Blog: Communication Officer’s Log – Week 7

This week, my colleagues Isla and David took calls for justice and compassion direct to Westminster.

Isla has been working incredibly hard with a group of lived experience experts and Fair by Design - the organisation that acts against the poverty premium. Together, they have created Give Me Some Credit - a fantastic online photovoice exhibition unveiling the truth of how lack of access to affordable credit has affected their lives. The launch event - supported by the APPG on Fair Banking - was packed with MPs and others, and has had great feedback on social media. Before they headed to London, I gave the group a very quick refresher on framing communications on poverty, and I've got a meeting with Fair by Design next week to talk about further communications work.

We issued a news release this week following the announcement of yet-another consultation on the future of local government finance.

I created and published our latest Scottish Anti-Poverty Newsletter this week. I was annoyed with myself for missing a duplication in the first paragraph! It's a lesson - I always find that I do better proofing when I print things out. But we got some nice feedback about the content, which helped me get over myself.

We're getting close to the time when the statistics on poverty in Scotland for 2023-24 will be published. The Child Poverty Act set down interim targets for that year - fewer than 18% of children should be in relative poverty, reducing to fewer than 10% by 2030. Given that the stats for 2022-23 recorded that 24% of children were in poverty, there's a growing fear that we're going to miss the first targets. So we've decided that the next edition of our journal the Scottish Anti-Poverty Review is going to focus on the issue of child poverty, looking at what we can do as a movement to hold political leaders accountable to the targets, and what more needs to happen to make them a reality. I've been contacting experts among our members to contribute articles, and it's looking to be a good edition. We're hoping to get it out to Poverty Alliance members by the end of March.

It's simply wrong that people are judged and discriminated against simply because they have been forced to live on low incomes. We have contributed to previous work in Fife and at the Scottish Parliament, looking at this unjust stigmatisation of people, and are continuing to support some ongoing work. I've been asked to look at what has been produced from a framing perspective, and I've been writing down some first thoughts this week.

I had a very quick meeting with our Steven Drew, who supports the work of the brilliant End Poverty Edinburgh group. I'm going to deliver training on framing and doing media interviews for them next month. It'll be slimmed-down versions of training I've delivered previously, so I had a quick look over my slides and started creating an agenda for the day.

I have been trying to place an op-ed about public transport and buses in a morning newspaper, without success so far, but I'm trying other avenues. We're supporters of the Better Buses for Strathclyde campaign, and have run the Everyone Aboard campaign in the past.

Myself and our Administration Officer Sinead met with the consultants who are supporting our implementation of Salesforce. We hit a snag when trying to use their built-in mass mailing function - basically the character limits are way too small - so we discussed other options and platforms, and there will hopefully be some developments soon.

I mentioned previously that I've been looking at refreshing our website to make it more reflective of our strategy. That work is progressing, and this week I've also been working on doing the same kind of thing with a Communications Guide that I created for colleagues. Once it's signed off, I'll share it in future week-notes.

Next week, Third Sector Lab have asked us to bring along colleagues to our Open Working Programme meeting. The idea is to start to get more people in our organisations on board with the idea. I'm glad that our Taking Action on Rural Poverty Aberdeenshire Development Officer Annie McCormack has agreed to take part. I've also been looking at the Open Working Champions Toolkit, and thinking about what else I can do to promote it within my team at the Poverty Alliance.

On our social media this week, we were promoting our forthcoming Scottish Labour conference fringe event with Citizens Advice Scotland and Future Economy Scotland, as well as the launch next week of the Serving the Future toolkit, a Rights In Action webinar, and meetings of the TARP networks in Aberdeenshire and Argyll & Bute.

As always, if you want to talk to me about any aspect of my work, drop me a line at david.eyre@povertyalliance.org.