We are very fortunate at Revive & Thrive, we get to talk to towns and cities all across the UK, both with professionals and passionate residents, or retailer activists on a daily basis. However, rarely a day goes by that we don’t talk to someone who is feeling a little ‘battle scarred’ offering comments such as ‘Our community is different because… and that’s why things don’t work here’ or ‘we’ve got some great ideas but the residents or retailers are so apathetic’.
Well the good news is, with a large number of you feeling this way, I can assure you that you are not alone and while you might have a set of challenges which might indeed be unique to your area, they are probably no harder (or easier) to overcome than other peoples’ challenges in other towns.
So this situation is just normal and the options are:
a) Give up
b) Tackle the situation head on and build enough support to force your projects forward
c) Work with and around the situation
If you are determined to prove to your community what can be delivered locally, then option ‘a’ does not apply. That’s great because now you are left with a plan and that is – choose b or c and get on with it.
Could this video show you the way to incentivise activity in your area?
However it might be worth taking a step back to consider one question, how confident are you that you are sending clear and simple messages to your community? Do your neighbours truly understand that you are asking them to interact with you in some way? May I suggest that you really separate yourself from your emotions and previous challenges and consider that thought? We are all probably over-stretched in the various elements of our lives, and definitely inundated with information, so how certain can you be that your message is getting through?
The answer is: you can’t be certain, and for that reason you mustn’t assume that you have connected with everyone who wants to interact with you, your projects and importantly, from your high streets’ perspective, your retailers. And you can’t be certain because you can’t measure.
Perhaps consider how technology can support your work and whether you can potentially add an anti-apathy tool to your project-delivery armoury. New advances and readily available tech hardware allows you and I to potentially connect all elements of a community, and use simple messages such as rewards and incentives to encourage activity and participation.
You might know that I spend a lot of time considering innovation for high streets and I have been offering some support to a company that has a platform that measures and rewards almost all ‘activity’ in a community.
Every day that I meet or speak with the team at Reward Your World, I become further impressed with the depth that their platform can reach into a community and incentivise the ‘right’ kind of community behaviour.
If you’re delivering anything in your community, I challenge (used that word a lot recently) you to think of an activity that Reward Your World can’t motivate or measure. So, to create a possible scenario, if you want someone to leave their car at home and get on their bike to meet with you to help you volunteer at an event, and then pop into town and buy from a retailer in a specific street, followed by going to see a local amateur dramatic performance, then cycle home, they can measure and reward every individual element of that journey and each individual activity.
In Reading where they launched late last year, they are partnering with Reading Buses by connecting their travel card to the Reward Your World platform to encourage use of sustainable transport. Their relationship with Reading Borough Council and the BID, Reading UK CIC, is enabling all parties to consider how recycling, car parking, volunteering, research, exercise, education, use of libraries, attending events, and even helping young people find employment or training, can be rewarded and measured through the platform.
At its heart, Reward Your World has all the features a local high street reward programme could hope for and my reasons for supporting local ‘loyalty schemes’ has always been the wider benefit that a simple message like incentivisation can deliver. The additional feature here is that the retailers don’t even need to offer a discount; elements of the platform mean that the retailer can be fully reimbursed, if necessary, when a resident collects their reward for their ‘activity’ in the community.
So now imagine the scenario where you need your community to connect with you in some way; using technology and solutions of this type you can reach out to everyone with a computer and/or Smartphone with very little effort – encourage them to support your cause, share the message as to why they might want to do this AND even give them a reward that can be redeemed in their high street. What’s more you can even measure the results.
So even if Reward Your World is not the complete antidote to perceived apathy in your community at least you can measure how apathetic your community is, or, hopefully isn’t!!
Final comment, I have another challenge for you and that is how to get the message across to you the reader, the community, town or city professional, or activist, about how you can now completely broaden your horizons way beyond what you thought technology could offer your community, and look at your projects and engagement with fresh eyes. The scope is massively broad and the opportunities are endless. The platform can be seen as modular, so it is within reach of almost all communities so please give me a call – I would like to see how Reward Your World can fit into different scenarios and I would appreciate the opportunity to chat to see if we can’t make at least some of your local frustrations disappear.
To find out more visit the Reward Your World website or call me for an informal discussion about how this could work in your town or city
You can help your high street and community ‘Revive & Thrive’ right now. Take a look at the Revive & Thrive Partnership, as well as Who’s Who, the Revive & Thrive Business Group and how to join the Business Group. Also see our testimonials our free ‘Ask the Partnership’ service and how to join the Revive & Thrive Town & City Community.
Want to get the best from social media for your community, town or city? See the results that we achieved on Retweet For Towns Day and how the Revive & Thrive Twitter Service could deliver these outcomes to you today.
For further information please contact us direct. We would love to work with you to realise your ambitions for where you live, work and play.
