WHAT’S IN THE TOTALLY LOCALLY TOWN KIT?  

As well as all the templates for posters, newsletters, bag designs, banners, stickers, bag stuffers, badges, postcards and much more (shown here), there are lots of instructions on how to run the campaign – from how to get a meeting together (with a template for an invite to send out) to running events. There’s even a press release template for you to amend with your town name, times of launch etc. There is a timeline, and everything you need to run the campaign in stages.

THE TOTALLY LOCALLY TOWN KIT

Our multi Award Winning Town Kit for you and your group of willing and able volunteers to get their teeth into.

It’s a tried and tested way of breathing life into your town.

 

A Word of Caution

You need to be approaching this with a sense of deep collaboration with your fellow volunteers and business owners, with a common goal and a sense that you really want to make this work.

Totally Locally is not easy, it’s not a silver bullet. It’s a tool kit to fix towns.
And let’s be honest, you could give someone the best tool kit in the world but they wouldn’t try to fix their Audi’s gearbox without a bit of knowledge in the first place! Same here. You need people with certain skills (design, web, organisation, social media).

But if you have them. This is the kit for you.

The kit is free to use for volunteer teams, we don’t get any funding from anyone. But if your organisation is funded (see our FAQs page) and you would like to use our kit, there is a charge for this, this helps support our work, please email us for a chat.

We offer a mentoring scheme of workshops and masterclasses for local authorities and organisations wanting to help create and support the Totally Locally movement in their town, in which they can become an officially Totally Locally Certified.

Step this way – ABC, easy as 1, 2 erm…..

You can jump right in and apply now but if we were you we’d read the rest of the page first (it’ll save you loads of time). 

Getting Started….

To get you going, DOWNLOAD our:

Totally-locally-What-it-is-What-It-isn’t Guide>>

Hopefully you’ve got 3 or 4 likeminded souls you think would want to be involved – you can start Totally Locally on your own but we really don’t recommend it.

Get together, read the guide and if you’re all happy this is right for your town then you’re ready to move on to your first town meeting…

But just before that we recommend you Join The Town Kit Totally Locally Doers Group on Facebook>> Say hello. Introduce your town. Ask questions. People will answer them! Be a part of the community. It will help further on because, well, you just know someone will ask you a question at some point!

Before you start…..

If you’re here, reading this, you’re probably aware of Totally Locally? Maybe you’ve been to a town that’s gone Totally Locally and think “We could do with a bit of that!”

If that’s why you’re here then read on.

First off – the Town Kit is more than just some posters, it explains a new way of working together in your town takes a bit of time, effort and dedication. Don’t let that put you off though, the results can be amazing.

Just follow the steps and it should(!) get you where you want to be.

Welcome aboard.

Get your first meeting together.

Ask anyone to come – even if they don’t have a shop or even a business. This is about independent makers, artists, growers, web designers, accountants, people who care about where they live – anyone who makes your town tick.

Have a rough idea of a launch date – Spring / early Summer work the best. Don’t be tempted to try and get it all setup in 4 weeks. This is a marketing campaign, carefully planned, done right it works, rushed it doesn’t.

Preparation for the meeting:

  1. Send a press release to your local paper with a couple of weeks’ notice.
  2. Download this Meeting invite which you can edit in photoshop and print a load out.
  3. Download our House Rules, a PDF of 10 very basic rules for Totally Locally.
  4. Download our Manifesto – to give out and get people excited.

These will help you get started and explain to people what the whole thing is about. Keep the meetings really informal, no Chairmen, apologies, etc. Just get together, have a chat and agree some actions, trust us, it works really well.

Good to go?

The next step is to register with us and apply for your town.

There are 2 ways to get the kit setup:

1) If you’ve got people in your team who are skilled in Adobe InDesign or Affinity Publisher for our posters/files and Photoshop or Affinity Photo they can set up the kit with you for your town – you’re pretty much ready to go

2) If you don’t have those skills we can set everything up for you for a small charge, leaving you free to concentrate on getting everyone excited about Totally Locally coming to your town.

When you’re ready Apply to us for the Kit here and we’ll send you all the details and info over.

Our  ‘How To’  page has plenty of info on how to do things that are Totally Locally.

Follow the Timeline we provide.

Roughly anyway.

Don’t think if you put some posters up and start a Facebook page that everyone will all of a sudden start supporting local shops. It’s not that easy. The key elements in the Town Kit are arranged to take people on a journey, to rediscover their town and fall in love with it. Explore the kit, work out your year, keep getting together and talk about the amazing shops and businesses in your town.

This is long term stuff. It does work. We’ve seen shop vacancy rates drop from 14% to 3% in one town, huge events happen in towns where nothing happened at all, and much more.

Stick at it! Don’t try to add anything new at first, you’ll probably be busy enough as it is.

Add your own flavours and share the ideas.

The beauty of Totally Locally is that once you’re up and running you’ll start to have ideas, some will be amazing, some not so amazing, but we encourage towns to share the ideas and continue to add to the kit.

Dare to have the crazy big ideas. Towns end up doing all sorts of things once they’ve gone through the first couple of years running the kit.

Towns end up doing all sorts of things that aren’t in the kit but they feel their town needs it –

skill exchanges, new markets, community newspapers, Sunday opening, fair tax campaigns, pop up shops, community festivals; all sorts of ideas that are created through the initial seed of coming together and collaborating for the good of the town.

A final word of caution…

Totally Locally is all about being nice to each other. It isn’t about individuals but your town, your community and your people. You will get questioned why you are doing this for your town, people may even be rude! Just take it on the chin, ask them to join in and if they don’t, well, that’s their loss. They can always join in later when they see the difference in their town.

‘Nuff Said.