I hail from Prestwick, though the majority of my childhood was spent in Ayr. There are only a few key things these two adjoining towns are know for; Prestwick for it’s airport, and Ayr for it’s strong links to the bard Robert Burns.
Oh, and golf. There are golf courses all over the place.
The area has a top heavy population of elderly residents, but has slowly been seeing an increase in more middle class families. This change, despite how gradual, is already having a big effect on the many clubs, organisations, churches and charities that operate in the area. Some are coping better than others.
Prestwick has an abundances of places to meet people and try new sports and hobbies, but a lot of these are under threat, not necessarily from financial difficulties, but from the growing indifference the public and the organisations have towards each other.
Here are six key points that any charitable group can take action on to (almost) instantly boost their image in the public eye.

1. Get A Website. But Don’t Get Taken For A Ride
This is an obvious area to start with, and likely an area you’ve already covered. But so many people get it wrong. Unless you’re a web designer yourself, chances are you’ll be asking someone else to come in and do part of it for you. Have a look on sites like ThemeForest or Mojo Themes. These sites let designers and developers share and sell theme templates for popular Content Management Systems. The majority of these are highly customisable. Of course if you are planning on asking a web designer to build your site, there’s nothing wrong with showing them stuff you like, and make sure you take note of things you need to have in it.
A lot of web designers that take on client work whine that they spend a lot of time just explaining what their role is to the client. Try and do as much homework as you can before hand, so that it’s easier to talk to them, and so that nobody takes advantage of your inexperience in the area (if any)
A CMS for example, means Content Management System. If you aren’t keen on doing any coding and technical stuff, it’s best to use a site built on a CMS. If you’ve ever used Blogger or Tumblr, these are services that let you create a web page and content within an easy to use but detailed interface. WordPress is the most popular CMS out there, with a plethora of themes, plugins and add on which make running your own site a sinch. You first install the CMS on a web server, then install a theme with any relevant or required plugins. WordPress is free, and you can get a lot of free themes for blogs and such, but a professional touch can be worth a little extra coin.
Whatever you chose, make sure you don’t corner yourself into having to work with a particular client or person. Unless you’re a really big or highly specialist organisation, developing a “custom” CMS from scratch is likely not required.

2. If Your Organisation Can Be Added As A Friend, You’re Doing It Wrong
Moving onto the big buzzword of the last five years or so, Social Media is a vastly increasing space, both in users, and services. Over the past few years though there’s been a huge change in how social media is actually used. Even in the past few months, things have changed drastically. The way a company/organisation is meant to present itself on Facebook is drastically different now with the use of Timeline, making it even more about stories, relationships and the “big picture.” brand pages used to be more about the here and now, anything past a scroll wheel spin could be considered old news. Now it’s actively encouraged to look back at a companies’ history, even before Facebook. The more you do to make the experience better for the user, the richer the relationship becomes.
This relationship will always, and has to be, different from a relationship between a real life friend. Nightclubs and student unions still engage in the practice of creating standard social network profiles, resulting in the hundreds of “VIP” photos of people at club nights, looking rather better than they actually do, watermarked with the name of the club.
It’s not a good use of the system. It demands users share their information with you, and also leads to a rupture in the social dynamic of the site. It’s unprofessional, messy, and you miss out on all the good services and tools on offer for authentic pages. And it’s against the terms of service.

3. Keep In Mind the 1/6th Rule
For every 6 posts on your Twitter feed or Facebook Timeline, 1 of those can be directly about you.
Being liked or followed on Twitter is a privilege, it means that someone out there is interested in what you have to say, and what you feel about things. It is not an invitation to spam them constant adverts about your next event, product etc. Though this may seem counter-intuitive, it keeps the relationship fresh and adds value to your brand. Try to think of people following you as people who are willing to buy into your kind of ethos. So, if you’re a charity that helps young musicians meet their idols, why not share relevant news on young people achieving success? Seen a cool video of a kid playing bongos upside down in the office today that’s worth sharing? Then share it!
Even when you look at a lot of big brands or movies – where they run short to medium length campaigns - a lot of the content doesn’t specifically say “BUY ME” or “IN CINEMAS: …” It’s not cool. But you’re cool, right?
4. Get Good At Design, Or Find Someone Who Is
It takes an average of just three seconds for a person to make up their mind if they like someone or not based on their initial presentation of them. Businessmen and politicians have known and played to this strategy for years. In supermarkets, products get even less time to present themselves (we’re talking milliseconds).
Even just formatting things in a correct manner drastically improves a visitors reaction to what their seeing,
If you’re just looking for images to put in front of a blog post there are a few methods you can go about. Stock images can be useful, but of course they’re expensive and can sometimes feel a bit sterile. May favourite thing to do is a Creative Commons search on sites like Flickr, and crediting them somewhere in the bottom. Or I dive into my collection of funky hipster analogue photos. Your own content is always the best, just make sure it looks nice. Stay clear from overly cheesy photo effects or anything that Microsoft Word can do.
The worst thing to do these days is a simple google search, especially with the wealth of creative communities and artists out there sharing their work for nothing but a virtual thumbs up. It might seem a bit nerdy or pushy to complain about a typeface or image, but it’s your brand, you have every right to make it look the best.
And for the love of god stay away from Comic Sans…
I don’t even think it should be used when the target audience consists of children. Drove me to boredom in school seeing EVERYTHING in Comic Sans.

5. Social Media Shouldn’t be The Focus of Your Site
This is one that’s done the most, by big brands and small. I’ve been on a couple of big sites that actually, consist purely of twitter posts and Facebook link, purely to try and drive better analytics for the boss upstairs. The worst part is when all those twitter posts forget their purpose in this and try to link people to visit the website, resulting in this endless cycle of link issues, that’s stupid and frustrating.
I experienced this looking at the Dare to be Digital site. A recent site design has minimised the impact now, but it’s still it’s greatest flaw I think. Social media doesn’t replace a full blog or webpage. It’s the jackpot of info and content for people interested in what you do, so don’t waste their time.