2. Agree with Graham how this gets judged

Nobody has set targets for this campaign except the £50,000. Better to set them ourselves and report them every week than to have someone else decide later.

• Agree the four numbers on the Numbers page and start sending them weekly
• Start recording when a small sale leads to a conversation about a full websiteOne extra column. It is the proof that this work is worth doing, even though it is not a target

3. Decide what we sell first and what it costs

• Find out how much a Head of Communications can spend without asking anyone above themUsually somewhere between £1,000 and £5,000. Ask a friendly existing contact. If our cheapest thing costs more than this, they have to get permission, and most will not bother
• Build one fixed-price website check-up that costs just under that amount and takes two weeks
• Write down plainly what we can and cannot do for people who are not on our systemSay it before they buy, not after. Selling a report and then saying we cannot do the fixes would lose the account for good

4. Build the list of 310 organisations

• Find every UK housing association with more than 1,000 homes
• Add columns: country, number of homes, who built their website, their published tenant satisfaction scores, how promising they are, and which salesperson owns them
• Take out the 40 we already work with, and anything Johnny is already talking to

5. Reuse what we already wrote for the October deadline

• Point the existing guide and website check at new organisations instead of existing customersWe wrote it for customers. It works just as well for strangers and it is already finished

The two of us, coming from different ends

Johnny is our business development director. He talks to chief executives and finance directors about replacing their whole website or intranet.

I talk to the communications team, who look after the website day to day. They rarely control big budgets, but they know exactly what is wrong with their site and they are the ones who have to live with it. Same organisations, different people, different conversations. If it works, the two conversations end up supporting each other.

How we say it to them

You have not got the money for a new website this year. That is fine. Let us see what we can get out of the site you already have, so the next eight months are not wasted.

Who we are targeting

About 350 housing associations in the UK own more than 1,000 homes. That is 227 in England, roughly 75 in Scotland, around 30 in Wales and fewer than 10 in Northern Ireland. Take out the 40 we already work with and there are about 310 left.

Smaller housing associations are not worth chasing. They rarely have a communications team or a budget for this kind of work.

310 is a small enough number to be useful. We could post something physical to every single decision maker for about £2,500. This is not a numbers game where we blast thousands of emails and hope.

Who we speak to inside each one

Anyone in communications, from Head of Communications downwards. Nothing above that, because Johnny and Graham handle chief executive level. Two people going at the same organisation without telling each other is how this falls apart, so we agree who has which contacts up front.

What we can actually sell to someone who is not already a customer

So for new organisations, the thing we sell is the advice, not the work. Most agencies refuse to write a fix list for a rival to carry out, because there is no follow-on money in it. That is exactly why it builds trust, and it means the customer does not have to change supplier to buy from us.

How we reach them, best first

1	Emails written one at a time, sent from a real person's mailbox, about 30 to 40 a day. Not mass marketing emails. This is the only thing we have proof of: 145 of these got us 10 meetings, although those people already knew us.
2	LinkedIn posts from my account and Johnny's. Housing communications people spend a lot of time there.
3	Something in the post, addressed to a named person. The only method that cannot be affected by our email problem.
4	Free online sessions. Easy for someone to attend without asking permission or spending anything.
5	Housing trade press. If we produce something genuinely interesting they will cover it for nothing.
6	Paid LinkedIn adverts. Worth doing, but note that LinkedIn needs at least 300 matched companies for this kind of targeting and our 310 will not reliably reach that once matching drops some. We would target by job title instead.

Not worth doing: leaflets and magazine adverts. They perform badly in this sector compared to being written about.

Stage 2, January to March: the sector report

Works everywhere, so this is when Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland come in properly.

We check all 310 websites ourselves and score them on how usable and accessible they are, then compare that against the tenant satisfaction scores every landlord already has to publish. That gives us one report the whole sector wants to read, and 310 private scorecards, one for each organisation, which is a reason to contact any of them.

• Get Adrian and Graham to agree what we publishPublishing a league table naming 310 landlords could annoy the whole sector. Safer version: publish the overall findings, send each organisation its own score privately
• Automate the scorecardsIf making 310 of these by hand is the plan, it will not happen
• Collect and check the data across all 310 sites
• Publish it, offer it to the trade press, run a session on what we found
• Post printed scorecards to named Heads of Communications

Stage 3, April to June: accessibility and a training course

A second set of rules arrives in April 2027, covering how landlords answer information requests from individual tenants.

