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Age Concern and Help the Aged
ngo.media works with Age Concern and Help the Aged's campaigns team to write their eight-page newsletter, "Activate", aimed at older campaigners.
The challenge
To overhaul the content of "Activate", in order to make it fresher, more engaging, more practical and useful, and also more inspiring and empowering for campaigning readers. The charity also wanted to cut the time it took to write, edit and design, Activate.
Activate aims to get older people campaigning on issues that affect them. The bimonthly newsletter goes to 10,000 Age Concern and Help the Aged individual campaigners and older people's forums and groups in England, Scotland and Wales.,
Our role
We worked with Age Concern and Help the Aged to come up with a new structure for the newsletter, dividing it into four distinct sections that are instantly recognisable from issue to issue.
Each issue centres on:
1. One major Age Concern and Help the Aged campaign, which takes the whole front page and emphasises, older campaigners' participation in that campaign.
2. A Campaigns Update with news, update information and developments on other Age Concern and Help the Aged campaigns with distinct actions campaigners can take.
3. Your Campaigns, featuring case studies of local forums' campaigning.
4. A Tools & Resources section giving campaigners practical information and tools, to enable them to mount campaigns themselves.
We also came up with a strict production schedule making the full editorial cycle for Activate just three weeks from editorial meeting to print.
Our impact
The redesigned newsletter has had a massive impact: campaigners love it. 'It really gives us a lot of confidence having such a professional publication to work with,' said one campaigner from Wolverhampton. 'The new Activate is great! People grab it and put it in their bags,' a London-based campaigner told us.
More people reading "Activate" means more campaigners completing the suggested actions such as writing to their MP, organising a petition and having their say on older people's issues.
We've made producing the newsletter a lot quicker and easier. We talk to people featured in the stories to check they're happy with the copy and we ring round campaigners to source news so it's ready well in advance.
Jane Keating, senior campaigns officer at Age Concern and Help the Aged, said:
We've recently relaunched our campaigns newsletter 'Activate'. ngo.media really understood what we needed to do to improve the newsletter for our audiences. They have worked with the team to consistently deliver that. They are always professional, have great ideas, and are a pleasure to work with.