Section Six: Recruiting Collaborators

I have started contacting bloggers who I want involved with the magazine. I have sent emails out to all my potential interviewees and have also posted appeals on social media, for applicants for some of the other articles, as you can see below. The main place I posted was a Facebook group called UK Bloggers which has over 4,000 bloggers/members, so it is a good place to find collaborators! 

My email to Corrie 

The people I have currently contacted are:

• Pixiwoo
• Corrie
• Alice Spake
• Jemma Morgan (for an interview and to be the agony aunt/blog doctor)
• Dunya (Dearest Deer) and Sarah (TempSec) to model for the cookbook
• Meg McCarthy 
• A wide range of book bloggers for the book club

As well as appeals for the other articles. 

I have also been thinking about a few other student/uni based posts I could include. One of them is a 'What's in My Bag: Uni Edition'. The What's In My Bag tag is a classic and very popular post for bloggers' and Youtubers to create. Similar to the Blog Space series, it'd be interesting to delve into bloggers' bags each month and see what they carry. Each month could have a different theme, like this month the theme is university.

I have contacted a few student bloggers to get involved with this post, after searching for them under various hashtags on Twitter.


Update 1: 27.11.15

Great news! I have just received an email from Corrie who has agreed to take part in an interview! I will start preparing questions to send over to her.

I have also received a lot of response on Facebook for my other articles and have sent out emails to those who were interested. Alice, Jemma and Meg have also agreed to take part and Alice is currently working on her article - 10 Do's & Don'ts for Hosting a Meetup. 

My appeal in the UK Bloggers Facebook Group which has over 4,000 members

I have a lead on the 'Love at First Site' article - a girl called Laura who has met TWELVE best friends via blogging. We have been emailing and so far I have asked her just to give me a bit more information on how they met and their relationship so I can decide which direction to take the article in. I am waiting for a response. 




Update 2: 28.11.2015

Today I received an email from Sarah, one of the bloggers I asked to model for the lookbook. As you can see from the email, she was quite reluctant to take part and after some discussion with her we have decided not to go ahead with the collaboration. I very much want to create my own photography for the lookbook so I won't be using her images for the article either.

I am yet to hear back from Dunya, but I am hoping it is more positive news.

On the brighter side of things, Alice has already sent me her article! It needs a bit of tweaking (grammar etc) but overall it's an excellent article and I'm impressed with how quickly she submitted it.

I have made contact with Anna from an interior design blog called dontcrampmystyle.co.uk, who will be featured in the Blog Space article. Ironically, she was the person I used for the mock up design back in Section Five, so I'm going to be using and developing that layout for her article.

Update 3 2.03.2015

It's been a while since I sent out emails to both Dunya and Pixiwoo and I've still had no reply. In regards to Pixiwoo, I sent the message via Facebook (as I have them as Facebook friends) and although the message was "seen" the day I sent it there has still been no reply. I have decided not to include them in the magazine as they are hard to reach and response is slow, which could become problematic further along in the project.

There is a similar issue with Dunya. After looking on her blog she has not blogged for a few months and seems to be out of touch with the blogging community at the moment so I have decided not to wait for a reply and will start contacting other bloggers to model in the lookbook.


Update 4 3.03.2015

My photo of Jordan (far left) after her catwalk at Bloggers Fashion Week

Finally some progress! After struggling to find a model for the lookbook, I have finally managed to secure a photo shoot with a blogger called Hello Miss Jordan (above). We met in the Summer at a blogger event, where she also modelled on the catwalk. She is very excited to be a part of the magazine and we have arranged a photo shoot for around the 14th December, putting me right on schedule. I am currently putting together some outfit ideas, by looking at her some of her pieces from outfit posts on her blog and we are discussing things like location, times and other details for the shoot.

Areeba's Instagram Feed, featuring some of her art work

I have also added another interviewee to the list! I found Areeba Siddique, via Instagram. She is a creative blogger from Pakistan, who has recently launched a community for art journallers. Her own work is pretty breath taking, and very expressive of her personality and culture. I thought it would be really interesting to feature her in the magazine as what she does is very different and it'd be great to hear more about her background and artistic inspiration. She also replied very quickly to my email and is more than happy to do an interview and has agreed to take some flat lay photos of some of her art journal pages, to be featured in the article.