Partner Alliances

How we can work with you:

Campaign Partner

Could you work with us to create great campaigns?

Between now and 2025, we plan to spend around £100K on running joint campaigns with our partners.

We fund and provide end-to-end creative support on joint marketing campaigns with local support groups.  We create impactful content, whether this is an educational video, infographic, press campaign, ad or poster, and we can raise people’s awareness of the issues alcohol creates in our communities.  This means working together to tackle issues such as:

• Stigma
• Mental and physical illness
• Domestic abuse
• Bereavement and;
• Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD)

Click here to view our 5-year plan to see the campaigns we have coming up.  Collaboration can take very different forms based on the time you have to commit; this could be a simple content contribution, or you can get involved in concept design through to execution with our team taking on the heavy lifting.

We have previously partnered with the Aberdeen ADP, the ADA and RGU to invite professional photographers and enthusiasts alike to investigate and communicate the truth about alcohol and its use or misuse in our society.  The competition created disruptive conversation as we set the community the challenge to look at alcohol in perspective and creatively show the impact it has on different people throughout our society.

The campaign attracted entries from all over the UK – with some images exploring the joyous side of alcohol and others diving into the darker realities of alcohol addiction.  The grand winner went to a professional photographer and illustrates the negative impact drink can have if abused and shows disorientation.  The people’s choice winner went to a 14 year-old budding photographer who explored the trend of children mixing alcohol and prescription drugs to get a bigger hit.

The ADP guest spoke at the exhibition held at the RGU campus – triggering great conversations between the business community, students, competition entrants and local support groups.

Insight Partner

Can you help us to identify what digital solutions your community needs?

DRiNKLiNK is community led.  We aim to be the true voice of the community and work with local support organisations to marry their wants and needs with Government strategy.

We want to work with our partners to engage the community in proactive conversation.  We see this as beneficial on two fronts:

• The community sees the combined support available from our partner group
• The community can tell us as a union of partners what they need from us and help drive and influence our key objectives

Working with AiR and the ADA, we held a workshop with recovering addicts, family and friends to ask them exactly what they would like to see on the website.  From their feedback we created a needs and wants chart and will continue to use this as a roadmap for future content development.  The session directly led to the creation of the letters segment and tools section of the site.

Finding the right words and the right time to talk to a loved one about their drinking can often be difficult, and at worst can lead to a fiery altercation.  Through our letters segment, we take a loved ones unspoken words and pull them together in an anonymous letter with the hope that they can share this with their loved one in a more disconnected way; hopefully feeling a sense of release by seeing their words in black and white, and supporting others going through a similar experience.  One of the letters was actually handed to our team at the workshop further demonstrating the direct impact your organisation can have on the solutions we build.

Victim is not a word that could be used to describe the people who participated in our workshops.  In front of us sat strong, interesting, and talented individuals who came out of their situation stronger.  They put a lot of this down to their escapes into art, music, reading and movies – which also build life skills and evoked passions that stayed with them for life.  To create a true community, we wanted to create a safe space on our website that allowed them to share recommendations, express what the book/movie/piece of art means to them without risk of trolling – a major contributor to stigma in a digital age.

Click here to see the 5-year plan and our content strategy. We are always looking for partners to support in creating engaging, impactful content. Our next insight workshop will focus on our partner portal. More details below. If you would like to register your interest, click here.

Content Partner

Can you extend your expertise to us and help us to create impactful, responsible content?

Drinklink.org is our core offering.  As well as helping us to identify what should be included on the site, you can actually benefit more directly.

From the workshops, we create a site plan outlining content that we would like to build on the website.  We identify who the experts are in that space from our partner network, and work collectively to tell the story that will help those struggling with alcohol misuse to understand their situation and take the next steps in their recovery.

As a partner, we would look for you to use your expertise in that area to make the content as relevant, accurate and impactful as possible.  In return you will get access to shareable, reliable and reputable content that you can share with your audience with minimal legwork.

Each year, the UN run a campaign to raise awareness of violence against women.  We partnered with local groups to spread the word in Aberdeen and through this collaboration, organisations like the ADP, Grampian Police and Aberdeen City Council came together to review the content on our website and to help create new content not readily available in the digital space.

Service Partner

Do you have a service offering that we could promote… for free?

The DRiNKLINK website focuses on a powerful user journey where people navigate through our site, learning about the facts regarding alcohol misuse and how they can create change.  It’s about enabling people to understand their situation and – most importantly – identify the next steps in their recovery.

We want people to know they are not alone.

DRiNKLiNK is not a service provider; we simply direct people to the services that are relevant to them.  Here is where we need your help!  To complete the user journey, we want to direct people to your service at no cost to you.

Do you run a helpline, a support group or an event surrounding alcohol misuse issues?  We’d like to get these initiatives out to the people that will benefit most.

We can do this in two ways:

Behavioural targeting

We advertise your service on relevant page(s) on our site and where we believe your help is needed the most.  This way, we can drive the visitors looking for your services directly to your website.

Service directory

The impact alcohol misuse has on people’s life is diverse.  It is not uncommon to get lost in the net as you try to find out what help is on offer. To stop people from being referred to inactive services and facing referral blocks, we’re aiming to create an accurate service directory and introduce a service search function on our site.

This is a key area of development on the site and we are looking to enhance this with:

• • A filter system that allows visitors to search by support category (I.e. bereavement support, self-harm, domestic abuse) as well as referral type (GP referral).
  • Back-end access for partners to maintain their profile.  This is where you’ll create a profile detailing your contact information and service/product offerings.  Your profile will be added to our directory along with other like-minded organisations from all over Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire, and shared with the community.
  • Share insight on anonymous user journeys on which pages are most visited, have most interaction and other data which can be used to strengthen funding applications and service development.
  • We not only want to make sure end-users have access to live services, we also want to create service-to-service connection and opportunities for collaboration.  We believe that peer-to-peer collaboration is a way of opening doors to enhanced support and service provision.
  • We will create a platform for partners to share insight, learnings, benchmark performance, connect and collaborate.  It’ll be a space for joint projects and sharing of best practice.

Volunteer Partner

Would you like to join us in providing training programmes to boost our organisation’s skills?

We run regular training programmes with our team with new topics being added all the time.  Some areas covered in the past include:

• Employability
• Social media
• Digital marketing
• Public relations
• Email campaigns
• Event management

With most guest coaches, lecturers and trainers delivering these sessions free of charge, we would like to maximise their reach and invite your team to participate.  For upcoming training, please contact lee.malcolm@drinklink.org.

Your commitment

Let’s maximise the potential of our resources.  Let’s avoid double dipping on service provision and let’s work on true value and joint initiatives with our combined expertise.  If your organisation wants to be part of something bigger and brighter with a vision to help our community, we want to hear from you.

Email info@drinklink.org to let us know how you’d like to get involved with DRiNKLiNK.