Get ready for your Child Safety Week

It is never too early to start planning your Child Safety Week, the theme for 2012 will be launched early next year but if you are getting a head start we hope this guide full of helpful hints and tips will help you plan, promote and evaluate your Child Safety Week activity.

Step 1 - Use the theme

The theme for Child Safety Week 2012 will be launched early next year.

Step 2 - Set SMART goals

SMART = Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely

Think about the parents and families you can reach.  What are the key injury issues for children? Take a look at the safety preventation pages in the ideas booklets, visit www.capt.org.uk/safety-advice, or talk to colleagues or partner organisations to find out which serious accidents top their list of concerns.

What would like parents and families to do, or change, as a result of your activities?  What practical prevention measures would you like them to adopt?  What is likely to motivate them?

Thinking more broadly, what are the benefits to your organiation or work?  How can Child Safety Week help you to promote the work you do?  For example, if you work in a Children’s Centre, can Child Safety Week help you with the ‘Stay Safe’ part of the Sure Start performance review?  Remember the accidents we focus on during Child Safety Week, are those that are the most common cause of hospital admissions.

Write down the most important things you would like to see as a result of your CHild Safety Week.

Be specific about who your are targetting and what you want them to do differently.

Step 3 - Plan logistics

Make a point to keep revisiting your original goals to make sure the activity you are planning will make them achievable.  You can always update your goals as you go along, as you fine tune your planning.  It’s easier to focus is everyone is clear about what they are trying to achieve.

Take your goals and think about the resources you have yourself or within the organisations.  Do you need to get approval from anyone else?  Do you need to make a case for a budget to buy resources?  Do you need to book a venue or hire any equipment?

Have a look at the partnership section of the website, so see who you could ‘friend’ to work with on your Child Safety Week activity. you may be able to partner up to save on staff resources and budget.

Step 4 - Communicate

With your partners: if you need support from colleagues, managers or potential partner organisations, bring them in as early as possible so they feel part of the team and can be involved in the planning stage.  Get Child Safety Week on the agenda of your regular team meeting or why not pick up the phone?  You may be surprised as to how many people already have Child Safety Week in their diary.  It may be a good idea to draft a rough plan of what you would like to do during the week and email if your contacts to request their support and input, highlighting the benefits for them getting involved.

With parents and families: make sure you get the word out to the families you work with as soon as you know what you are doing, so it is in their diaries. Make use of the poster you will find on the downloadable resources page to help publicise your activity.  If you want to promote your event more widely, make use of public notice boards, in newsletter or on local websites.  You could also promote your activity through local businesses or partner organisations - even if they just promote it to staff via their intranet or decide to help out with some freebies of funding.

With your local media: local newspapers, radio stations, magazines, websites or TV are a great way to get your message out there.  Decide what your key message is, this might be the number of children harmed by preventable accidents locally, information about your event or motivating messages about how to help prevent accidents.

Have a spokesperson briefed and ready to speak to the press, if you can supply them with local statistics this will help make your story stronger.  Think about inviting your local MP, Mayor or other public figure to your event and make sure you invite your local media and let them know about any photo ops but remember to get consent from parents if children are involved.  You will find the consent form on the Downloadable resources page.

Over the next few weeks we will be uploading template press releases to the Press room, along with photocall templates and consent forms.

With us: Do let us know what you have planned during Child Safety Week, you will find the My Activity form on the Downloadable resources page.  We will be uploading all the details of local events on to the Child Safety Week website, to help generate interest and of course act as inspiration for others.

Step 5 - Evaluate your impact

It’s relatively easy to measure how many people attend your events, how many partner organisations got involved or how much local publicity you generate.  But how will you measure if your activity has had an impact?  How will you know if families have learned something new or done something differently as a result of your activities during Child Safety Week?

As budgets continue to tighten, it becomes more important to demonstrate that your work has had a real impact.  As well as giving yourself, and your colleagues a sense of satisfaction that your hard work has helped protect children from preventable accidents.

Think about what your success will look like, take your goals and think about how you will measure their impact.  Trying to measure behaviour changes can be complex and take a great deal of time, but you can:

• count how many people sign up to have free safety equipment fitted, such as smoke alarms and safety gates
• ask people if they have learnt anything new.  You could do this as part of a discussion, using our downloadable quizzes and competitions to check out what people know, asking each person to shout out one thing that surprised them
• find out what changes people have made - these could be one off changes like buying and fitting a window safety catch, or changes to their routine like driving more slowly, or walking to nursery or school to help teach their child the Green Cross Code
• ask people what they plan to do with what they have learned.  The best way of helping people to make changes it to get them to picture the change, think about the benefits and get them to write it down, being specific as possible about the ‘when’ and the ‘how’
• if you have the opportunity, run a post Child Safety Week session so you can find out what changes people have made

Step 6 - Tell us what you have achieved

Don’t forget to tell us all about your Child Safety Week and what families have learned or done as a result of your activity.

The evaluation form for Child Safety Week 2012 will be uploaded on the downloadable resources page by April 2012.

Your feedback helps us to improve the support we can offer during Child Safety Week, and helps secure ongoing support.

We would welcome photos of your event, they are a great way to generate interest in Child Safety Week activities and tell the story of your work.  Do remember if your photos feature children, we would need a completed consent form before we can use them.  You will find this on the downloadable resources page.