We ask one thing: If you make a living from regeneration, from working for a private initiative that makes money from regeneration, or you are paid by a council or other organisation, you don’t use our kit yourselves. This is because of the spirit of the Kit centres around volunteers.
Also you will definitely struggle to run the campaign yourself – this is from experience watching councils try. It doesn’t fit with ‘council way of working’ and is deliberately free of formal structures.
Local Authorities & Councils have tried Shop Local campaigns over & over – most didn’t work. In our experience, this is for one reason. If a council tells a business what to do, and how to do it, it’s a bit rubbish, isn’t it? Someone who doesn’t run a business telling someone who DOES run a business HOW to run their business. Most people have a negative view of council-led initiatives (quite often unfairly) and so they will not engage. Also, there will then be an expectation of “What are ‘they’ going to do for me then? OK, but what are they doing for me next?”. Which is exactly what kills it all.
BUT….
If you’re a Council, BID or ‘political animal’ and you think Totally Locally is right for your town, we run a Mentoring Scheme to show the businesses of your town how to run the campaign with your organisation in a supporting role. We will you help identify the right local group to take on the campaign, then show them how to do this via workshops and talks. Your organisation can then receive Official Totally Locally Certification – this also includes a license for having your organisation’s logos on the Town Kit posters. This is chargeable and where applicable is compatible with Government funding for helping high streets, independent businesses and strengthening local economies and communities.
For talks, workshops or using our Town Kit as an organisation, get in touch.
BUSINESS ASSOCIATIONS
You could try to, but a ‘paid for’ business association that relies on membership and excludes people who don’t ‘pay in’ will not work! If you want to run it on these grounds, we ask that you include every single business in the town in the campaign, even if they refuse to be involved with your organisation.
Totally Locally is given away in good faith. We ask that you repay this good faith by making the campaign completely inclusive. This is a condition of you using the kit.
There are a lot of good people doing good things in many organisations. But they are there to do what they set out to do. Most associations like this have a membership scheme. We’ve heard “I paid 20 quid to join the business association 10 years ago and they did nothing for me!”.
People have pre-conceived ideas about some associations. They may have had a bad experience in the past and that will make them not to want to get involved in Totally Locally if it is run by them.
Totally Locally has to be seen as a “No membership, no paying to join (with perhaps voluntary donations for printing etc), non-exclusive” thing.
Our experience has shown it will make it a lot harder to create an all-inclusive campaign. It also causes friction within the town – so you shoot yourself in the foot at the first hurdle, and damage the brand of Totally Locally. That’s why we say this can’t happen.
POLITICAL PARTIES AND CANDIDATES
For the same reasons as mentioned above, organising and joining in with Totally Locally has to be non-exclusive. If you attached a political candidate or party to it then you will exclude or alienate some then it won’t be as effective as it could be.
So we kindly ask that politics is kept out of Totally Locally. Collaboration gets things done, as does people of different political persuasions working together.