2.4 Service Promotion
You should produce a marketing plan or promotional strategy as part of your service plan. It should meet your aims and objectives.
Your budget should include funding for promotional work.
Your target service users should be aware of the services available. In order to achieve this, regular publicity is essential. Publicising the activities of your organisation ensures that you continue to reach people who may have a need for your service. It is possible that some groups are excluded from services through ignorance rather than need.
Instead of encouraging additional use, your promotional strategy may need to consider how to keep demand to a manageable level. For example, your service may experience peak periods of high demand. You may then decide to publicise recommended times for enquirers in order to avoid these periods.
Promotional material needs to ensure that you are not only publicising what your service does, but also when it is available and how it can be accessed. Specific parts of your service may be relevant to particular groups and should be publicised in different ways. For example, if you are open one evening each week specifically for people who are in work, you should ensure your publicity reaches these people. It should also be carefully worded to make clear the intentions of the session.
Similarly, if you offer a home-visiting service your promotional material should explain who this is for to avoid inappropriate demands for this part of your service.
Publicity also ensures your accountability to the wider community. You can achieve this through annual reports to inform the wider community about casework and achievements during the year. It should also include details of any changes made as a result of user involvement and explain how people may become involved in future planning of services.
Go to the next page: Standard Two - Developing Your Service to Ensure Accessibility
(c) Scottish Accessible Information Forum, 2007
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