The Media Trust is the UK’s leading communications charity. It delivers support to all kinds of voluntary sector organisations to strengthen their communications skills, resources and connections to help them spread the word about their work, raise vital funds or attract interest from key stakeholders or volunteers.  A key part of the Charity’s Capacity Building strategy is the work that it does via the Media Trust. Our grants to Media Trust are a wonderful example of how we build capacity for both the sector – through the films initiative – and individual organisations. Since 2015, the Charity has been working with Media Trust on its Volunteer Films Initiative.

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How it works:

Volunteer Film Producers are matched with organisations to create films that will benefit the organisation in question. Key staff members also receive support to maximise the benefit of having this promotional film.

It is always striking how different each of the films are, as the Volunteer Film Producers strive to find the most effective tools to best showcase the work of the charities. The films are produced to a very high standard, something that was endorsed when one of the 2018 films, the Grasvenor Project, which was awarded a Gold Award for ‘Charity Film of the Year 2019’.

John Lyon’s Charity has now funded four rounds of the Volunteer Film Initiative and in so doing, has discovered that the knowledge and understanding within the charities of how they could make best use of their films, and indeed how they could incorporate this into a wider communications strategy, was quite limited.

As a result, a menu of options for practical media and communications support that could be offered to groups in the Charity’s Beneficial Area was developed in consultation with Media Trust.