Steve Dyson, @SalfordCpayback writes about how he uses photos in his Twitter account to promote the work Salford offenders do on Community Payback schemes.
When I first started working for Community Payback nine years ago, the thing that frustrated me most was that no-one knew about the wonderful benefits for local communities.
I was blown away by the type of work Community Payback achieved in the community, although publicity was almost non-existent. At the time I was based at Manchester Community Payback unit, the second biggest unit in the UK. I set about working with Greater Manchester Probation Trust’s PR team to promote the good work we did.
Over the years I moved around Greater Manchester gaining a wealth of experience about the different types of communities GMPT serve and seeing first-hand what a real difference we actually make. It’s always frustrated me that we still struggle to get our message out, given the amount of work we actually do.
I’m now based at Salford Community Payback unit and am extremely enthusiastic about working to improve the City, a City which I have grown to love. Last year GMPT launched its Facebook and Twitter account – administered by Stephen Hallmark (@gmptprobationpr) at HQ. I was always sending Stephen photos and little snippets about projects that we were doing to raise the profile of Salford CP.
Stephen asked me if I would like to tweet in a personal capacity as a GMPT Tweeter, I think he may have been trying to tell me that I was bombarding him with too much information…
I have always thought that Probation Trusts have an excellent product with Community Payback but have NEVER SHOUTED LOUD ENOUGH about the good work we do.
This is not a reflection of GMPT’s PR Department but I believe it is due to probation being the “poor relations” of the Criminal Justice Service, for example GMPT only has two PR staff.
When Stephen asked me to tweet, I jumped at the chance but asked if I could tweet from an account for Salford Community Payback and not in a personal capacity so that I could represent the team in the tweets, but more importantly show our followers exactly what we do.
I wanted to demonstrate the types of projects Salford undertakes in the community and I wanted this to be instant, I guess Twitter compliments my impatient side when it comes to shouting about what we do.
I had only just started to tweet in a personal capacity with my own Twitter account a few months earlier and I was worried whether my tweets would be of interest.
It’s one thing banging on, that we don’t shout loud enough and another thing to SHOUT LOUD GIBBERISH.
Once our twitter account was launched I found it exciting and then had some form of “Twitter fright”: my stage was empty, only a couple of followers in the audience and my fingers poised on the keyboard behind the curtain. It’s not like tweeting from my personal account where I can tweet about anything I want to, I was aware that what I was tweeting has a far reaching audience even if I had no followers.
As part of my duties as a CP Officer I’m required to conduct site visits on the projects that were working on. I found I had an abundance of material for my tweets, instead of making the site visit and then telling the CP Supervisor and the offenders what a good job they are doing; I highlighted their work on twitter.
As time went on I started to add more and more photos of the projects that we were doing , most times when I have tweeted and attached a photo it’s been in real time, what the followers see at the time of the tweet is exactly what’s happening, and that’s one medium that only live TV can rival.
I like the twitter community, I like the Friday following #ff and the partnership work that can be created by just tweeting.
For Community Payback it’s a good medium for connecting with the public, I often have direct messages sent via twitter asking me to pass on the thanks for a great job to the offenders and project requests from partner in the community.
Check out Salford Community Payback’s Facebook page.
Next week: Charlie Fox, @defencegirl, trainee police station lawyer and deservedly popular blogger: www.themodstolemyboyfriend.com.
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