An introductory word from one of Three Whiskey’s co-founders, Ben Myall:

“One of the things that Tom and I have wanted to do since we started Three Whiskey is to use some of our time and our team’s knowledge to help charitable organisations we believe in. So in 2017 we’ve taken the chance to engage in our first charitable endeavour.

Makaton’s goal is to help people communicate, and to better connect them with their friends, family and co-workers. So when Terri from Makaton got in touch with us, we thought the partnership seemed like a great fit – our business is all about connecting people and communicating effectively. We know our team appreciates the chance to do work like this, and it’s also really valuable for us to hear about the different marketing challenges faced by a charity, as opposed to a commercial company. We’re very much hoping to do more work with Makaton and other charities, and it was a real pleasure to spend the day at the Makaton offices.”

The Makaton Charity, based in Farnborough, has developed a language programme which uses signs and symbols to help people communicate. The charity aims to bridge the communication gap between those that can’t communicate effectively by regular speech. It’s currently used by over 100,000 children and adults.

This August, Three Whiskey’s Organic Marketing and Paid Media teams led a training day with some of the staff at Makaton. The aim of this session was to provide a grounding in organic search and paid media for team members with no prior knowledge, and to give those with some experience a chance to learn more and get answers to any technical questions they had.

For Makaton, getting better at online marketing is all about raising awareness of the work they do. They want families, educators and healthcare professionals that may benefit from using Makaton to hear about it, and to have easy access to information and resources. That’s why, for this first training session, we focused on some of the foundational elements of digital marketing. Our goal was to leave the Makaton team with some practical steps to work on in the coming months, and an understanding digital to take forward into future marketing strategies.

The material covered topics ranging from the basic theory, rules and technical knowledge for organic and paid media, to more advanced best practice guidelines and strategy.

One of our main objectives for the day was to engage the Makaton team as much as possible – we know that training days can be long and tiring, so we wanted to share our love for digital and try to get people as excited about it as we are.

So what better way than to introduce a dose of competition to the proceedings? At regular intervals, we tasked the Makaton team with short quizzes and tasks, testing their knowledge and totting up the scores throughout the day. (Well done to team Tumblers for winning our  prize and certificate!)

After the training we got some feedback from Terri Lazzari at Makaton:

“I just wanted to pass on the thanks of myself and the team for the excellent training delivered by yourself, Yvonne, André, Haley and Matt. To deliver to an audience with such wide experience in the subject is not easy but was done very effectively. None of the novices felt overwhelmed and those with experience also gained a lot.”

It was an excellent experience for the Three Whiskey team – firstly to help a charity that promotes such a great cause, and secondly to meet such a lovely group of people at Makaton. We hope this won’t be the last time we work together.