Thatcham Vision is a voluntary local group in West Berkshire; we put together a big community plan which has been adopted by Thatcham Town Council and noted by West Berkshire Council.
A few members of the Thatcham Vision team
We aim to make Thatcham a better place to live and work in by linking all the disparate clubs/societies/churches with individuals in our town and surrounding villages. We have ‘spun-off’ successful groups like Thatcham Youth, Thatcham Film Nights, the Lifelong Learning Forum and Thatcham Sports Network. Thatcham Vision has been going for 11 years and had a website showing the survey responses but it was static, uninvolving and not suitable for the way the web is used today.
We wanted to have a modern, attractive site, which had a far greater reach so a decision was made in late 2015 to update the website with funding from Locality/DCLG. A technical review said we could not easily just upgrade the old site, so we appointed a local web developer and generated a brief which included the following elements: easy navigation, suitable for all devices, pictorial, modular layout with feeds in and hyperlinks out to partner groups, sponsors and clubs etc. We knew that making the site timely, relevant, interesting and involving was going to be key to the site’s success. Supporting the site with social media (Twitter and Facebook) was also important but the major decision we took was to make our 6 action groups responsible for their own pages. The quality control of updates/ articles is controlled and monitored via a built in approval mechanism by our marketing team. Importantly a rolling events calendar is free to our local community so they can see what is on and where. We still have big plans for how to support the local community with more features, but that’s for another post!
The Thatcham Vision team also hope to highlight areas of natural beauty
C4CJ were very helpful as coincidentally one of our team had completed their FutureLearn course on hyperlocal journalism and this helped give impetus to the project.
Thatcham has claim to be one of the oldest continuously habituated places in the UK with archaeological evidence dating back 10,000 years. It has grown from a small village, then small town to be one of the fastest growing parts of West Berkshire in the beautiful Kennet Valley. The 42,000 folk who live in and around Thatcham have another tool to see what is going on and tell us what they want.
Although Thatcham is served by conventional local media (e.g. Kennet Radio, Buzz-local and Newbury Weekly News) our easy access portal is available for all the minutia of community life.
