Remember with FB, the audience you’re most likely to target at the moment is parents. Tailor any paid stuff - and the FB target characteristics - accordingly. However, by targeting the largest audience, you often need to pay more to get the coverage you might want. It’s frustrating, but if you couple it with a couple of freebies (both off line articles in the local rag, parish magazines, community radio, and online community Facebook groups, online media etc) you can help get a really good - and effective - spread.
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I’ve shared the squadron recruitment day in a few local FB groups, and we are up to 16 potential recruits for the day…
I did a similar thing a few years ago for staff. I got several new staff out of it, along with some registered civ com.
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I tend to put the lower age at 29 upto about 65 aiming to catch the parents and grandparents.
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All good tips. Thanks
It’s not a magic wand but worth £20
I feel Carol has more to offer by sweet talking the Corporate opportunities than catching thr interest of potential volunteers
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At risk of derailing just about everything over Carol Vorderman ( yet again), she certainly caught the interest of many of our current volunteers, so not much of a stretch to extend that to potential ones too.
Facebook advertising:
Unless it’s changed, I think the tools and targeting might be slightly different for ads vs boosted posts. There are certainly options available for the targeting and you can go even more detailed than what’s described above, but if you’d need to is a different matter.
The key I think is to really narrow your geographical area and then cast your demographic net as broad as possible within that. We found friends and wider family of parents tagging people as a suggestion.
I once tried two different targets - one at parents to gparents and one at teens. Quickly turned the teens one off. Depends on your budget, but we had an ad grant so also ran 3 different ones, 2 weeks each one after the other released a week apart (so ad 1 was day 1-14, ad 2 day 7-21, etc), and tracked performance, quickly turning one off early for poorer response and turning one back on for performing the best.
You need a strong image to grab the scrollers and a small but punchy amount of text - people turn off at walls of black squiggles after they hit “read more”.
Also be aware of what Facebook will not let you boost/ad. You can’t mention age because it goes against their discrimination policy, for example. Which is a pain when the nature of what we do discriminates on age. Should be able to get around this by putting the age in the comments though, but I didn’t mind getting slightly too young requests as they were open to going on a waiting list for later and being contacted when relevant.
If Facebook do hold it after review, it’s better to just edit it and try again, because the dispute process is just pointless and time-consuming.
If you can put up with the “hey you didn’t finish your ad” reminders, you can easily play around with the tools, adjust the budget, demographic, etc and look at the “reach” estimates without paying a penny. They will want card details, but payment isn’t taken up front.
It would be worth looking up a couple of how to articles/blogs as well - the more recent the better - to get a feel for some more general principles to think about.
Also, just because you boost a post or run an ad, don’t neglect sharing it in local groups, getting cadets/families/friends to share it, etc. You still get organic reach and likes/comments/shares are still important.
Depends what she’s wearing at the time 
The bigger issue is that the ACO needs to convince cadets to stay on as staff cadets. In the good old days we had ways of keeping cadets interested and engaged: They’d get through their advanced gliding scholarship, then be offered a place as staff. Why are so many squadrons full of very young cadets? Plastic mechano, diversity training and initiative exercises only keep cdts’ attention for a short time. Older cadets want a lot more, but because of the awful staff structure within squadrons and wings, they don’t really have any way of progressing, either through the ranks or academically through technical training. Not all cadets are CWO material - some may be super studious and better suited to CI->CF commission route once they time out. Trying to keep them in the ACO until they time out is the difficult part. Not bashing CFAVs, but I think there should be mandatory training to ensure that all uniformed staff are competent to teach the entire classification syllabus (all subjects) to a high standard right through to senior and master cadet. All uniformed staff should also be required to gain specialist instructor quals in at least one area, e.g. AT, FC, shooting, FAAW instructor, D&C, etc before they can lose their white tabs. RAFAC needs to improve what it does to attract new staff and retain cadets.
We don’t need 20 year olds who don’t know anything outside their sqn, we need 30 year olds with a bit of life experience.
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I think most sqns would take who they get…
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Agreed.
But having an interest in Carol doesn’t suddenly encourage her fans to knock on her door.
I’ve met her twice, both times at RIAT but I’m the only one to have done so at my current and previous unit…
Her being part of the organisation doesn’t mean CFAV get to meet her or work with her.
