Community Organizations Editing and Proofreading Services

Small community organisations write under conditions no professional communications team would accept. The person drafting the funding bid is also the person who unlocked the hall that morning, there is no budget for anyone to check it, and the deadline is Friday. What they are competing against is a bid written by a paid fundraiser at an organisation twenty times their size. The work on the ground is frequently better; the document rarely is, and funders can only read the document.

We edit what residents' associations, community groups, tenants' organisations and neighbourhood bodies produce — constitutions and governing documents, funding applications to local and national funders, reports back to funders and members, annual general meeting papers and minutes, membership and volunteer recruitment material, newsletters and noticeboard communications, consultation responses to councils and developers, petitions and campaign material on local issues, room hire and facility agreements, safeguarding and health and safety policies, partnership agreements with statutory bodies, and community survey questions. Our editors work at the scale you operate at and do not recommend processes that assume staff you do not have.

The claim to speak for a community is the sentence that carries the most weight in everything a group writes, and it is the one most easily challenged. A council officer, a developer or a funder reading that a group represents the neighbourhood will ask who elected it, how many members it has and how they were consulted — and a group that cannot answer loses the argument regardless of whether it was right. We work on this so the claim is stated at the strength it can actually bear: not that the group speaks for the area, but that it has 140 members across the estate, that 62 people attended the meeting where this position was agreed, and that the survey it rests on had 310 responses out of roughly 900 households. Stated that way it is unassailable, and it is very often more impressive than the vaguer version. Where a group genuinely does not know how representative it is, saying what it does know — and what it is doing to widen participation — protects it better than a claim someone can puncture in one question.

Everything you send is treated in confidence. We are editors rather than legal, governance or funding advisers, and we offer no view on your constitution, on charitable status, or on any planning or licensing matter. What we can do is make the writing clear and the claims solid, and we are used to working with volunteers writing this alongside everything else they do.