Marketing

Adult Staff
1

Well, as I’m not expert in enticing teenagers into a van using sweets…

How do you do it? I was recruited as a cadet myself by CWOs coming into school at lunch time… I don’t even know if that is allowed nowadays. Most of the cadets were family of ex cadets or friends of current or ex cadets

From a social media point of view the kids of today do not use Facebook with the most popular ones such as tictok being linked to China so I doubt we would be allowed to have a presence on there?!

How do other squadrons go about it?

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You are correct, we are not currently allowed to have “official” accounts on TikTok, that doesn’t stop the cadets themselves being on there and posting about cadets though.

Ultimately the best recruitment campaign is via two routes, existing cadets telling their mates about all the great activities they’ve taken part in because of cadets, and advertising to the current parents about how great the air cadets are for their kids, so they talk to their friends who may well have kids.

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It’s not just targeting the youths, you need to reach the parents / guardians too.

We find that locally, Facebook, Instagram & X work with us. The cadets tend to help out with the word of mouth.

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4

Going in to local schools and doing year group type assemblies can work well too!

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5

This the way we describe it to our cadets is Facebook for the parents, X for the professionals and Instagram for the Cadets.

We don’t necessarily “recruit” we put up everything (including normal parade evenings) on it, and when an intakes coming up announce it on there or add an extra line to the post to say FYI if you want to join next intake is X

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6

I wonder if we can post in local groups… You know the ones, the postcode groups where people post about ‘why was the police on X Street this morning?’

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7

Of course you can!

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8

Absolutely - double check the rules of the group (we have one where you can’t advertise groups) but the majority will, and they enjoy seeing some positive elements.

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9

Depends on your area geographically. I initially joined on the back of a newspaper advert but that paper has gone bust now so that wouldn’t work!

Word of mouth is definitely one of strongest ones. We “target” community work, our Remembrance Sunday parade is held in a different small town to our Battle of Britain with luckily a 3rd gala type parade being held in another location which is still part of our catchment area. Across the 3 we have found no competition from the other uniformed youth services (excluding Scouts) which makes us stand out and get noticed

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Unfortunately we share our building with army cadets… Lots of them

And we are within a few miles of other squadron’s around the city

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Word of mouth is the best form of recruitment. Run a varied training program with lots of opportunities and the rest will take care of itself. You can’t beat a bunch of teenagers going back to school on a Monday saying you’ll never guess what I did at the weekend.

Run social media alongside, it probably won’t reach the teenagers but it will reach their families, lots of look what we’ve been doing stories and they’ll want their kids to be part of it.

We’ve had Cdts also join as a result of bag packs at Tesco’s and stands at local events where we’ve been helping.

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