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The search has begun to find 3,600 people around the UK interested in becoming the ‘champions’ of their local high streets.
The team behind Local Rewards, a new free to access service that aims to help retailers in towns around the UK recover from the impact of successive lockdowns and support them in reaching more customers and increasing sales, is behind the call for potential High Street Champions to come forward.
Local Rewards is a High Street Guides service launched by social media specialists Maybe* Tech. It allows shop owners to communicate with and reward shoppers and has been created with the intention of ‘levelling the playing field’ between local retailers and giants like Amazon.
The search is being launched in the run-up to the Independents’ Day weekend on 3rd and 4th July, an annual campaign to promote small independent shops around the UK.
“The High Street Champions programme is all about enabling people, whether they’re a business owner, a social media expert or just a person who lives in a town to be the champion of their local high street,” said Polly Barnfield OBE, CEO of Maybe* Tech.
“All we need them to be is the person who shares their town’s High Street Guide every day on social media, puts up posters locally and tells local businesses how to make use of it. Everybody will have a different way of doing this, but we will provide everything they need to make their high street famous and to ensure people are invited back there on a daily basis.”
With Local Rewards, participating retailers are able to cross-promote and support their high street neighbours to create an online network of connected traders, or ‘High Street Guide’. It allows shoppers to see businesses near them and view their social media content as they are shopping the city. The aim is to provide every shopper with a prompt after each high street purchase that reveals somewhere else nearby that they may like to discover. All of the content is sourced from social media, connected via Google maps and is connected to payments from Visa, Mastercard and Amex.
“The technology is in place; we now just need a network of people to share it across the UK,” added Barnfield. “Each Champion will get all the tools they need and masses of help and support. We want to celebrate what’s great about our high streets up and down the country, because we know they’re evolving, we know they’re changing but know fundamentally, people want a physical experience, but this is something that we have to all do together.”
To express an interest in becoming a High Street Champion, go to https://www.localrewards.chat/wanted-high-street-champions.
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