Today’s Fakenham Fair was well attended and the event was great fun. Lots of stalls, bouncy castles, local organisations and demonstrations – and the weather was very kind too!

Fantastic work by Kick Start and the Fakenham Area Partnership – well done, guys. Here’s to a successful full-blown Fakenham Carnival in 2011!!!

What are you doing tomorrow? Did you know that it’s the Fakenham Fair? Well, it is. From 2pm – 6pm in Millennium Park.

“Rides, inflatables, stalls with toys, crafts, games, food, classic cars, bows & arrows, you can even come and build a wall! “

The running order looks like this…

• 2.00 Football
• 3.00 Punch & Judy
• 3.30 Tae Kwon Do Display
• 3.50 Basketball Display 
• 4.00 1st Acadamy of Dance Performance
• 4.20 Magic Show
• 4.45 Fakenham Bowmen Display

… but may be subject to change.  Then in the evening, there’s the disco…

8-11pm Family Disco, Community Centre, tickets £2.50 on the door, under 12′s FREE

Fakenham: Warnings for moped riders – Local – Lynn News

Good to se the SNT focusing on this. The behaviour of these riders who seem to hang out in the car park next to Tesco has been extremely annoying at best and at worst, an accident waiting to happen.

If you haven’t been to Fakenham Surgery recently, you may not have seen their leaflet explaining what their proposed new building in Clipbush Lane will look like. Here’s an artist’s impression…

Looks impressive. If you’d like more details, the leaflet says that their newsletters (from which this is taken) can be obtained at the Surgery Website

Local shoppers love bargains, but local business owners don’t go for them!

In the past, I’ve talked to somebody at Fakenham Chamber of Commerce as well as Kick Start Fakenham about a local shopper loyalty scheme, but nothing has so far become of it.  I think the Chamber has also recently and independently discussed an idea like this, but maybe somebody needs to give it a nudge and/or get some feedback from the local public…

I think the town’s traders could do with some kind of mutually-beneficial loyalty scheme. Something which would reward local shoppers by giving discounts or special offers and which would, in turn, keep some of their trade in the town rather than see them shop further afield.

I have had some ideas already, having mulled it over for the best part of a year. What has rekindled my ideas now? Well, I was speaking to another business owner from this area yesterday and we were comparing notes about local advertising and promotion. His thoughts were (and my past experiences bear this out) that local businesses are usually very reluctant to promote themselves – even if the method offered is extremely inexpensive or even free! They’re not at all pro-active when it comes to publicity and many smaller businesses in the area will happily admit to being complete technophobes – not at all helpful when somebody like me is trying to convince them to promote their businesses online!

We came to the conclusion that if local businesses could be shown an obviously consumer-driven scheme, they’d be more likely to see the advantage of promoting themselves through it. Our reasoning was that they’re historically used to being consumer-led and would react to a more traditional idea that shoppers would want to use.

So… I’d like your ideas. If you’re a shopper, what would convince you to use a local business rather than one from Norwich or Lynn? If you’re a Fakenham trader or shop owner, do you have any ideas to make a scheme like this work?

You can leave comments here on my blog or email me via steve (at) wensum.net. Alternatively, feel free to give me a ring at the office on 01328 856688.

You know that little park by the river path? Yes, just down Hall Staithe (corrected: cheers, Mark) - that’s the one. Well, there’s a project underway to freshen it up a tad. It was looking a bit run down, so an organisation from Norwich is organising (what else would they do?) a bunch of long-term unemployed youngsters to give it a lick of paint and add some sparkle. Apparently, it gives them a bit of work experience and adds a project to their CV. No doubt it gives them a bit of confidence-building too – that can’t do any harm. Anyway, they were all busy down there today when I popped out for a walk, so I took the opportunity to poke my nose, have a quick natter and take a snap.

Nice to see youngsters doing community projects like this. Thanks. Well done, guys!

Appeal after Fakenham theft – News – Lynn News

.

£10,000 has been provided by the Priorities Challenge Fund (Museums Libraries & Archives) to employ a project officer on a five-month contract at the Fakenham Museum of Gas & Local History. Frances Collinson is considering a name change for the musum and is asking for suggestions. Read the story at the EDP’s website.  

Boost for Fakenham gas museum – Norfolk News – EDP24.

What do you reckon to this story in today’s EDP? Marston’s are a large Staffordshire-based brewery and pub company (they have over 1700 pubs across the UK). They own the Wychwood, Jennings, Banks’s, Brakspeare and Ringwood beer brands as well as high-street ‘cooking-lager’ brands  like Carlsberg, Stella Artois, Carling and Fosters.

They’re apparently looking at opening a bar & restaurant in the Clipbush Lane area, close to the proposed Health Centre complex.

Do we need it? Is an edge-of-town site good for our town?

Fakenham’s a small town. You’d think it would be easy to let everybody know when you had some news to tell. Unfortunately, I haven’t found that to be true over the years. We all seem to be involved with friends and colleagues in small groups and news doesn’t always escape into the outside world efficiently.

Newspapers like The EDP, Fakenham Times and The Fakenham Sun play their part. In fact they do a really great job in keeping us all informed. Trouble is, they can only ever print a limited snapshot of what’s going on at any one time and they don’t all pick up on the same information.  Also, there are lots of different people you need to contact when you have something happening and need to tell the world - and if your news is business related you may not be able to reach your target audience easily.

When Kick Start Fakenham held its first tentative meeting over a year ago, I mentioned the fact that there was no central point of information distribution. No single place you could go to make sure that your news reached the right people. At the time, it looked like Kick Start might provide that central point, but their website is still to be published and if the truth’s known, they’re probably finding the same old problems themselves when they need to get their info published.

So, I’ve come up with something myself. It will be launching soon