For Organisations

 Thanks for showing interest in People of Leeds!

Hello! Thanks so much for showing interest in taking part in People of Leeds. We like to get all sorts of people tweeting about all different aspects of Leeds, so we’re grateful for your support. However, we have some rules about organisations taking part in the project, and we’d like to explain why.

This might look like a lot of writing, but I promise it won’t take long to read, and it should contain anything you need to know about taking part. If you have any questions, please email us on peopleofleeds@gmail.com 

What is People of Leeds? 

We are the People of Leeds. All kinds of people, from all over Leeds, coming together on one Twitter account. 


Based on the now defunct but amazing @sweden Twitter account, we're handing the reins of our Twitter account over to the people of Leeds. Each Monday a new person will take the account for a week, bringing you a unique snapshot of living, working and playing in Leeds. If you’d like to see what we’re hoping to achieve, do check out the @peopleofleeds account for those who have gone before. 


We started on January 16^th 2012 and we’re hoping to continue for as long as we can get people to sign up! 

Yep. I know this. How do I get my organisation involved?

We don’t allow organisations to take over the account as a group. There are a few reasons for this:

·       We don’t want to become a marketing account, and although the majority of organisations have good intentions, we’ve had a few who have thought this was a quick way to get free advertising.

·       We don’t want to be a marketing goal: several organisations have used PoL as a way to meet marketing targets or to show ‘innovative ways’ of marketing to their bosses. We’re totally happy to work with organisations to use the ‘rocur model’ on their own account, but we don’t want our followers to become guinea pigs for a training ground.

·       We want people who are actively engaged in the account, not people who are being told they have to do it as part of their job. Related, we want people curating who actually tweet, not ‘dead air’ when someone who isn’t excited about curating takes over and decides not to bother.

·       We want accountability – ultimately the admin is responsible for the account, and if anyone tweets anything inflammatory or offensive we need to know who that person is, which we can’t control when multiple people are using the account.

·       We want variation – anyone who is only tweeting about one thing is going to be less interesting, whether that’s an organisation or photos of their cat or Love Island. It also isn’t fun for the individuals tweeting if they don’t get much interaction from only tweeting about one topic.

But we’d never do that!

We’re sure you wouldn’t, and that your organisation is awesome and we’d love to support you. But we can’t guarantee that everyone is like you, so we have to have blanket rules. It’s happened before, and caused a major headache, so we’re protecting ourselves and our followers.

That sounds fair. But how can we get involved?

We still love to hear about all the great organisations in Leeds, and if your members would like to curate the account and talk about your organisation as part of their week (not just about the organisation) that’s totally okay and we’d love to have them involved. Just ask them to send us an email to peopleofleeds@gmail.com telling us briefly who they are (if they’re on twitter include their @name, or mention their familiarity of using twitter through the organisation) and if there are any weeks that are particularly good/bad for them. We’ll email back with an info pack when we open our next booking block. You can also share the info pack with them from our website. If more than one person wants to curate, great! We’ll just ask that they don’t follow on from the previous person to ensure a good mix of content on the account. We’re also happy to discuss with any potential curators their plans for the week and advise if we think it will be appropriate or suggest ways to mix it up. We can also point people to past curators who will be happy to give insight into running the account and what to expect.

Please note that you can’t nominate someone, email on behalf of someone or book a week to fill with a person nearer the time. The person taking over the account must email themselves.

Great, now what happens on their week? 

On Sunday night at around 8pm we’ll DM the person with the login details for that week, and then it’s theirs to curate for the week. 

If we get complaints, or if we feel someone is using the account as an organisation rather than an individual, we’ll discuss it with the curator and ask them to mix in more personal tweets. If the person continues, we’ll block them out of the account. Sorry, but we have to be strict to make sure that we’re fair to everyone. We’re totally happy to discuss beforehand, and during the week, if someone is unsure about ‘how much is too much’, and we’re pretty friendly and forgiving, so please don’t be put off!

Still reading?

Great! We appreciate your support in this – PeopleofLeeds has been going for a long time, and we want to continue to keep it fun and engaging. So go and get your members to sign up!