Social Innovation Programme launches in time for Christmas

Over the last year we've been working hard on our Social Innovation Programme and now we're ready to officially launch it in time for Christmas. 

Up to one hundred and fifty charities in six countries will benefit from a 1 million euro initiative to make their communications activities more efficient and impactful.

Each charity will be provided with a new all-in-one brand newsroom and multimedia public relations platform free of charge as well as expert training and communications strategy support.

Employees in Mynewsdesk’s Swedish, German, UK, Danish, Norwegian and Singapore offices have each chosen small and worthy charities that align with their personal social concerns. Mynewsdesk’s UK team partnered with JustGiving to identify the small charities that would benefit most from this programme.

Earlier this year the UK government announced plans to cut £2.8bn in public funding for the third sector over the next five years, meaning small charities will be under increasing pressure to work with limited resources and significantly reduced government support. The online newsrooms will give charities the easy to use tools to efficiently run more integrated communications campaigns across multiple platforms and channels using a variety of formats – text, video and images. The professional presentation of the newsrooms will also have more impact upon opinion formers and donors.

As small charities do not have the advertising budgets of large charities and they are reliant on public relations and content marketing for both fundraising and campaigning on issues. As they often work on specific issues, small charities are able to give insightful expert comment and offer content of strong media value but are short of time and the contemporary tools to react to the news agenda. The network tool will help the charities to identify and build relationships with key journalists and online influencers who can help them with their campaigns and the analytics function will provide valuable insights into how each piece of content is performing. 

Breege Zachary, Communications Manager at SportsAid, said, “We support over a thousand young people every year and promoting their achievements through Mynewsdesk makes a huge difference to them and our fundraising efforts. It also saves us time and we’re already seeing our work being more widely recognised and reported on as a result, which is fantastic.”

Watch this video below to find out more about the project, the Elephant Parade statue designed by Marcel Schreur which has become our charity symbol and how one of the charities, Stroke Association, is benefitting from the programme.