• Make accessibility the main offer, using the report as proof
• Design a six-week course with a certificate at the endProbably the best long-term idea we have. People put certificates on LinkedIn and bring colleagues next time. But it is a lot of work for one person, so do not start it until Stage 1 has proved this campaign works at all
• If we run an award, base it on the report data and not on finishing our courseAn award from us, for completing our own course, looks like something you can buy. Basing it on independent data makes it mean something, and a sector body might put their name to it

The steady drip underneath all three

One small useful thing every month that someone can use straight away without asking their boss or spending anything. A short video pulling apart one real website. A template. One chart with one interesting finding. Never a brochure. This is always the first thing to get dropped when we get busy, so keep it small enough to survive a bad month.

Every Friday

Two minutes. This is what makes the update below write itself.

Add this week

Deals

Add deal

Add a week above and this fills in on its own.

A separate email setup for approaching strangers

Emails to people who have never heard of us must not go through the same system we use for customers.

• Set up a separate web address for sending, with three mailboxesIf cold emailing goes badly it damages the sender's reputation. Keeping it separate means it cannot harm our email to existing customers
• Build the volume up slowly over four weeks before sending properlyA brand new address sending hundreds of emails on day one looks exactly like spam
• Check every address is real before the first sendEmailing addresses that do not exist is one of the fastest ways to get blocked
• Make sure people can unsubscribe from these emails too, not just the marketing ones
• Write down our legal basis for contacting people who have not asked us to

The list and HubSpot

• Get all 310 organisations into HubSpot with their country, size, website supplier, satisfaction scores, how promising they are, and their owning salesperson
• Check whether our HubSpot plan can score whole organisations, not just individual people
• Build do-not-contact lists: existing customers, live deals, and anything Johnny is working on
• Label every email we send with which group it went toTen seconds each time. It means we never again have to spend a week working out whether two campaigns are comparable
• Agree one way of tagging links so we can tell where website visitors came from

Keeping Johnny and me in step

Two people approaching the same organisation without knowing is the most likely way this goes wrong.

• One shared view where we can both see who has been in contact with whom
• Written rule for what happens when I get somewhere with an organisation he is already working on, and the other way round
• Fifteen minutes together every week, same slot

Money, asked for in two parts

The first part is small enough to be easy to say yes to. The second only gets asked for once the first has proved something.

What has to be true before asking for part two: our email is measurably fixed, the website data is collected, and Stage 1 has produced a real reply rate from people who had never heard of us. That last one is the genuine unknown. The only cold emailing that has worked for us so far was to someone who already knew us.

Put the value of one typical website project next to the £10,450 total and the case makes itself. If anything gets cut, protect the posted scorecards. It is the only method on the list that our email problem cannot touch.

What the email results will mean

What we find	What it means	What we do
Plenty of clicks, but opens look low	Our emails are arriving and being read. We are just counting them wrong.	Nothing. Report clicks instead of opens.
Almost no clicks either	Either it is going to junk, or people are ignoring it.	Do the test below to tell which.
Our best readers open normally, everyone else does not	Delivery is fine. We have simply been emailing too many people who do not care.	Email fewer people, more relevantly.
Even our best readers barely open	Something is wrong with the sending itself.	Do the full email repair in Setup.
Microsoft addresses do badly, Google ones do fine	Microsoft is filtering us out.	Security records, simpler emails, ask customers to approve us.

Rules we do not break

• Blame the rules, never the person. The standards changed and most housing websites have not caught up. Nobody wants to be told their site is bad.
• Talk about what it means for tenants, not about the score. Mention a number once to show we actually looked, never as a verdict.
• Never call the review free. It is a named session with a fixed length and a real value.
• Never say our technology makes anyone compliant with the regulations. It helps them meet and prove their responsibilities. That distinction matters legally.
• Tell people what we cannot do for them before they pay, not after.

Words you will hear

Housing association

A not-for-profit landlord providing affordable housing. Our customers and targets. Also called a registered provider or, in Scotland, a registered social landlord.

Cold outreach

Contacting someone who has never heard of us and has not asked to be contacted.

Deliverability

Whether our emails actually reach people's inboxes rather than junk. Currently our biggest problem.

Open rate

The share of delivered emails that were opened. Unreliable, because we measure it with a hidden image that many email programs block.

Deal or opportunity

A specific piece of work a specific organisation might buy, with a value attached.

Pipeline

All the deals being worked on but not yet signed, added together.

Accessibility

Whether a website can be used by people with disabilities. There are legal duties around it and most housing websites fall short.

Tenant satisfaction measures

Scores every English landlord must collect and publish, including how well they keep tenants informed. Public, so we can use them.