Social Saturday 2015 continues to inspire people to BUY Social!

By Sana Amos

Social Saturday marked another huge success on 10 October, with well over 50 events nationwide showcasing the contribution of over 70,000 social enterprises to the UK.

The momentum of the awareness day campaign received widespread coverage across local and national press, as well as on social media. With high profile twitter support including the Prime Minister and Jamie Oliver it was no surprise that #SocialSaturday2015 was trending across social media platforms.

Today is #SocialSaturday2015, the day to celebrate social enterprises. Use your spending power and #buysocial today! pic.twitter.com/M6w7L7Rrik

— UK Prime Minister (@Number10gov) October 10, 2015

Today @SocialEnt_UK & @cabinetofficeuk celebrate #SocialSaturday2015 small changes make a big difference #buysocial http://t.co/KopBb6TuBy

— Jamie Oliver (@jamieoliver) October 10, 2015

Enterprises across the UK got in the spirit of Social Saturday by running events to showcase and promote their services to the public and highlight how every day they make a positive social and environmental impact.

One good example that truly demonstrated how social organisations can bring the community together was Divine Chocolate, the award winning chocolatier and social enterprise. They celebrated the day in style by hosting a free fair, that brought London’s social businesses in fashion, food and drinks sector together at the Lexi Cinema, itself a social enterprise.

Speaking of the significance of the day Peter Holbrook CBE and CEO of Social Enterprise UK, said: “Social enterprises are redefining how business gets done. When you buy from them, society profits. Social Saturday is all about celebrating and raising awareness about our growing movement. This year we want to really put social enterprise on the map through a range of events across the country.”

At Poached Creative we are proud to be working with Social Enterprise UK to produce the branding and campaign materials for the Buy Social campaign, that helps to support and promote social enterprises like ourselves across the UK.

It's Mental Health Month at Poached Creative!

This month we’re focusing on creating a mentally healthy workplace in the office. 

We were inspired to look at mental health due to our recent work on Free Minds, a youth-led campaign to raise awareness of how mental illness affects young people. We've also been inspired by our work on Off Centre’s Tackling Gang Violence report, which looks at the psychosocial issues behind gang violence, and our Oii My Size project – a youth-led website that tackles healthy relationships for teenagers.

It’s an important and common issue, with 1 in 6 people working with a mental illness at any given time, and absenteeism due to mental illness costing £8.4 billion annually to UK employers .

Our experience training unemployed and disadvantaged people in communications, many of whom experience mental health problems, have shown us the positive difference that meaningful work can have in people’s lives. Many of our trainees go on to volunteer or work in our office, becoming a valuable part of the team. 

So we’re confident that our office can support people with mental illness – but we want to be the best we can be! So we asked Twitter how to create a mentally healthy workplace.

We had a great response, with people advocating:

* flexibility,

* looking out for and respecting one another, and

* confidential support.

Here are our favourites answers from Twitter:

@poachedcreative ...Promote an open and honest culture in which you engage and support your staff
— NHS Employers (@nhsemployers) June 20, 2013 

@poachedcreative Mentally healthy workplace? Flexibility, giving a sh*t about each other not just outputs, solving problems, caring...
— Markoneinfour (@MarkOneinFour) June 18, 2013

Hi @poachedcreative ooh, it would be difficult to pick just one! Have a look at our top tips for healthy workplaces: http://t.co/weRJUd1Ziu
— Mind (@MindCharity) June 18, 2013

What’s your top tip for creating a mentally healthy workplace? Tweet us @poachedcreative

Twitter, the NHS and other stories

The US healthcare debate and the UK's backlash with the We love the NHS campaign has finally prompted me to join the Twittering masses.

I've been keeping an eye on Twitter for a while now - any communications tool that can mobilise the country in support of our most simultaneously loved and loathed institution deserves some attention.

There are several things that strike me.

1. Even though it looks like it's aimed at nine-year-olds, it's companies that use it most. It suprises me that so many professionals, academics and media personalities take it seriously. (OK, I'm not really surprised about the media personalities.)

2. Its best use seems to be to let people know about something really interesting that they don't know about yet. Why, then, so many people use it to tell their friends what they had for breakfast is beyond me. (But they do - oh yes they do.)

3. It's got tremendous potential as a democratising technology - a free and open platform for anyone to have their say in 140 characters. Basically it promises many of the things the internet promised and didn't quite deliver back in the dotcom days. I love it when people take hold of a technology and turn it to their purposes (so often it's the other way around!) and Twitter's use as a campaigning tool is particularly interesting.

So, I've decided to venture out there into Twitterland, tweeting as my professional self to share links and ideas that might be of interest to people who care about similar things - social enterprise, media, the NHS, unemployment issues, homelessness, good employment practice and such like.

You can find me at www.twitter.com/jessicatsmith

Don't worry, I've only posted one thing so far and I certainly won't be bothering you with what I had for breakfast.

Virtual stalking or communications revolution?

Twitter. It's all over the place. Electing presidents, attempting to rescue lost chums, giving me a sneak peak at my ex-boyfriend's dream bicycle (no, I'm not going to link to that one)...

It amazes me that the ability to ping 140 characters of text into the ether can have so much of an affect on society, individuals and relationships.

The truth is, while I've been hearing about Twitter for a while now, I hadn't actually seen it for myself until a couple of weeks ago. It was the first day of the pilot project for my start-up social enterprise and I'd spent hours preparing the more theoretical component for the day.

The idea was to give both trainees a broad foundation in communications theory - the message, the medium, communications channels, noise, feedback, that kind of thing. Twitter came up when we were talking about internet channels and I confessed I'd never been on it. Jeevan didn't know much about it either, so Angela took over my laptop and gave us both a quick tutorial.

She showed us what it meant to 'follow' somebody (which still seems quite stalker-like to me) how to send a post, and the counter that tells you how close you are to your 140 character limit.

This reminded me of writing news text messages when I worked for Australian Associated Press. Trying to condense a 400 word article into 140 characters without the aid of text-speak was, in fact, really good for developing concise writing. Providing the laws of grammar are heeded, it seems to me that the same could be said of Twitter. Perhaps, alongside the enforced brevity, we could introduce a grammar and spelling check that encourages the use of correct English.

But this still leaves the question of the terminology that builds up around anything web. People using Twitter post 'tweets', apparently, and the most popular tweeters are collectively known as 'the twitterati'. I only really know that through searching the Urban Dictionary - another revelation to me and, again, courtesy of Angela. Thankfully, this is the only dictionary that's currently keeping pace with the rapid rate at which web users create new words.

Our focus turns to web writing next week and I'm sure, once again, I'll be learning almost as much as my trainees.