Charities offered online marketing training

The course began earlier last month, offering insights into the charity’s activity, as well as marketing tips.

Course tutor Lucy Radford focused on the fundamentals of marketing.

‘Marketing is a fascinating subject, but it’s one that’s often confused with just advertising and public relations, so my first aim was to explain the key differences between these disciplines,’ she said.

Ms Radford’s expertise comes from working as an account manager at a local advertising agency, before spending 11 years as part of Specsavers’ marketing team. She left to set up a cake-baking business in 2019 called Bakewithluce but continued to want to share her knowledge.

‘I came from an organisation where there was a huge resource of skilled people to work on a whole variety of activities,’ she added.

‘Charities don’t have that luxury. Helping them promote and market their services effectively means they can save time and money.’

She hopes that the training marks the beginning of a longer journey.

‘The first step has been understanding in what areas charities might need support.

‘The intention now is to explore in more detail other elements that could be useful.’

As the foundation’s third sector liaison officer, Joni Nettleship organises training sessions for the third sector. ‘We’d originally planned to run this short course face-to-face, but after lockdown we decided to move it online, which meant it became accessible to a lot more people,’ she said.

‘One of my roles is to help strengthen the third sector and that means liaising with charities and arranging training sessions based on their needs.

‘PR and marketing are areas where a lot of charities recognise they have a knowledge gap.’

She said they were keen fill this gap and urged others, like Ms Radford, to speak to them if they were interested in volunteering their time to upskill local charities.

• For more information and to learn more about volunteering, email Joni@foundation.gg or call 259523.