What we do

Discovering Quakers is a grassroots Quaker outreach initiative that provides a first point of contact for people curious about Quakers. We promote Quakers throughout Britain through social media and our website, produce an enquirers' email newsletter every two weeks, run weekly online events for enquirers, and publish Quaker books.

Our outreach activities focus on the ‘marketing’ aspects of outreach – connecting with members of the public, informing them about Quakers and letting them know that if they would like to give it a try, they will be made very welcome. We work in three areas; reaching out, engaging and informing, and inviting.

Reaching out

Our main way of reaching out to people curious about Quakers is through social media advertising on Facebook and Instagram – you may have seen our advert on ‘7 interesting facts about Quakers’. Currently (Aug 2024), around 5,000 people see our ads every month. We currently spend £300 per month on social media advertising and would like to increase this as we now know it helps more people engage with what we have to say and offer.

We also reach out through our website aimed at the general public with regularly updated content, and posting content on Facebook, Instagram and more recently TikTok. We currently have 1041 followers on Facebook and 1260 on Instagram. Our website gets over 15,000 visits per month.

In addition, we bring Quakers to the public’s attention through printed matter having previously helped Meetings produce posters to support their local outreach. We would like to do more of this, but currently are limited due to our level of funding.

Engaging and informing

Once we have attracted someone’s attention we seek to engage and inform them about Quakers with easy to digest information, signposting them to other information sources and events they can join. Among the things we do are;

  • Send a series of welcome emails to people who sign up for our email newsletters.
  • Send regular email newsletters – every two weeks to over 6,000 people on our mailing list.
  • Post regularly on social media channels.
  • Run quizzes and polls that introduce aspects of Quakerism in an engaging way.
  • Run weekly online Quaker Lives sessions where enquirers can learn a bit about Quakers, hear from a Quaker about how Quakerism has influenced their life, experience a short Meeting for Worship and ask questions. Between 10 and 15 people attend these weekly sessions.
  • We recently published our first printed book and ebook – the revised 3rd edition of Being a Quaker by Geoffrey Durham.

Inviting

We invite people to give Quakers a try in numerous ways – through our email newsletters, our website and social media, and at our online events.

More recently we have launched a new service for enquirers to put them in touch with their local meeting when they sign up to our email newsletter. This is working better than expected with around 25% of people asking to be contacted by their local meeting – that’s 20 every week.