So what’s it all about? here’s an 18 minute presentation (part of a larger talk in Australia about Place Branding) that explains the main concepts and the history of how Totally Locally came to be.

So……

Totally Locally is a free campaign for you and your town to use (as long as you fit our free criteria). It’s a well thought-out strategic marketing campaign, that has a timeline and covers everything from holding your first meeting to launching Totally Locally in your town, to holding events and much more.. Then there’s loads of other tools to help you promote your independent businesses for a good 2 years. But its most unique characteristic is it relies on ‘non-structure’, good will, being nice and having a bit of fun.

Support each other as businesses, and the Kit will help you target people in your area to help them understand how supporting the local businesses makes their town better. It’s that simple.

Here’s a video that explains the whole concept of keeping money in the local economy. You can use it in your group to get the whole message across.

Totally Locally is all about collaboration and each town will need to have a small group of ‘do-ers’ as we like to call them, who implement the Town Kit and then come up with ideas of their own. You don’t have to own or work for a business, you can just be a passionate local, love your town and want to get involved to make it even better.

Once you have a name for something and a platform to launch things off, there is no limit to what you can do for your community. No-one is in charge and you’re not allowed to take minutes, it’s not that sort of group!

Once you get into the habit of meeting in pubs, having no structure or chairman (i.e. just doing stuff!) new and exciting ideas come easy. And then we ask you to share your ideas with other towns. As we said – it’s about being nice.

We don’t like having rules, but one thing we must insist on is that you HAVE to have fun running Totally Locally in your down. THAT’S AN ORDER.

Chris started Totally Locally back in 2010 in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, where he lives. It was so successful that other towns asked if he could do it for them. Chris was joined by Nigel Goddard and together they built the structure to enable towns to have the campaign as a ‘self-help’ in an open-source structure (aka the downloadable Town Kit). And that’s when it all went a bit crazy!