Promoting and Building Your Town Group

How much time you spend on promoting your group is entirely a personal decision. There are plenty of ways you can promote your group. Any way you do it, know that you are helping the community by keeping usable items out of landfills. Reuse, recycle, and reduce waste!

Here are some ideas:

On social media

Leveraging social media is the single best way to promote your group. It's easy and the potential reach is enormous.

• Start a group promotional page
• Promote your group on your personal Facebook page.
• Promote Freecycle.org and your local group on the Facebook pages of other local community groups. "Like" their pages and chances are they will reciprocate.
• Post links to articles on The Freecycle Network's social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

On your Town group

• Your members are your best advertising resource. Ask them to "like" your group's promotional page. Remind your members keep spreading the word about Freecycle.
• Have membership challenges to increase activity on your group.
• Recruit additional moderators to help with promotional activities.

In the community

• If your neighbors are having a garage sale, stop and give them a flyer so they can get rid of the stuff that doesn't sell.
• Pass on the word to realtors, since people buying and selling homes are always looking to declutter or refurnish.
• Find some parents' groups in your community and get them involved.
• Contact the local school's principals and ask them if you could place flyers in the teachers’ mailboxes or send flyers home with the students. Maybe join in the school recycling educational programs in some of the areas. Sometimes you can even get the schools to offer you a booth during their open house.
• Contact your local waste management department. Sometimes they are willing to add a line to the bills and letters they send out at no charge.
• Join in the local Earth Day & Arbor Day events
• Pass out flyers at farmers markets.
• Contact your local churches, Salvation Army, and other community resources.
• Place flyers on public bulletin boards, like at grocery stores, libraries, Laundromats.

In the press

• Contact your local/community newspapers. They may be interested in doing a story about your group. When working with local media, please provide a link to our pressroom: https://www.freecycle.org/about/pressroom

Emails

• How about a tag line in your emails?

Events

Click here on some ideas and requirements for events.

Brochures

The Professional Brochure has a colored/green background unlike the Home Printed Brochure which has a simple white background and won't use up all your ink.

Professional Print Brochure has a green background, looks better, but is intended for professional printing. If you print this at home, it will use up your color cartridges.

Home Print Brochure has a white background and may be printed using a regular inkjet printer.

Click here for Spanish-language brochures.
Click here for German-language brochures.

Flyers

The easiest way to prepare the first two flyers for printing is to copy and paste the graphics to a word document or another similar program. Adjust your top and bottom margins to fit graphics to the page. Replace all XXX references with the local Freecycle group name. Print the page. Distribute!

• Larger Flyer
• Quarter-Page Green Flyer
• Generic 5x2 Flyers

If you decide to produce your own material be careful to use appropriate logos so that you do not risk damaging the Freecycle® logo. Information and what you have to do is available here:

Trademark

Do share whatever you have done with the rest of the moderator community at: https://thefreecyclenetwork.groups.io/g/FLC/topics

Trademark Guidelines for Promotional Items (for volunteers of approved Freecycle groups only)

No approval required

No approval is required when local Freecycle volunteers use the above, non-saleable printed matter which promotes the overall organization and properly follows the trademark guidelines.

Approval required

• Anything saleable requires pre-approval, including t-shirts, bumperstickers, mugs, bags, etc. You may request this approval from Freecycle Help Desk .
• Events and event posters. Events necessitate event liability insurance, and we need to make sure the event is not one which is misusing the name, for example, to promote one's own yard sale, etc. Ultimately the liability may be traced back to the organization and we have learned this can be legally risky and costly if not done properly.
• Logo requests by media, governments, other external websites. Often external requests are made for use of our logo. These likewise need to be forwarded for approval to the Support team. We need someone legally authorized to make such approvals.

To reiterate, local volunteer Freecycle moderators may use the logo/mark within the local approved Freecycle groups following the standard trademark guidelines as noted on Freecycle.org. They may further use the logo/mark elsewhere, such as in the above-provided, promotional, non-saleable brochures (general org info, not specific event info). Any use for items which may maintain a commercial or saleable value, or for specific events or for external use, would require direct approval via Freecycle Help Desk.

We know that no set of guidelines will ever cover every question, and when in doubt, we simply ask that you ask at Freecycle Help Desk to be safe. The Freecycle trademark represents the goodwill of millions of members making a difference every day. We need to use it with care.

These guidelines are intended to provide our approved volunteers with a general framework for trademark use in promotional material. The Freecycle Network reserves the right to amend the above general guidelines as needed. When in doubt, simply request approval at the info team.

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