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Family Awareness · Events

Out in the open

Camps, drives and community days. Where to find us, and what we did last time.

How to run one

A campaign is you going to people again and again. An event is people coming to you once, at a time, in a room. That changes what matters: not the message, but the clock, and what you do when four turn up instead of forty.

The building meeting

A housing society hall, a terrace, or somebody's living room.

45 minutes

Fraud spreads through a building the way a rumour does, and so does the defence. One session where neighbours hear the same call acted out is worth more than fifty forwarded messages, because afterwards they talk to each other about it.

Before anyone arrives

  • The doorstep poster, printed, one per floor, put up three days before
  • The campaign script, so you can read the fraud call out loud
  • A sign-in sheet, for the people who want the follow-up
  • Nothing digital. No projector, no slides, no laptop

The run sheet

0-5People arrive late. Start anyway, at five past, with whoever is there.
5-10Why we are here, in two sentences. Not your life story, not the organisation's.
10-22Act out the call. Someone plays the caller, someone plays the neighbour. Do it twice.
22-35Questions. This is the actual event. Everything before it was setup.
35-42One action each, said out loud. Not a pledge, one sentence about what they will do.
42-45Sign-in sheet goes round. End on time even if it is going well. Especially then.

Minutes from the start. A negative number means before it.

When it goes wrong

Only four people come.

Good. Sit in a circle instead of rows and make it a conversation. Four people who talk beat forty who listen, and those four tell the building.

One person talks the whole time.

Thank them by name, then ask the room a question directly. Never argue. The room decides who has the floor, not you, so hand it to the room.

Somebody says it already happened to them.

Stop the agenda. Let them tell it. That story is more persuasive than anything you prepared, and the person telling it needs the room to hear it without judgement.

How you know it worked

Count the people who took a poster home for their own floor. Attendance measures your poster; posters taken measure the session.

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