One of the major benefits of working for City of Sanctuary is the range of things you get to be involved in. We aim to make towns and cities more welcoming towards people seeking sanctuary, and (within reason) there’s no limits on how we do it. Local groups are given complete freedom to decide what methods they want to use to further the cause in their locality, which has resulted in a number of creative and innovative ideas.

However, there is one big restriction on all our groups, and that’s resources. City of Sanctuary will never have boundless funds, so we need to utilise the best value methods we can, and take advantage of low cost or free options to the full.

Internet and communications technology has changed a lot in the last few years, with a steady stream of new innovations with differing uses and characteristics. What they have in common is that they tend to be cheap or free, and they tend to be social, and this makes them potentially vital tools for an organisation like ours.

Now there are clearly a lot of different types of social interaction, as there are lots of different types of people, so inevitably there are many different types of social media, each of which allows people to interact in a different way. The design of each particular site is optimised to allow and encourage the type of interaction which characterises it as a particular form. The resulting structure of these sites makes them far more suitable for some uses than others. I’ll try and explain this through the example of a problem we faced recently.

When I joined, City of Sanctuary already had a Facebook group. The movement had started just as the whole social media phenomenon was itself starting to gather pace, and the decentralised, open nature of the site seemed suited to the movement’s ethos and likely to prove a useful tool in expanding our reach and recruitment.