Promotion

I had so much enthusiasm for the marketing for our strand of events! We got the events on the FAF website in time for their national deadline, which involved listing them and then sending them off for approval and then got them listed on sites like Netmums, which is a widely used resource for planning days out with children. I also sent the events to a BFI contact working on the Gothic strand, since we had the part Gothic-funded Svankmajer event as part of the season. We have a children’s film, Justin and The Knights of Valour, on at the moment so I have cross-promoted the season and this film.

Working in the Communications department meant I had access to all Watershed’s usual channels and tools for promotion. I sent an email to past Cinekids attenders who we know from Box Office bookings that they are return customers, so I was hopeful this would spread the word. I was able to get the events online with the draft copy we had straight away, I sourced images, made a season poster to go in our Cafe/Bar, made a dip for the cinema to screen before the films in our regular programme and made foyer screens to display in the top foyer, as well as lcd screens of the Cafe/Bar poster. I also put the events in our weekly email (and the lovely Claire wrote intros for 3 weeks of emails which mentioned our Down The Rabbit Hole events) end I even wrote a news post and sent out a press release – all in about about two weeks!

Here are the final exhibits that I made, as well as the programme page linking it all together.

watershed.co.uk/whatson/4447/alice-in-wonderland-the-mad-hatters-magic-tea/

watershed.co.uk/whatson/4448/alice-the-big-draw-magic-ink-workshop/

watershed.co.uk/whatson/4449/rolling-stones-dance-workshop/

watershed.co.uk/whatson/4450/spellbinding-storytelling-workshop/

watershed.co.uk/whatson/season/252/down-the-rabbit-hole

watershed.co.uk/news/get-curious-at-our-magical-family-arts-festival-events/

Attending a marketing masterclass with my colleagues Claire Stewart (Digital Communications Manager) and David Redfern (Online Publishing Manager) to learn about how Watershed create content and messages for events and films was helpful for clarifying the objectives for my marketing campaign. Working with Claire on the copy was also really great – we came up with some good solutions for selling the season. I also heard a talk by Emma Williams who is Marketing and PR manager for the Creative Youth Network which runs amongst other venues in and around Bristol, The Station. Her advice was fantastic and really easy to engage with – for instance, she advocated a balance between product (the offer), place (where is it and what does it mean for the event – i.e. is it special in some way?), promotion (sell, sell, sell and get it out there) and price (be careful with your pricing) to make an event successful. She also talked about getting in touch with who is talking to your current audience: if you can get them to spread your message then your efforts will have more impact.

This was key advice for me – getting the message to a family audience would definitely involve online platforms and social media – I learnt at the FAF day-long training course that I attended that parents use websites and social media a lot to find out what to do for family days out on short notice. I felt that we needed to get other arts organisations in the city to help us push the event out through twitter, online and in news bulletins so we could appeal to as many families who are interested in art in Bristol as possible, with the hope that word would then spread to more families about the events. I planned to target specific interest groups as well, e.g. storytelling, dance, illustration. I also liaised with the other FAF organisations to see if they could put up our FAF events poster in their building or staff room. Of course, during the entire lead up to the launch event and throughout the festival we were distributing the joint marketing flyers and I was keeping them well stocked around the building.

I also sent regular updates to the team and we communicated effectively together to ensure we  covered as much of our marketing plan as possible, whilst firming up the other events in the season.

I also helped to compile a database of arts organisations and contacted people I already knew (such as Colston Hall), asking them to help us push the strand through their newsletters/facebook/twitter and websites. The email that I sent over to these people was carefully planned and had all the information that the organisations would need to get the event out there (short copy, link, date and time, image, poster) and I also made sure I was very specific about where it would be good for them to share it. This makes the process for the other person as easy as possible (I know this as I get requests like this from time to time and it is so helpful to have all the info you need in one place and you are much more likely to share it if it is easy for you to do so!!). I shared this email template with the other girls in my team, and we set about getting our events out there in a big way!

 

 

 

Weekly email listing our events

 

There was an amazing response to our events and we received lots of support from local and not so local organisations, especially on twitter, pushing our events.

I was also in contact with The Mirror about doing an offer for our events in their half-term ‘things to do with the kids’ supplement. Unfortunately it fell through yesterday, but the tickets are for the events were selling gradually this week and I think that come next week and the first even we will have sold at least half of the Tea Party tickets! This launch event will hopefully raise the profile of the other three events and I will make sure that we plug the other workshops at this day to those attending. I can’t wait to see what the next week brings…

Suddenly we are a week away from the events and the press has started to pick us up! The national Metro (online), local Metro South West and in the Bristol Post newspaper, as well as online on Bristol Culture have all featured us. 

Dressing

I love to paint, make and invent so leading on the craft day we had was really fun for me. Using the powerpoint I had made a while ago for inspiration for Alice-themed decorations, made it easy and we discussed and critiqued ideas together before we had a list of things to get and to make. The idea was that we would produce a stock set of decorations for the Tea Party that would create an immersive atmosphere for the families attending and then re-use these to decorate the spaces where the other workshops were being held to tie all the events together.