It’s like going into politics because you like Barrack Obama and hope to meet him.
Perhaps its just me but I can’t see how a potentual CFAV chance of knocking our door is significantly influenced by Carol
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I think we need a mix of ages to deliver the best experience we can. A diverse volunteer force is what will keep us going.
Cadets at the age of twenty are not going to have the best life/work experience as of yet but they know what a cadet wants and how best to keep them in the organisation.
Volunteers of a slight older age, May never have been cadets and just want to learn how to be a great volunteer. They will have a different skill set at that time.
Also… 20 year olds tend to move away for career and family.
30 year olds are settling and will be around long term.
@GrandMaster_Flush I fully agree but what is there to entice older people in as staff?
If you target the say 30-40 age group, do they have their hands dull with growing kids and who knows what else.
I think we are better off targeting the 50+ as their kids will have grown up and not need the mum/dad taxi services, so may have free time.
Do people who join want to “develop”? There is a lot made of this, but how much of it puts people off? We IMO make too much of being in uniform and effectively putting a metaphoric arm up people’s backs to get them into uniform as despite having had CIs for 83 years, it’s almost become a dirty word in some quarters.
I don’t think it matters how it is advertised, because the process from enquiring to doing is just too long.
@Expired lose the “be of worth” tag and paperchase (other than DBS) for cadets staying on beyond 18 and we may keep them in. We had 2 just starting the process before last March and one who had just got through it, all now gone due in part to what has happened wrt to their college work and uni, but all concur on not wanting to be staff or considered as such. The older one got caught up in the bravado of it all with mates from other sqns, but you sense the lockdown and then being at uni the gloss of being an older cadet wore off. He also acquired a girlfriend at the uni, how much bearing that had, wouldn’t like to say.
Because it’s so bloody hard to get older people to join as staff we have to try and entice cadets to stay on but it is so uninspiring and dull.
Those of us still around from my era have said we’d have gone at 18 or before, had we been subjected to the sort of thing cadets are now and the total lack of opportunity to do cadet things. We all went on camps and went flying a between 18 and 21, how many 18+ cadets get to do that now? We went on camps as the senior NCOs with almost s staff role, but we were still cadets.
I’m not sure the RAF would be too concerned about the drop, fewer cadets means a lot less strain on them. I felt the 50K was a daft idea and would be too expensive in just cadet uniforms, not to mention accommodation.
If you include staff I imagine there is still more within the community side than personnel in the RAF.
Personally as long as the cadets are achieving who cares few cadets there are, as I said fewer cadets means potentially better access to what they should be getting. Unless there needs to be a certain number to maintain our senior management.
i don’t think it was a daft idea - it had merits but was done so without any infrastructure.
from Dawn’s point of view having the organisation increase to 50k (although from what I cannot recall) is a positive story.
Had it been achieved and maintained it would show the organisation is a success story
As a success story this would breed greater interest from potential volunteers (be that ex Cadet, ex-service or otherwise) thus increase the staff side further – in the same way people jump from a sinking ship, people are happy being part of a growing/successful organisation.
With more staff comes more opportunities, as more CFAV would pick up quals and use these to deliver to units
As a success story our “profile” on the street would increase, word of mouth would spread and each unit could see the benefits of this, both through recruitment and with cooperation within the community, such as with the local councils, schools or other organisations
However I the costs you suggest are one of the stumbling blocks, but critically the 50k target was simply that – a target.
There was no campaign behind it, nationally or locally. There was no strategy to achieve it or any plan put forward to suggest how to realize the desire growth. It was only ever a target and missed all the weight of a national (Government) organisation behind it to make it happen.
Maybe if we hit 50K they’d have let us keep our gliders…
Something growing and/or showing sustainable strength and success is more worth backing. It would be a slippery slope funding wise if our numbers continue to trend down. Likewise, static numbers lends itself to “can you do a bit cheaper?” bean counting.
Look at how Olympic sports are funded - similar idea. Do well = more cash.
All of that in turn of course potentially attracting CFAV to the cause when we try to recruit
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Not just us who have struggled
“Number of participants has bounded back faster than volunteers”
Really… no… never…
Ease of joining as a participant vs volunteer.
Also parents still want cheap babysitting.