You may have realised that despite the Shake My Hand social media accounts being active since May 30th, the website didn’t actually launch until almost three weeks later (Monday June 17th). With today being the one-week anniversary(!), it’s amazing and I (Aimee Wilson, Founder) am super grateful to be able to say that shakemyhandcampaign.com has reached over 1,000 views! As is natural with a lot of achievements, I’ve gone back over everything that’s been done in order to have reached this point; and I thought I’d share the thoughts about that with all of you…
Launch Blog Post On www.imnotdisordered.co.uk
On the morning of our Launch Day: June 17th,
I wrote a blog post for my award-winning mental health blog; I’m NOT
Disordered. My blog is eleven years old; it’s ranked by FeedSpot as number one
in the UK for Borderline Personality Disorder Blogs (you can see the rest of
the Top 5 here),
and has over 1.3 million readers. Using I’m NOT Disordered as a publicity
platform for Shake My Hand was something that I put a lot of thought into – I mean,
it did really seem like a naturally wise move because I thought about it almost
immediately when I began creating the Campaign. If anything, it actually helped
me to create it because I felt encouraged by the idea that at least a portion
of my blog’s readers might be a group of people who will find Shake My Hand
relevant to their experiences.
In recognising this though, I also felt it was
important to confront the fact that my blog and the Campaign are two different parts
of my life. That whilst I’ve published numerous blog posts specifically about the
rape and sexual abuse I experienced when I was younger with advice on helping
and supporting survivors of those traumatic instances; the majority of the
content on my blog is actually centred around mental health. I also differentiate
them by the label I would stick on them… When I’m blogging, a lot of people
will refer to it as work e.g. “are you still working? It’s the weekend!” And I’ve
always confronted this with my belief that I enjoy blogging so much that whilst
I might say I’m “working on a collaboration,” I don’t define it as ‘work.’
I always want to be blogging! I always look forward to creating new content and
securing different collaborations and launching new projects.
Now, I’ve often thought that this was because I think
that a lot of people see ‘work’ as something they – for whatever reason – feel
compelled to do and something which they might often begrudge and could feel
reluctant to do. In creating the Campaign however, I would define it to be more
relevant to ‘work’ than my blog; but definitely not because I dread doing anything
for it. I think it’s more because I feel that everything, I’m doing for it, is
a lot more professional in nature rather than recreational; in the way I feel my
blog is. And I think that the fact I’m writing policies on important issues
like Data Protection and Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, creating a
Volunteer Handbook, and putting together Induction Tasks, makes it completely
understandable that I’d deem it to be so much more career changing.
I think that this difference has played a huge role
in my uncertainty in terms of using I’m NOT Disordered to shout about Shake My
Hand. I feel like me being professional and me blogging about my life, are two
very different things. So, I’d be worried that if I blogged about the Campaign,
the crossover could ruin my more professional reputation and people’s
understanding and opinion of the Campaign being more official, formal, and
incredibly well-meant. I’d like there to be a bit of a wall between my blog and
Shake My Hand so that people know what to expect when they go to one of the
other. That, what they’re looking for, and the ‘me’ they want to experience, is
delivered and fulfilled. However, despite the risk, I ultimately recognised that
the huge following I have on I’m NOT Disordered is a powerful tool and I ended
up feeling like it would be almost foolish to not utilise that to stir up some
interest in the Campaign’s brand-new website. You can read the post about the
website launch: MY
JOURNEY TO CREATE A MEDIA CAMPAIGN | CELEBRATING THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF SHAKE
MY HAND’S WEBSITE | ad | I'm NOT Disordered (imnotdisordered.co.uk)
Using Pipdig & Canva
Firstly, as soon as I knew I wanted a website for
the Campaign, I knew I would want to use Pipdig. Over the previous five years,
perhaps, of my blogging career I noticed that the bloggers I admired most used
Pipdig to provide a template and design and layout for their websites/blogs. It
wasn’t until around two or three years ago that I eventually took the plunge
and paid for a template for I’m NOT Disordered. Now, I say ‘plunge’ not because
it cost a fortune – because it really isn’t too bad (I think the most expensive
is £59.00) – but because I was worried it wouldn’t work and that I wouldn’t
have a clue what to do in terms of installing it and applying it to my blog
which – at that point – had been running without Pipdig for about eight or nine
years! So, perhaps I was set in my ways a bit as well. But I recognised that if
I wanted to make it into so much more, then Pipdig could help with that and so
I bought one of their Blogger templates.
