Activate your community venue!

An activated community venue feels alive, buzzing with people and activity 🐝

This is the goal of many community venues - to create a thriving hub that fosters a sense of belonging and creates opportunities for the communities they serve. There is a ‘popcorn’ effect as new connections are formed, new events and initiatives emerge and people willingly give their time to help grow resources, fund and projects. It can be messy, noisy and complicated but it’s real and beautiful. Lives truly can change course by the opportunities created by having a place to do, connect and meet locally.

But the last few years have been tough. The pandemic hit grassroots community venues hard. Regular hirers that felt like they would be part of the furniture for years to come have stopped for good. Divisions have formed in previously tight community groups around vaccination and other complex issues. Previously highly motivated community organisers have lost the confidence to book and plan things, after lock downs presented blow after blow to their efforts to start things.

However, there are green shoots of change and life emerging - like the first brave buds after a bush fire. The way people work has changed for good, increasing the time people spend in their home suburbs. People have woven a new web of connections to their local neighbourhood. These threads are still fragile as we navigate the post COVID recovery period, but there is a clear opportunity for community venues to act as connectors in these webs, helping cement these bonds.

There are countless initiatives that venues can undertake to harness these opportunities and activate their spaces. This guide will not give you a checklist of ‘foolproof’ projects to run. Instead, we know that each venue and community is unique and different, so we’ve created a framework to help you generate the ideas that will activate your specific spaces for your specific community. Think of this guide as providing you with the rod, so you can go fish! 🎣

We define community venue activation as:

‘Doing projects and initiatives that get more people to create their communities in your local spaces’

But we also think it’s easier to describe what an activated community venue feels like:

buzzing
alive with people
a hive of activity
a home for the community
full and busy

The outcomes we want to achieve by doing activation work are:

Increasing utilisation E.g. more bookings, more things going on in the spaces	Increasing diversity of bookings E.g. reaching the widest possible community that can gain value from your spaces
Increasing opportunities available to community Eg. more events, programming and activities that can build skills, help people heal and create connections	Increase public participation Eg. more volunteers, more people who care about seeing the venue grow, more people bringing ideas and opportunities to the venue

Think of your community venue as a hot air balloon. To get lift off you’ll need to invest time, energy and money into projects that help activate ‘lift’ your space. We’ve identified 7 categories of ‘lifter projects’

However, you may also need to look at solving issues that are dragging your balloon down. We’ve identified 4 categories of ‘dropper issues’ that you may need to come up with solutions for.

Lastly, any projects you embark on to activate your space, should help move your venue towards achieving its unique purpose for its community. Most venues have a vision and set of values that underpin why their venue exists and what they want to achieve. We call this ‘purpose’ and ‘pillars.’ Getting clarity on these for your venue can help you prioritise what initiatives are right for your venue.

Lifters ⬆️

Here’s some detail on the lifter categories and what they can help your venue achieve:

Lifter	What is it?	What is the outcome?	Initiative ideas
Marketing and Awareness	Your venue is well promoted and easy for new people to find & book	Increased utilisation Increased diversity of bookings	Good signage Social media campaigns
Regular Hirers	You have a diverse range of trusted regular hirers that bring new people to your venue regularly	Increasing bookings and utilisation Increasing opportunities available to community	Promote venue to new regular hirers First 6 week discount
Casual Bookings	The wider community regularly books your venue for social, corporate and charitable events	Increasing bookings/utilisation Increasing diversity of bookings	Kids birthday party package Flyer to local businesses
Programming and events	You have a range of opportunities for the local community to participate in, either internal or delivered by your hirers.	Increasing opportunities available to community Increase public participation	Kids holiday program Family fun day Neighbourhood clean up
Community engagement	The venue and community work together to further causes and there is a high rate of participation & volunteering to support the venue	Increasing opportunities available to community Increase public participation	Neighbours day Community Panel
Strategic relationships	The venue has a network of relationships with business,, funders and council that support, use and amplify the impact of the venue	Increasing bookings/utilisation Increasing opportunities available to community	Appoint a partnerships/grants lead Reciprocal board members (e.g. church or PTA)
Placemaking	The venue fosters a sense of belonging and shared ownership in the local community.	Increasing opportunities available to community Increase public participation	Mural Photo history project

Droppers ⬇️

These issues can weigh your venue down and place barriers in the path of achieving activation. Here’s more detail on what they are and how they can harm your venue and community.

