Celebrations are in order after three online brands that promote Forres businesses, organisations and events picked up a coveted national award in Dundee last week.
Forres Local, Forres Loves Local, and Visit Forres won the award for Best Digital Community at the Scotland Loves Local Awards, presented by Sean Batty at the V&A Museum. The Forres entry beat off strong competition from the ‘Like a Local’ campaign from Forth Valley Food and Drink, and Lokali, an ecommerce platform in Inverurie.
The mix of websites, social pages, app and mailing lists champion the cause of shopping locally, and to advertise Forres as a destination.
For locals, this means highlighting businesses not only in the town centre, but also those hidden from public view that are doing business across the UK, and sometimes further. From a tourism aspect, Visit Forres lists all accommodation providers and eating out establishments free of charge.
Social enterprise
The digital assets are part of the social enterprise Moray Local CIC, a community interest company that was set up to fill a gap online where local businesses can get free publicity.
Managing director Marc Hindley said: “Small businesses are the lifeblood of any small town, and that’s why their demise is so frequently lamented.
“Yet there’s rarely any support network for businesses or platforms for them to tell their customers what’s going on.
“People constantly ask ‘what can be done’, and I was sitting there, having spent decades of my life working in newspapers, PR and marketing, and just decided to do something, so we built Forres Local and Visit Forres, and offered free publicity to any local business within the IV36 area, as a service to the public.
“And it’s worked. As well as this award, we’ve also had enquiries from several other parts of Scotland, including the Central Belt asking for help and advice on building a similar model for their own community.
Free publicity
“We found that, although the media help community organisations to spread their message, no-one was doing this for businesses without some sort of payment for a commercial service like PR, marketing or advertising.
“Now with more than 250,000 website page views a year, between them, and reaching up to 150,000 people a month on its Facebook pages, we have created a platform that has found its place in the town.
“We’re proud to be recognised as the best digital community in Scotland, and of course there’s still more we can do. We’re a very small team of volunteers, and we do this solely for the benefit of the town.
“We will be looking to expand into the wider Moray area. We have also acquired the Inside Moray and We Heart Moray brands, and we’re working on plans to replicate our success with those.
Making Forres findable online
“In creating an online hub, we’ve made Forres more findable online. And that’s great for tourism, but it’s also great for locals as well. We provide an online calendar of local events, and this goes on our two websites and our app, it goes out in a weekly newsletter, and we try to make information as accessible as possible to everyone. We created a local directory, because you’d be surprised how many people phone us up to get telephone numbers.`’
Moray Local CIC submitted the following digtal platforms for the award:
- Forres Local – website, Facebook page and mailing list
- Forres Loves Local – Facebook group supporting local businesses
- Visit Forres – website, Facebook page and app
- Forres Local Business Network – network and mailing list
Marc added: “While this award is given to us as a social enterprise – and we’d clearly like to thank Scotland’s Towns Partnership for seeing our vision and recognising our value in the community – we see this as a win for the whole Forres area. If our digital community is the best in Scotland, then we won’t rest on our laurels.
“The phone calls we get sum it up. We get people calling asking us to provide historical information, requests for pictures, old maps, etc. We get people asking us to find them accommodation. And we even get TV companies asking us for help.
“By embracing what we’ve built, the people of Forres have made it work. The businesses, organisations and events who’ve worked with us, the website visitors who’ve clicked our social links, the readers who’ve subscribed to our newsletters, and the people who send us information to spread the word, we thank you all.”
Moray Local CIC also recently launched Screen Moray as a film and TV locations and facilities agency to make Moray more film-friendly.