Hi all,

I hope you are all well and looking forward to lighter nights and better weather.

I just wanted to put together brief blog as a way of updating you as on where we are at in respect of Preston Community Network at the moment.

As you will probably be aware from previous communications, after a period of dormancy, PCN came back into action last September.

We began by collating and updating our list of members, sending out a survey to each of them to ask what their needs from PCN were, and also contacting potential new members.

We then set to work on re-establishing our social media presence with new Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts and a revival of our existing Twitter account, and we also developed an updated PCN identity with a revised logo etc.

Central to our work in the early weeks was also the organisation of what proved to be a very successful relaunch event in November at St Cuthbert’s Church Hall in Fulwood.

And following this, we began to act on one of the chief findings of our survey which was that  our members felt a regular newsletter would be useful and that publishing this on a quarterly basis was the preferred option.

We are pleased to say the two editions published so far have gone down well and the third edition is due for release in May.

We then turned our attention to organising our AGM and following the meeting in early January, we are pleased to advise that we now have two new Trustees on board.

Since then, our main focus has been on setting up our brand new PCN website.

As this will be central to much of PCN’s planned activity in the coming months, we have spent a lot of time uploading information and trying to ensure the site is as useful, informative and easy to use as possible.

We are delighted to say the site went live early last month and it includes among other features a full list of members along with a summary of their activities along with images and contact details if these have been provided by the member group. If you wish to update or add any details, images or logos, please feel free to email us.

We also have an ‘Events’ section which details all events which may be of interest to members along with time, location, registration details etc, and this section is now updated daily.

Along with setting up the website, we have continued to try to build up our activities including distributing details of any info and opportunities which may be of interest to our members, working with our members on a number of projects and recruiting new members whenever possible.

We are also continuing to try to open and increase channels of access for members to bodies such as Lancashire County Council and Preston City Council, and this is an area we will be particularly be focusing on in the coming weeks.

In addition, we are pleased to advise that we have now recruited an additional Development and Communications Officer to work alongside myself.

Ashley Dalton will be joining us at the beginning of next month and we hope she will help us continue to expand and enhance our services to members.

Things are certainly moving in the right direction as since our September ‘rebirth’ we have almost doubled our membership list which now stands at more than 60, we have broken the 500 barrier in terms of Twitter followers and we have seen a steep rise in the number of daily ‘hits’ on our website.

We hope you are finding being a member of Preston Community Network useful and we hope you will see further benefits to membership in the future as we expand our activities.

And remember, we exist for our members and we are driven by your needs, so if there is anything you would like to see us doing which we are not already, please let us know, and also let us know if you think anything we are currently doing should be done differently.

As always, we are here to help and if you need help or advice at any time, call us on 07305 017890 or email us on admin@prestoncn.org

Thank you.

Tony Dawber

Development and Communications Officer

Preston Community Networkector for their mutual benefit