Plan of Action for your event: Step 1 Reaching your goals

Step 1:

Start the event by thinking about what you would like to achieve. This might include goals such as:

• Increasing the number of people visiting your venue

• Raising your profile

• Reaching groups of people that aren’t currently engaged with your service – e.g. dads

• Promoting specific types of learning such as literacy, numeracy, ICT or healthy eating

These will form your event’s objectives – the ‘where you want to get to’.

Step 2:

Next, think about your target audience. For example, you may decide to target:

• dads and lads

• families from a particular ethnic background

• families who live in a particular area

• grandparents and the wider family

You may have a clear idea about the audience you wish to attract to your Family Learning Festival activities.

If not, there are different ways of finding out about the people who live in your local area and decide who you want to target (see box on page 11). You may wish to think about:

• qualification levels of the people in your area

• age ranges of children and adults

• unemployment levels

Step 3:

The activities that you choose to run, how you promote your event and the partners you decide to work with all depend on your target audience. So it is important to find out more about them as people, for example what interests them, what they do on the weekend and where they are likely to go.

One way of doing this is to invite members of your target audience to join a planning group for your activities – they can then also send out positive messages to their peers, which will help to promote the event.

You could also invite organisations that work with your target audience already such as Children Centres or voluntary groups to join the planning group.

Try the following for information about people in your local area:

• The National Statistics website can give you information on demographics (e.g. age, gender, qualification level) as well as showing the deprivation indices for a particular area. Find out more by visiting www.statistics.gov.uk

• Your local Learning and Skills Council has a Strategic Plan full of useful information, especially around education and qualifications. Go to www.lsc.gov.uk and then click onto regions, the publications section for your area should have local plans.

• Look through information from your local authority, which may be in the form of a development plan for adult learning or a community plan. You should be able to access these by visiting you local authority website or contacting the local education department.

   

This information should help you see how you could widen participation.