration is the norm not the exception.

As part of a 3-year project, Ideas Alliance will work with People’s Voice Media to deliver a co-production development project. This project will benefit local people, professionals and organisations across England, through engaging them in co-production workshops, Community Reporting, annual community learning festivals and a peer support network that connects people and creates a partnership of practice.

The first year of the project has been based in Greater Manchester and has seen a series of workshop delivered on co-production, community reporting and storytelling.

Most recently planning has begun for the first of three community learning festivals, which is set to take place in Manchester this summer. Last week members of Ideas Alliance came together with project contributors from across Greater Manchester at the Science and Industry Museum to discuss what should be included in the festival. The day will be a chance for people to learn more about co-production, challenge their understanding of what it is and most importantly celebrate how it can be used as a tool to create positive change within a range of different settings.

Stay tuned for future updates on the project and keep a look out on socials for invites to the festival!

Last week members of the PVM team ventured out to Valladolid to take part in a series of training workshops as part of the Narrative of Impact Project.

We were joined by project partners from across Europe and together we tested a series of storytelling activities, each of which had been adapted in order to be used as a way of measuring impact. These activities, alongside a series of video guides, will combine to form a toolkit – which will provide instructions on how to implement storytelling as a tool for measuring impact.

A huge thank you goes out to INTRAS Foundation (Spain) for hosting the training and the rest of the partners for your efforts in presenting and testing the activities: Comparative Research Network (Germany), Coordinamento delle Organizzazioni per il Servizio Volontario (Italy) and SNDE (Poland).

Stay tuned for more updates!

Last week members of the PVM team attended the Narratives of Impact project meeting in Sopot, Poland. Project partners from SNDE, COSV, CRN and INTRAS joined PVM at the ‘Our Friendly House Foundation‘ – A supported living space for adults with learning disabilities – for a two day meeting which focused on the future development of a storytelling toolkit.

Digital storytelling has become a popular method for curating communities and has been thriving as a tool for social transformation and social justice. The aim of Narratives of Impact (NOI) is to see storytelling as not only being a powerful tool for creating social change, but also a tool for measuring the impact and change. People’s Voice Media are coordinating a pan-European consortium to deliver this project. Funded by Erasmus+, we are working as a partnership to write a state of play report outlining the current climate for using narratives in impact settings and will produce a toolkit for creating and measuring impact via narratives and will create tutorial videos to support the toolkit. 

At the meeting partners updated each other on the progress of IO2 and collaboratively planned next steps. Partners also settled on an outline for the IO3 toolkit, selecting which chapters they will produce and discussing what content will be included in the video guides. There was also a presentation from The Polish Association for People with Intellectual Disability that explored good practices in digital storytelling. At the end of day one we were joined by Remont Pomp, a percussion band with resident members of the our friendly house foundation community, who performed a selection of songs from their upcoming album. Day 2 included planning for the learning lab which is set to take place in Spain in March 2022, dissemination reporting and a project risk assessment.

Overall the meeting was a huge success and it was great to meet partners in person for the first time!

If you would like to find out more about the Narratives Of Impact project, you can visit the project website here for more information.