How we grew our profile with help from Media Trust’s bespoke training courses

Safer London works with young Londoners, their families, peers and communities affected by violence and exploitation. Our vision is a city that is safe for the young people who live here and for everyone around them. 

We are one of the leading charities working with high-risk children and young people affected by violence and exploitation. While we were recognisable in London and throughout the sector, we wanted to grow our profile, so that we could reach more young Londoners than ever before.  

Over the next five years our focus is to position ourselves as thought leaders within the sector – the ‘go to’ people for commentary on the issues that affect young people in London today. To achieve this, we’ve developed a PR strategy, which sets out clear goals and what we need to do to achieve them. Within this we indicated a need to train a variety of spokespeople who can engage with the media on a range of topics.

Being familiar with Media Trust, our first port of call was to check their website to see what was on offer. Here, we came across their bespoke Media Interview Training and immediately put in an enquiry. 

Soon after getting in touch with Media Trust, the team got in contact with us to start conservations and find out what we were looking for. We were quickly put in contact with training facilitator Linda Rose. Our communications team worked in collaboration with Linda from start to finish, developing a full day’s training that was fit for our needs. We had an initial discussion over the phone with Linda, so she could get to understand who we are and what we do. We then worked with her to develop scenarios for practice interviews that were not only for us an organisation, but for each individual taking part in the training too. 

Linda was amazing, she was very patient with the team and put them completely at ease. It’s nerve-racking doing practice interviews – especially sat in a room of your peers. Linda was able to judge when and who to push to get the best out of us, as a team and as individual people.  

The biggest impact from the training within the team was a change in the general attitude towards the media. Historically there has been a massive distrust in the media, and therefore a huge reluctance in engaging with the sector in any form. Changing attitudes from taking part in this training meant that the team opened to the idea of working with journalists and newsrooms. This was in part due to Linda herself being a journalist for many years, so our team were able to learn first-hand from someone who knew the ins and outs of the industry.   

We’re now in a place where we have started engaging with media in a way that is raising our public profile. This supports our fundraising goals, allowing us to grow as an organisation and pilot innovative ways of working. The more we grow, the bigger our reach – thus we will be able to help more young Londoners than we have ever done before! 

Safer London would absolutely recommend bespoke communications training provided by Media Trust. They have knowledge about the sector that sets them apart from other providers. I would say the more you put into the training, the more you’ll get out of it. You will see a return on investment in bespoke training, if you are willing to put in time to collaborate with your trainer on creating a bespoke training package completely tailored to your team