ESTABLISHING the Tottenham Community Food Hub online

The Community Food Hub · Marketing and social media volunteer

Mar 2020 - Apr 2021 · Tottenham

  • Creating a marketing and comms strategy

  • Establishing brand, tone of voice and content creation for brand’s first steps online

  • Training volunteers on social strategy and tone of voice

Joining at the start of lockdown in 2020, I developed a marketing plan and strategy for the Community Food Hub in Tottenham. In March 2020 the Food Hub saw a huge rise in service users due to COVID-19. Working alongside the Food Bank, the Hub distributed fresh food that would otherwise go to waste, to local people in north London. While the Hub was doing an incredible job in-person, they didn’t have any online presence or easy way to share their news and updates for service users. 

As part of a team of volunteers, I established the Hub’s social media accounts and a simple landing page. As the Hub is run by a local church, this needed to be sympathetic to their organisation and the very generous work the church community do in making the Hub possible. In time, I distilled our approach and key messages into two target audiences: our service users and our supporters.

Due to the nature of the Hub, there were often very quick turnaround times for projects, and I helped to organise and devise questions for a filmed interview of Tottenham MP David Lammy within hours, after hearing news of an impromptu trip to visit the Food Hub.

I trained other volunteers in social media strategy and tone of voice, and used my marketing networks to set up free training in Facebook Ads and Google SEO for other volunteers. I was also able to secure a volunteer graphic designer. In a few short sessions with the Hub organisers, I was able to devise a brief for the graphic designer and secure a new brand identity for the Hub within the same week.

After a year of volunteering, I helped to raise over £8,000 through a social media awareness campaign bringing in our new branding, video assets and photography. This was an extremely rewarding project to volunteer on, galvanising my comms instincts and confidence in the process. It brought a huge amount of meaning to my time stuck at home during COVID-19.