Sedgemoor Citizens Advice Bureau

Location: Bridgwater

We offer free and impartial advice to the community of Sedgemoor, Somerset. Many people believe that we are Government funded and operated. this is not true. We are a charity. Sedgemoor has 5 super-output areas of deprivation. Money is tight and there is not a lot of light at the end of the tunnel for a great many in the Sedgemoor community.Getting the message out that we do not only help people manage their debt and benefit issues is hard. Getting to many of our potential clients is difficult because much of Sedgemoor is rural. We have seen large increases in employemnt issues and now threastened evictions. We need to get the message out to all that we can help assist with the most complicated of issues and also provide simple information. we are available to all and everything that we do is free.
So many within our community feel isolated and many feel that they are alone, struggling with their problems when in fact there are many more in exactly the same situation. The average debt per client that we assist with money advice is £17k and for most this is completely unmanageable. A feeling of hopelessness takes over and so many times we have heard "what is the point. no-one is going to listen or help". We constantly campaign to have these voices heard and to influence decision makers to change rules and regulations to be more fair.
Sedgemoor CAB has 45 volunteers and 9 paid staff and we work tirelessly to encourage Sedgemoors 115,000 residents to stand up to be counted and to have their voices heard.

To raise the profile of the bureau and to raise awareness of the plight of the residents of Sedgemoor, we realised that the most effective way to get the message out to as many as possible was digital media. We ran a "Live Tweet Week" to give an insight to the work that we do and the issues facing the local community. Every case that we dealt with for one entire week was Tweeted throughout each of the six days. Face to face interviews, telephone enquiries, fax enquiries and e-mail enquiries alike. to ensure that we did not breach any of our strict rules of confidentiality, we "washed" every case to remove any element that could identify any one client. We publicised the Tweet week on the Friday prior to starting when we had 37 followers. by the Monday morning we had 160 followers and by the end of the week we had 300 followers. these included the main political parties and spread sheet newspapers. Other campaign charities and other organisations also followed. We were able to raise the profile of the work that we do and the huge range of issues that we deal with. More than this, we were able to reach the entire UK which saw for itself the breadth and the complexity of the problems that our local community is facing. Many press interviews were printed, several radio stations also broadcast interviews and ITV West Country News broadcast our Tweet Week. This digital media usage had the best result we could ever had hoped for and proved to be the best method of spreading the word available at this time.

Nothing will change if no-one knows and no voices are heard. Information taken from our Tweets are all over the internet now as part of national media press releases. The political parties media offices are now very much aware of the issues facing rural residents of Somerset. Now that we have tried and tested this media method, we now know that we can continue to use Twitter to get our campaigns out to a far wider field which adds power to the pressure we have to make on the powers that be to pay attention to what is really going on in the lives of the public. This has proved to be a very real and reliable notice-board and one that we will exploit to make the lives of our local community better. Many local people have commented that they are very glad that at last the real picture has been made available for all to see. as the Government cuts bite deeper, we will repeat this full exercise to show the real effect on the community.