After myself, Amy and Hannah had been to the Bristol Scrapstore, we headed to the PM Studio to set up camp and start making. So we had a realistic idea of what we could get done in a day, and so we could check progress and delegate tasks, I wrote on the huge whiteboard there the different items we would be making.

We were so lucky to have a team of willing volunteers who came along on the day to help us make our vision come true! The other Future Producers were so great and we had a really fun time making all the decorations, here are some photos from that busy, paint-paper-and-pritstick-packed day!

 

 

 

Detailed Planning in Lead Up to Events

It is just over a week away form the first event and we are getting the last minute things together for the Tea Party and other workshops! It has come around really quickly but I am so happy as to how it is all coming together.

We have now got some volunteers on board for our Tea Party and I have firmed up the room plan and Hannah WW has dealt with all the tech for the party.

Requirements for Tea Party (rough breakdown):

There will now be 5 large cabaret tables with ten seats around each.

2 x large plasma screens, 3 x iphones, 2 x laptops + animation equipment (camera, stand, small spotlight). Nikki brining her tech.

The catering will be at on the left as you walk in and will include a self serve drinks station and platters of cakes and sandwiches laid out. There will be plastic glasses.

The doorway will be decorated. There will be bunting around the room and fairy lights. We will project a slideshow on the large screen at the front of the room and the music from the 1951 Alice in Wonderland will be playing in the background.

The activities will be all around the edge of the room: opposite the door there will be a coat rack and greetings table with all our promotional material and necessary forms on, then the mini cinema will go behind (small round table), with a single tressel table for Nikki Pugh and her jabberwocky makey makey station next to that, and another single tressel table for an animation station set up with two sets and cameras and two seats, set up in the left hand corner of the room.

There will be a small area for Rishi the young magician at the centre back of the room. He wants a large screen with seats around it (6) to do his mini-magic show, then we will have a photo booth backdrop in the next corner, with Opposable Games and another large screen with their Clockwork Racers game on the other side wall. This should leave enough space for wheelchairs and for the general flow of people around the room.

There will be coloured pens, feathers, googly eyes (FAF symbols) and activity sheets on the table. We will need to use the Cinekids dotty table cloths.

We need print out of Nikki’s jubjub bird templates.

I will make appropriate feedback forms, child-friendly programme notes, consent forms, and have clipboards, labels, pens ready to sign the children in to ensure we can take their photo and if not that we know we cannot use it after the event.

I will get ready keeping in touch cards and some new info we have for Birthday Parties to cross-promote, What’s On programmes, other appropriate marketing materials and FAF flyer.

We will need signage for on the day: table names, slide, poster with directional arrows.

I had another meeting with Events, this time with co-ordinator Roberta to discuss the exact catering requirements (I thought catering for 60 people would be good, but Roberta suggested doing it for just 40 people because there were going to be lots of children which seemed sensible) and we talked about the room layout, capacity, and other requirements. I also had a chat with Hannah Higginson about the running order for the day, handling the flow of people and our approach to different situations (e.g. what happens if people start squabbling over the activities, we can assist with moving people around the room through encouragement and demos in small groups in rotation).

I also liaised with Box Office to get the events on sale and displaying correctly, as well as to update capacity, deal with other requests and track ticket sales. I also talked to Ellie about how we were going to implement the FAF flyer passport system.

A week before the third FAF workshop there was a last minute change to the Rolling Stones workshop location, but Ellie at Arnolfini allowed us to use their Dark Studio for the event which I thought was a much better space than Waterside 1 was going to be! It is completely painted black with spotlights and there is a huge screen and speakers at the front of the room – a perfect space for performing and nice wooden floors!

All of these activities were set against a background of making plan-Bs all the time and I learnt a lot about how flexible you need to be to work in event production. It is important to think of feasible solutions and act quickly to make amendments and re-arrange things. For all the events we ensured we had a Risk Assessment drawn up and were all briefed on what the exact plan was and what we expected.

A few days before the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and we have almost sold-out! Not long now…

Delivery:

Alice + Mad Hatter’s Magic Tea Party

On the day of the Tea Party, the team was join by some lovely volunteers (fellow Future Producers) who were going to help take photographs at the photo booth, run the animation station, and generally help with the amount of people we were going to be dealing with. We all dressed the room and the tables (and also the cinema door!) and then got changed into some make-shift costumes. A few of us greeted the families at the cinema door and then I did a brief introduction before the film and we were off!

We finished off the room and got the consent forms, labels and stickers ready for when the families arrived. I greeted the families at the cinema when the film ended and we processed through the Cafe/Bar to the Tea Party. The team was waiting with the clipboards and consent forms so that we could make sure we got everyone into the room and signed up as quickly as possible (which was no easy task). The audience was asked to take their place at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and I did another brief announcement welcoming them to the Tea Party and introducing the PM Studio residents and their activities. I also touched on Health + Safety, said that we were all here for questions and to chat, and please help yourself to tea party goodies!

