A Cumbrian care group is among the first organisations to benefit from Cumbria Exchange. West Cumbria Carers used the service to ask for help with a promotional video. For 25 years West Cumbria Carers has been supporting anyone of any age who cares, unpaid, for a friend or family member who due to illness, disability, a mental health problem or an addiction cannot cope without their support. As a charity they are always looking to raise awareness of their work to people who could benefit from their support but are unaware of the organisation and to potential supporters or sponsors. They had many discussions in the office about how they could use video to help them when they were doing presentations or as part of their Social Media presence but were unsure how to proceed.
Michelle McGibbon, from West Cumbria Carers, said “West Cumbria Carers required some short video clips produced for giving presentations to businesses, groups and in schools. We were told about the Cumbria Exchange website and were then matched with the Nuclear Community Network. Dianne Richardson, from Balfour Beatty (part of the Nuclear Community Network), provided us with a contact for her communications team who were able to give us advice on aspects such as how long the video should be. The Cumbria Exchange website was really easy to use and we were matched with local businesses really quickly.”
Michelle and her colleagues had a telephone conversation with Laurence Ager, Marketing Communications Manager for Balfour Beatty based in London, who develops the strategy for all Balfour Beatty’s videos. He commented “To be honest I didn’t think twice about helping out the West Cumbria Carers. We’ve made a lot of films ourselves at Balfour Beatty and we know what works well.”
“You only really gain this knowledge through years of experience and plenty of trial and error so it was great to be able to pass these tips on. It is nice to know that others might skip the simple film-making mistakes we made at first.”
West Cumbria Carers were then able to access some funding for the videos via Morgan Sindall and contracted Adamedia to produce the videos they needed. Adam Pearson, Creative Director of Adamedia, could see the result of the conversation between the West Cumbria Carer’s Team and Laurence, saying “When Michelle McGibbon from West Cumbria Carers approached us to support her on a video production assignment, it was refreshing to see that she had a well thought-out idea of how the videos would run and also a clear reason for why she wanted them to be made as well as where they would end up being used. Because of this we were able to quickly further develop her ideas during our first meeting and ended up coming to an agreed scope that we were both happy with. We look forward to beginning to work with her and the WCC team”.
Councillor David Moore, Chair of the Copeland Community Fund said; “It is encouraging to see people getting involved with Cumbria Exchange, and feedback suggests that people like the fact it is so easy to use.