Keeping in touch with each other
In order to have an active and involving group it's important to communicate regularly and in an accessible way. Make sure to collect everyone's contact details at the first meeting, and don't forget to do the same for new members at subsequent meetings. A regular email - clear and concise - is a good way of keeping members informed of what's been happening in the group of publicising future events or actions.
This could be done via a simple email (with the email addresses of all the members as BCC) but to enable discussion via email it might be a good idea to start an email list, either with email providers (e.g. www.groups.google.com or www.groups.yahoo.com) or with www.groupspaces.com or for a democratic, non-commercial alternative, www.riseup.net
NB. There is a new communications portal for local groups currently being developed. We will update this section when it is up-and-running.
Facebook and Twitter
The Equality Trust has its own national facebook page (facebook.com/equalitytrust) but it's a good idea to also set up a facebook group for your local group - you can publicise events on here and also facilitate discussion between group members
.
Similarly, The Equality Trust already has a twitter account (twitter.com/equalitytrust) but you might want to set up a local account. This is incredibly easy to do and a good way of keeping people up to date with what your group is doing.
Blog / website
If you do have a twitter account, be sure to include it in your local group's blog and send a tweet every few days so people can see that the local group is active and online communication is up to date. The two most popular blog providers are blogspot.com or wordpress.com (both free). They're easy to use and customisable: if someone in your group has web design skills, you can obviously be more ambitious. Some of our local groups already use their own websites; take a look to see what can be done:
http://www.sheffieldequalitytrust.org.uk/
http://www.scotlandequalitygroup.net/
Online collaboration
If you want to draft a group document such as a petition, letter or press release, why not discuss this online rather than leaving it all to one person. Resources such as docs.google.com allow documents to be drafted, edited and finalised in a democratic way. You can publish your documents with www.scribd.com, which can also be incorporated into your blog-posts.
If you need to fundraise as a group, try www.pledgebank.com. For hosting online petitions, try www.ipetitions.com or www.surveymonkey.com for questionnaires.
