Just a Card Day
WHAT AN AMAZING YEAR IT'S BEEN FOR JUST A CARD!
By Sarah Hamilton and Kayte Ferris
Hi, Sarah Hamilton here!
It’s been an amazing year for Just A Card!
Huge thanks to everyone for helping make the campaign such a runaway success. Our simple message that every sale, even just a card, makes a big difference to creative businesses is working! With Christmas approaching we now need to step things up a gear…or ten. For this we need your help.
We’re extremely excited about the very first JUST A CARD day on 28th September.
Please get involved. Please share your story.
LET'S UNITE ON 28 SEPTEMBER TO CELEBRATE OUR RICH AND DIVERSE CREATIVE COMMUNITY.
Let's work together to ensure people support independent shops, galleries, artists and designers this Christmas. Benedict Cumberbatch is on board - are you?!
Our fabulous new guest blogger Kayte Ferris, who's joining the team to write about broader subjects relevant to designer/makers and small businesses, will tell you more. Then next month she'll be writing a feature on Social Media. We've been promising you this for a while as it's so critical to creative businesses, and we know many of you find it rather daunting.
Before I hand you over to Kayte, I also want to welcome another wonderful new team member, Illustrator and Designer Mel Smith. Mel's already proving invaluable helping me with JUST A CARD administration. This campaign takes up a lot of our time and we have a hugely dedicated volunteer team - I can't thank them enough for all their hard work.
Now over to Kayte for Benedict Cumberbatch news and all other business ….
Hi everyone! I’m Kayte Ferris and I am so thrilled to be joining the Just A Card team. Supporting small businesses is what I do in my business and blog, so I’m so glad to have the opportunity to help more of you through Just A Card.
Natasha Newton
Angela Click
I’ll keep my introduction brief, as I’m desperate for you to read how you can get involved in the the first Just A Card day on 28th September. But in case you don’t know me, I am a creative business coach and marketing freelancer who helps creatives to simplify their marketing, and grow their business in a wholesome way.
I blog all about creative business and slow living at simpleandseason.com – but don’t go there now! It’s much more important you stay here, because in this post I’m about to share all the truly exciting Just A Card news.
So let’s dive in…
What’s Coming This Christmas
Just A Card Day – THURSDAY 28 SEPTEMBER
Are you getting excited?! It's the very first Just A Card Day on Thursday 28th September - that’s next week! On Thursday we will be creating a huge online buzz around our build up to Christmas, and all of your businesses too. Your involvement will be absolutely vital in making Just A Card Day a huge success for the whole community. Click here to find out more about how you can join in…
Benedict Cumberbatch designed Christmas cards
And now to the hot gossip…..We’re so excited to be the exclusive sellers of charity Christmas cards designed by Benedict Cumberbatch. We know our message is hugely popular with the creative community, but for us to really make a difference we need to reach a wider audience. What better way to do this than with the help of one Mr Benedict Cumberbatch. He knows a thing or two about reaching a wide audience. Proceeds from the cards will go to Anno’s Africa, and we at Just A Card will be receiving a small amount to help us with running costs. We will be revealing Benedict’s beautiful design on the Just A Card Instagram at 10am, plus making the cards available to buy, on Just A Card Day - 28th September exclusively from the Just A Card website and in store at The Leaping Hare Gallery and Framers in Easingwold, Yorkshire.
Please DIG DEEP – Please buy the cards and send them out to spread the Just A Card message, whilst supporting the amazing work of Anno's Africa – a U.K. based arts education charity working with children living in poverty in Kenya and rural Malawi.
Thunderclap
And it wouldn’t be Christmas without Just A Card’s annual Thunderclap, would it? On 2 December we’ll all be pledging tweets to the Just A Card campaign – and hope to beat last year’s reach of 1.4million.
How You Can Join In (and promote your business too!)
Share Your Story on Just A Card Day
Imagery is vital for getting more engagement on social media – Facebook posts with pictures get twice the amount of engagement, while Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than those without.*
So in order to capitalise on those stats, as well as making Thursday a beautiful day online, we need you to put your creativity to work!
Join in with Just A Card by sharing your creative story on Instagram. This is a great way to not only promote the campaign and your business, but also connect and network with other creatives online, meet people who share your style, and challenge each other creatively. We can’t wait to see how you all interpret this challenge!
As a bonus, Mollie Makes magazine will be featuring their favourite images and stories on their blog in October. Here's how to take part:
1. Post an image on Instagram, either one that you’ve created and that reflects your work, or simply the Just A Card logo. To give you an idea, check out this post by artist Natasha Newton, and this one by Angela Chick which you are free to use.
2. Share Your Story, tell us why you love what you do. Whether you make prints, jewellery, ceramics, textiles or run a gallery or bookshop, share your passion. Tell the world why it’s vital to support creative/independent businesses this Christmas, to value handmade and also what it means to you when customers buy and appreciate your work.
3. Tag us at Just A Card – tag @justacard in the image (not just the caption) and use our hashtag #justacard.
4. Share Just A Card Day on social media – make sure to check out everyone else’s images in the #justacard tag, RETWEET our tweets @justacard1 and also like/share Sarah Hamilton’s Just A Card Facebook posts.
Retweeting and Sharing
As I mentioned above, we’ll be going into far more detail on social media marketing in next month’s blog post, but one thing we can all do is CLICK THE RETWEET BUTTON – especially to help us promote Just A Card Day!
Next Thursday, make time to browse the #justacard and #justacardday hashtags and engage meaningfully with the pictures being created and shared in there. As you no doubt know from your own experience, a retweet means so much more than a like, so make sure you’re retweeting your favourite images throughout the day to help all our makers and businesses.
On Instagram, you can also share the posts by taking a screenshot of the image and posting it in your Stories, or share an Instagram post on Twitter using the share link.
Remember the social media channels LOVE you to share, so the more you share and engage with other’s work, the more visible Twitter and Instagram will make your own posts.
Please remember to tell your friends, join us across social media, retweet our posts and help us to build our Instagram following, as all of these social media channels (as well as good old word of mouth) are really helping the campaign, and to make creative businesses more prosperous.
That's all folks, but before you go PLEASE make sure you join our mailing list – we’d smile all day long.
Here's to a FANTASTIC JUST A CARD DAY on 28th September.
*we’ll be talking more about social media in next month’s post.