Dropper	What is it?	What is the outcome?	Initiative ideas
Inefficient processes	Your team's time is spent on repetitive admin, things get dropped and it's really painful when it gets busy or unexpected issues happen.	Missed/lost booking opportunities No time for growth/activation initiatives	Investigate software that can automate processes
Unloved venue	Your venue is not attractive for bookings e.g. tired spaces, missing key resources like projector or WiFi.	Lowers potential income generation Low utilisation	Conduct an asset & maintenance report and plan Working bees
Lack of resources/cash	No cash reserves to fund projects or initiatives that could help activate your space or optimise your processes	Limited ability to serve and grow the community	Investigate new revenue streams e.g. local sponsorship
Dysfunctional team	Internal politics, high attrition, unclear roles & responsibilities and tricky relationships have created a negative vibe and have alienated the community	Poor staff morale Churn of staff & volunteers Low community engagement	Staff training & team building Re organisation

Purpose and Pillars 💛

By getting clarity on what is the ultimate purpose of your venue and what you want to enable for your local community, you can ensure any initiatives you undertake are aligned to your vision.

Examples:

St Luke's Remuera

Purpose

“The Thinking Heart” – integrating compassion, care, action, thought, creativity, and spirituality."

Pillars

Spiritual well-being and contemplation.
Respect for others, hospitality, and communal care.
Inclusion of ethnic/cultural, economic, and gender diversity.
Integration of the church with the wider community, in Remuera and regionally.
Resistance to the ideologies that support poverty, inequality, militarism, and the unsustainable use of the earth’s resources.
Recognition of the importance of beauty, creativity, visual arts, and music.
Inquiry, pursuit of truth[s], and theological scholarship.

Kete Aronui, Onehunga

Purpose

“We will be Tamaki Makaurau's arts hub.We aim to provide affordable rehearsal facilities so that everyone can participate in the arts and we can foster a creative Aotearoa"

Pillars

auaha – tūhono – mahi tahi
create – connect - collaborate

Activity 1: Scorecard

Print out the Activation Score Card
For each lifter and dropper category, go through the scorecard and agree what your venue scores. A fun way to do this is the ‘poker’ scoring method where after hearing the descriptions for a categories 1-5 scoring criteria, you count to 3 and each person holds up the number of fingers representing their score. You can take an average from the group, or use the variation as a discussion point to come to an agreement.
Take the top 3 lowest scoring categories. Give everyone 5 minutes to write down as many ideas as they can to help improve the score.
Either use dot votes to score the ideas and choose the top ones to pursue or use a 2:2 grid to prioritise.
Voila - you have a prioritised list of ideas to activate your venue!

Activity 3: Droppers and Lifters

This is a group reflection exercise to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses for activation.

Print out the Droppers and Lifters template.
Give everyone 10 minutes to write things that are ‘Lifters’ for your venue and things that are ‘droppers.’ Make sure each thought is on a separate sticky note.
Ask everyone to place their stickies on the board and briefly justify them.
As a group see where there are big areas of consensus and create clusters or stickies.
Take the 3 biggest clusters and use these as topics for a short brainstorm for ideas for how to build on things that are working or solve things that are broken e.g. if you identified that the community picnic in 2020 was a great activation initiative, you can use this to generate similar/new ideas/projects.

We’ve pulled together more helpful resources to help you activate your venue, including our own free guides and tools and other helpful content from around the world.

Marketing	Free Online skills course to help venues market their spaces online - No techy skills required.Includes: How to create content for social media or posters How to get found online How to create attractive venue hire pages Find out more here. UK Village Hall Marketing Toolkit
Events and Programming	52 Painless ideas to bring the community together
Bookings	18 ways to increase bookings at your community venue. Growing community venues
Cash and Revenue	12 ways to increase revenue at your community venue. Grants that community venues are eligible for. The ultimate fees and charges guide
Community Engagement	How to build a community around your venue Make your hall the heart of your community
Improving Inefficient Processes	How to move to an online booking system What is an online booking system and how can it improve processes? How to make managing COVID easier at your venue
Teams	How to engage and manage volunteers
Placemaking	Free placemaking resources from Placemaking Aotearoa
More good stuff!	We love the toolkits and guides from Community Action Yorkshire.