So, for the Campaign, I already knew how helpful
and beneficial Pipdig can be for a site and after initially planning on using
WordPress, I found out that the Wordpress templates on Pipdig are incredibly
different and seemingly much more difficult to use. So, I created the Blogger
account, bought the URL (www.shakemyhandcampaign.com)
on GoDaddy, and – after a lot of thought and many pages in the Planner – I chose
the template: Venture (which you can see on Pipdig here).
Now, sort of unfortunately, when I had applied the
template to the website (which is far too easy to do!), there had been a few
features of it that I thought I’d be able to edit into being more apt for the
Campaign, but it turned out you couldn’t change them the way I had wanted to.
So, I made edits to the colour scheme – I have the branding colours (the dark
blue, the cyan, and the pink) reference codes documented so I was able to use
the exact shades as is featured in the logo and other graphics e.g. the social
media headers etc. I really felt like that simple change brought the template
to life a lot more and made it so much more fitting for the Campaign, and this meant
that I felt a bit of a boost to keep going with it and to just reconsider the
edits I wanted to do and which I couldn’t.
The edit I found the trickiest, was the pages
feature because I had actually chosen Venture specifically because it allowed
you to do ‘parent pages’ (which is where you have one page and then a drop-down
from that to other pages e.g. the ‘About’ page which drops
down to ‘Key
Messages’ etc. or the ‘Our Services’
page which drops down to ‘Supporting’ etc. on
the Campaign website) and that was something I knew would actually be quite an
essential design element for the Campaign’s website. After numerous attempts, I
realised Pipdig have a ‘how to’ set of guides (which you can only access after
purchasing a template) and I quickly found the one I needed and was so happy –
but also frustrated because it looked like I’d totally over-complicated it – to
discover the instructions were incredibly simple!
If you haven’t looked around the website yet (why
not?!), I think that my favourite page – which I’d absolutely recommend you
check out first – is the Speaking Up page!
If you have checked out the pages, you may have noticed that the text and
graphics are connected as one e.g. you can’t highlight just the text. That’s
because each page is completely designed through Canva in that I’ve selected a
customised size to crease a blank ‘canvas’ on Canva, and then created
everything on that before saving it as a whole and uploading it to the website
as a PNG. I liked doing this because I felt more confident that the pages would
meet my hopes and intentions if I used Canva because I’m so much more confident
on that than I would be designing a website through coding and HTML etc. Using
Canva has given me the reassurance that I’ve designed pages that are just how I
want them to be.
I think that using Canva and Pipdig for these aspects
of the Campaign’s website, have increased the views to be standing at over
1,000 within the first seven days of the website’s launch, because they’ve made
the website much more appealing visually and aesthetically, and easy to
navigate your way through the pages.
Making Moves In Recruitment
Prior to creating the website, I created an account
for the Campaign on Doit which is a recruitment site for voluntary opportunities
– both long term and just for one-off events etc. I had initially wanted to use
another website which I’ve used more recently to secure voluntary roles, but
your organisation has to match particular criteria which the Campaign does not.
So, on the Campaign’s social media, I put together a reel on Instagram (which
you can view here) of the
voluntary opportunities the Campaign can offer with the instructions of applying
on doit if you’re interested in any of them.
Whilst there were a number of applications via
doit, when I would trial out the application process on there myself, I found
it complicated, so; in launching the website, I created the ‘Volunteer
Vacancies’ page. With there being a fair number of vacancies, I didn’t want
to feature the full adverts for each position because it would have made the page
incredibly lengthy. So, I spent this past weekend creating shorter adverts for
each role on the Vacancies page, and then each advert links to a page with the
full description for each opportunity. They vary from Campaign
Secretary to Research Assistant
to Social
Media Assistant! There’s something for a whole range of skillsets,
qualifications, interests, hobbies, and talents!
So happy to say the Fundraising Coordinator role has now been filled – for anyone who had noticed it previously and that it’s no longer advertised. That Volunteer will be officially starting today and you’ll find him on the Meet The Team page very soon!!
Finally, a huge thank you for all the views on the
website, and the shares, likes, and comments on the social media accounts!
Facebook: Shake My Hand
Campaign
Instagram: https://instagram.com/shakemyhandUK
Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/shakemyhandUK
