Communicating with your community

This section will help you to build channels of communication between your group and your wider community. This might be local residents, people with a shared interest or people who support the aims of your campaign.

Involving people in your group requires two way communication. You might need to find out people’s views on an issue, help local people to make their voice hear, or provide opportunities for different people in your community to communicate with each other.

As well as the links below, you might find it useful to look at our section on Producing a neighbourhood newsletter.

  • Beginner's Guide to Printing

    Most community and voluntary groups need to produce printed material from time to time. Whether you are producing a monthly newsletter, a poster for a meeting or an information leaflet, it’s worth thinking right from the start about how you will print it.

  • Designing and using surveys

    Surveys are useful for finding out people’s opinions about an issue, or to gather feedback about your group’s activities. This page provides tips on getting the most out of surveys.

  • Facebook for community groups

    Simple information and tips for small, volunteer-run community organisations

  • Involving people in your group

    How do you get lots of people along to your meetings and events? How do you make sure that more than a handful of you are doing the bulk of the work?

  • Making your activities and events accessible

    How to remove barriers and make sure disabled people can participate in your group’s events and activities.

  • Organising a public meeting

    Holding a public meeting can be a really good way of building a campaign or getting more people involved in your group.

  • Support with publicity and printing

    At the Resource Centre we can help groups to produce publicity and stationery, and provide administrative support.

  • Video and telephone meeting tools

    How to have a meeting when you can’t all be together

  • Data protection for community groups

    A plain-English summary of data protection responsibilities for small, volunteer-run community groups, including how to comply with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

These books are available at the Resource Centre, to borrow or to use in the Centre.

Would you like to make a donation?

We hope you find this page useful. Would you like to make a donation?

All Resource Centre information is available for free because we know small community groups have small budgets. However, we are a small charity, so if you are in a position to make a donation, it will help us to keep running this service into the future.