Emma Serventi

I am the Apprenticeship Delivery Manager at Escalla TS Ltd, training Digital Marketing apprentices. I love playing about with new apps and platforms, to make my sessions relevant and interactive. My transferrable skills had to save the club!

I have always loved water but, during my childhood, I didn’t know anything about competitive lifesaving. I have always been a swimmer, and being a Type 1 diabetic since the age of ten, it has been a great form of exercise. I continued to swim whilst I was pregnant with both of my children until I got to 36 weeks. By that point, it was getting difficult to get out of the pool!

At six weeks old, both children were in the water, and have followed in my footsteps. Izzy has hit the headlines with the Royal Life Saving Society UK last year, after gaining the prestigious Distinction Award at the age of 13. I have spent many a weekend watching both children swimming, and when Izzy started at our local lifesaving club I was captivated by the skills being taught. I started attending their adult session to complete the Survive and Save Awards and developed close friendships with the instructors, who encouraged me to take on a new challenge; training to be a Rookie Instructor. For the past four years, I have been actively involved in the club; volunteering every Saturday morning to teach groups of budding lifesaver, and attending Open Water and Beach events with members of the Liverpool and District Branch. I am constantly learning, and absolutely love working with young people and watching their confidence grow.

In 2022, our club’s founding members retired, and a number of other people involved in the club decided to move on. We lost numbers due to the pool closures during the pandemic, and we were at risk of the club having to close. We were determined this would not happen, and I volunteered to promote the club on social media, in a bid to increase our numbers, and raise awareness of both the club, and the Royal Life Saving Society UK’s aims.

I use Meta Business Suite. This is a complete social media management tool for Facebook and Instagram. You can do everything, from creating and scheduling content to responding to engagement and analysing insights. You can also plan organic campaigns, run ads, and organise assets. All of this is free and can be done from your phone, tablet or laptop.

I use Canva and TikTok to create posts, with a little bit of photo editing on various other free apps. I have found that posting the same content on both Facebook and Instagram gets a similar response, due to my highly visual content. The best time to post is 7.30pm, when most parents have sat down in front of the TV, and are scrolling through their social media feeds. Our audience is mainly parents, as our lifesavers are too young to be using the platforms, but the older lifesavers do join in, and like being part of the videos.

Our posts help to raise awareness of lifesaving and water safety, highlight key campaigns from RLSS UK, celebrate success across the club, educate people on what we do, and attract new members. After four months of posting every day, we doubled our numbers, and now have 50 young people learning lifesaving skills every weekend. We have also started a session for children struggling to meet the required National Curriculum attainment targets for swimming and water safety.

Our success was recognised in October 2022 by Everybody Health & Leisure. We won the prestigious ‘Club of the Year Award’, which was absolutely fantastic!

Posting daily on social media can seem a bit daunting, but there is so much stuff out there that you can use, or adapt, to save time. The great thing about social media posts is they can be shared by your followers and reach further afield than you would think. We have some top fans, some of whom are influencers in the world of lifesaving sport. Once you start to see growth in followers, likes and shares, I think it becomes quite addictive!

I would encourage current volunteers to take on the social media challenge, but I also think there are lots of people now who post for fun, and could develop their skills further by posting on behalf of a club. It would be great for their CV, and may help them to get them onto a course or apprenticeship relating to the digital industries. I have gained new friendships, enjoyment, skills and challenges working as a volunteer. It is an amazing thing to do, and I feel a huge sense of responsibility training up the next generation of lifesavers. Anyone can drown, but no one should. Let’s work together to share our expertise and knowledge, with as many people as possible, giving everyone the potential to save lives and enjoy water, safely.”

If you’re interested in volunteering for RLSS UK visit: www.rlss.org.uk/volunteer