Visit New Mills
The principal aim of Visit New Mills is to promote the sustainable development of the town for the benefit of the whole community. Sustainable development encompasses economic, environmental and social aspects. Whilst including all of these aspects most of our efforts concentrate on marketing and accessibility.
The principal feature of our approach is to promote and develop New Mills as an accessible town with a strong sense of identity and place. This will increase its visitor attraction and will also help to increase the satisfaction of residents and those working in New Mills.
We are a small, outcomes-focussed group representing some of the statutory, commercial and voluntary sectors operating in the New Mills area. We also intend to be significant activists at the strategic level – acting as an umbrella organisation which brings other groups together for specific projects or actions.
We believe that the creation of a promotional web site (and a significant increase in the use of social media) is an important step in the wider marketing process. The VNM website is now functional and works collaboratively with the VNM Facebook page. The number of individual Facebook users (at the end of 2022) is over 10,000, Instagram and Twitter over 2,000 followers each and the number of separate page views over 10,000.
In order to maintain efficiency we manage our work through a small number of committee officers. We meet on a regular basis for an hour or so and maintain contact with each other electronically.
However, as the demands on the project have grown we have come to realise that we need to recruit other volunteers in order to maintain out momentum. Our greatest needs at the moment fall into three areas: 1) funding, 2) social media and 3) project management.
1) We need people with fundraising and grant-finding experience. This particularly applies to the voluntary and third sector – as these are principally the groups that we seek to support and develop.
2) We need help from people who have skills in content writing for social media. Many community groups have good ideas (and lots of enthusiasm) but often need help to promote themselves in an effective way. Social media offers them great opportunities – but suitable help and advice is crucial.
3) We need help from people with project management skills and experience. This would be focussed on specific events and would take the form of ‘task and finish’ groups that worked to specific time-scales.