On Monday 17th February, Envision's steering group had its first meeting at the RNIB HQ in Judd Street, London. The eight members of the group travelled from various points across England, including Manchester, Wigan, Darlington, Swansea, Essex, and Birmingham, to attend the meeting and to help shape the first campaign - accessible menus in coffee shops and improved support for visually impaired and blind customers.
Firstly the steering group, including myself, had a brief recap of the Five Golden Rules of campaigning, as well as discussing our first campaign in more detail. We went over the mystery shopper results that have been sent in so far (20 in total), and then discussed a brief overview of the findings. My mystery shopper results for 3 of the 4 main coffee shops (Costa Coffee, Starbucks and Cafe Nero) can be found by clicking here
Roles and Responsibilities
We then talked about roles and sub-groups within the steering group itself, dividing ourselves to work more efficiently in areas that we feel we are skilled in or would like to learn more about. I personally love social media, so became one of the first members to volunteer for the communications sub-group. The groups and members are as follows:
Chairs / Co-Chairs
• Kimberley Burrows
• Nina Davis
• Tom Church
Secretariat
• Lucy Hayward
Communications
• Kimberley Burrows
• Mohammed Mohsan-Ali
• Sean Barlow
• Lucy Hayward
Campaigns Planning
• Francesca Balon
• Nina Davis
• Naomi Stevenson
• Tom Church
Hugh Huddy, a member of the RNIB campaigns team, joined our discussion towards the end of the session, giving us a new perspective on how to approach a campaign. He also told us about questioning a company's audience through their slogan and quotes they use on their website, and how we can use that to our advantage.
We will be having a series of teleconferences among the sub-groups at the beginning of March. More information can be found about our steering group planning day by clicking here at the official RNIB website.
Envision on Twitter
As a member of the new Communications sub-group, specialising in social media, I decided to create a Twitter account for the Envision network recently. I wanted our Twitter handle to match that of the Facebook page set up by the RNIB campaigning team, EnvisionEngland, to dispel any confusion with too many different usernames. I designed the layout in Photoshop, uploaded the first group shot of our campaigning network and tweeted some of the most important information regarding our group and first campaign, with links to the RNIB website. I will continue to tweet on behalf of the rest of Envision until the Communications teleconference on March 13th, when we can discuss sharing the account and deciding when to tweet so we don't overlap information. We've received support and retweets so far from the official RNIB account!