Toolkit

Any event can be a Great Winter Get Together, so long as it supports people to make meaningful connections this January.

To give you ideas, some of the fantastic Great Winter Get Together events that took place last year included:

• Community cafes: a cafe-style event for people to connect at works great, or you could add a table that’s designated as a ‘chatty table’ within an existing cafe.
  
• Craft workshops: helping people connect around an activity – for example, stitching or art.
  
• Letter writing: Give a Few Words, a charity in Batley, ran a letter and poetry writing workshop, supporting people with writing positive letters/poems and sending them to those in local care homes.
  
• Board game evenings: Whether it be chess, Cluedo, or Warhammer 40k, board games are a great way to help people connect and to involve all ages. 

• Community wassail: Wassailing, the practice of visiting fruit trees to welcome in the new year and ensure a good harvest for the year to come, is an ancient tradition that has been repurposed to provide community links and connection.
  
• Community soup-sharing: Soup is one of the foods that we share across cultures – and a traditional, warming winter dish. Why not take advantage of this and run a community soup-sharing event, inviting people to come along and share food from different cultures?
  
• Public Living Rooms: Setting up a public living room is a fantastic way of creating a long-term place to connect in your community and you can find support from Camerados to get up and running.

Inclusion at a Great Winter Get Together means making everyone feel welcomed, comfortable and able to be themselves. This is a key part of making sure that your event is as successful as possible at encouraging meaningful connection.

• Are you including a range of people in the planning of the event? It’s great to co-produce your event with your wider community, so that you can share insights together and make it an event where everyone feels welcome.
• How are you publicising the event to reach people in your community? You might want to think about leaflets and doorknocking to reach people who aren’t active online, or having posters made in commonly-used languages in your local area. 
• What activities are involved? Will the activities be easy for people to participate in? Are there any barriers to participation that you could resolve?
• Is the venue easy to get to? Does it have adequate parking or step-free access? Is it one that normally welcomes a diverse range of people? Knowing these accessibility details will help people to plan how they will attend.
• Will there be any cost to people attending? The cost of living crisis is impacting people’s budgets and as such the ‘hidden costs’ of attending events may become bigger barriers to attending than previously. Let people know in your promotion whether the event is free or includes any costs, so they can plan.
• Have you made it clear in your promotion who the event is for? If it’s for everyone in the community, let people know that everyone is welcome! If it involves an activity that anyone can participate in, let them know that no prior experience is needed. Try to anticipate the questions people might have, but also offer some contact details so that people can get in touch with you.
• How can you find out about your guests’ needs? You could use an RSVP process to find out dietary requirements and accessibility needs and have name stickers available at the event so people can share their names and pronouns.
  

You can find additional tips to make people feel included in the section above: Keys for connection at your Great Winter Get Together.

Online events are a great alternative to in-person events and can bring together people from different parts of the country, or your local area, to make connections – with very little additional organisation needed compared to in-person events.

Include an activity: One of our keys to connection is to have an activity to build your event around. Activities can help people more at ease and prompt discussions and connections and for online events, they help to keep the atmosphere interactive so that people don’t zone out.

Choose your platform: In general we would recommend using Zoom as this is the online platform which most people are familiar with and offers free options. Other platforms you could use include Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp calls (only for smaller groups), or GoTo Meeting.

Managing the sign up process: Access can be a challenge for people attending virtual meetings – particularly for those who are less technologically savvy or using a system which they aren’t used to. Use TinyURL to shrink the meeting URL to join to something easy-to-read and get people to sign up in advance so you can send them full joining instructions. Asking people to sign up in advance means you can understand potential attendance numbers, communicate with attendees in advance and support them with information on how to join. Free systems you can use to manage sign-ups include: Eventbrite, Zoom and Facebook Events.

Promote the event: Promotion is always key to an event’s success, but especially for online events where people need to sign up in advance and can’t just wander along. Try and think about which local forums you can share the event on, and which organisations you can partner with to help to develop your audience.

Short and sweet is best: Online events can be tiring and hard to focus on for extended periods – so keeping an event short and using your time as effectively as possible is best. Try to keep the event to less than a hour in length, with lots to engage and connect people during that period.

Don’t worry about drop-outs: Online events do have a higher drop-out rate than in-person events – it’s simply easier to forget or not log onto an online event! Don’t worry about this – it happens to everyone and isn’t a reflection on your event. Do anticipate that it will happen, however, and plan for slightly lower numbers than initially sign up.

Technical support: Technical issues are inevitable with online events and be prepared that you may need to support attendees with accessing the event or taking part during it. Give attendees options to contact you if needed (such as an email and phone number). If possible, have a dedicated person at the online event whose responsibility it is to provide technical support, let people into the event, and monitor the chat. This then makes the facilitator’s role much easier as there’s less to juggle.