The atmosphere was fantastic throughout: all the families were getting along and everyone was flowing around the room nicely and the food went down a treat (I actually asked events to bring us more cake). The magician in residence Kieron was absolutely fantastic as the wondering entertainer engaging those at the tables (the kids loved him!!) and the animation station was very popular (it always is with kids). Daughters and dads alike were colouring in and decorating the jubjub bird designs on the tables and then taking them over to Nikki, where she recorded their monster sounds and hooked up the drawings so that when you touched the image it growled or roared or sqwaked! Tarim’s Miniature Cinema or Projection Hero was screening magical films from our DepicT! collection and it was very popular. Rishi was amazing! He had made a really well produced video as part of his trick and Hannah WW was great at helping him overcome a bit of nerves before he gave his performance, as well as ensuring all the groups saw the show. Opposable Games was popular and it was great to see different kids interacting. Our photo booth was used and we have some great photos from the day, thanks to Ella and Louise.

       

In the end, I had to make another announcement when we had overrun by about 10 minutes (it was okayed with events first), to let people know that we would have to wrap up soon, and I encouraged parents to fill in feedback forms and post their thoughts on our notice board, and asked the children if they would vote using our child-friendly feedback board with gold stars.

The families went about ten minutes after that and we talked to people as they left.

I had also talked to quite a few parents during the event to check in with them and see what they thought and if they were new to Watershed. Everyone was very positive and said that we should do more events like this for families, and ones with lots of activities like this. Julian who was our projectionist technician, Paul the DM and Eider from Events all said we should do more events like this and asked – why didn’t we? The feedback form PM Studio residents was that they had really enjoyed it and thought that the format really worked.

The standout feedback I saw from the forms that I read was that we should have had a list of the activities on the tables. I wish I had thought of that! I will definitely do this next time.

When the majority of the families had left (a few stayed on, including Rishi and his family) we packed up and about an hour later – had a nice long drink!!! Myself, Amy, Louise and Hannah could not have produced this event without the help of Cristina, Rosie, Jaye, Ella and Nicola! Amazing people and so much fun!

 

Rolling Stones

I went down to the Rolling Stones workshop once it had started at Arnolfini as I had a meeting. When I got there I was shocked to see so many little children. Straight away I took my shoes off and joined in the workshop as being so little, the children needed a bit more attention to keep them engaged in what was going on. They were loving it and the older ones were figuring out how the tech worked. Fantastic! We had slides on their screen and the room looked great with our decorations in it… I talked to the few parents that were there and they seemed happy enough, but unfortunately they weren’t really joining in which I thought was a shame as it was supposed to be a family workshop. I think it would have maybe been better to target the workshop at older children and their parents so they could both join in the dance elements and learn some moves – in this workshop, the kids were encouraged to express what they felt when they heard the different movements as well as discovering how their movements influenced the rolling stones. We gathered a few feedback forms from them once it was over and after the workshop Laura said she had enjoyed it, although thought the children would have been older and that she hadn’t really taught such little kids before (she did amazingly though!!) and she said she was happy that we had joined in with her engaging the children. All in all the day went really well.

Spellbinding Storytelling

For the Spellbinding Storytelling workshop I finalised the workshop plan with Ben and we liaised about materials and resources, set up and tech requirements and I wrote up the Risk Assessment. I got all the laptops and iPhones charged up and we installed the Fabler App on them. Myself, Ben and Hannah WW dressed the room and got the projector working, laptops, pens and paper on the table. We got some food from the shop and we for a jug of water ready. I tried to get all the websites for the workshop opened on the laptops, but when families arrived early we did it whilst we waited for the other participants to arrive. I felt a bit rushed to be honest when the workshop began even though one family was very late so we postponed starting for nearly ten minutes (we knew this through radio communication with Box Office) and I made got tea/coffee/water/milk if they wanted it. In the end, we just had to start without the missing people, but they turned up after another ten minutes or so, which involved making sure they were got up to speed.

Ben began the workshop by introducing himself, the theme and ideas for the workshop and then we screened the short animated film Presto (so brilliant and bonkers and fitted in perfectly with our Alice season!) which people seemed to enjoy. Ben explained about how the narrative in the film reflected the things we would learn in the workshop about narratives. We were going to do some ice-breakers but we were already at least 20 minutes into the 1.5 hour session so I was still feeling a bit rushed! So instead we got stuck in straight away with showing them some short and fun digital storytelling examples on the New Media Writing Prize website. We then asked them to make origami fortune tellers which we used to explain the principles of branching narratives. I had printed out instructions to do this for each pair and once made, the families got really into writing their stories on them. The kids did it much quicker than the adults in the end, who laboured over it much more – an amazing thing I did not expect! We then moved onto the second part of the workshop where we showed them how to use forking stories site Inkle Writer, a free site used for creating narratives and seeing how they are formed. We helped them to set up accounts and they began to write the first act for their stories using their origami fortune tellers.

We had many more plans for this section (workshop plan notes) but the families got really involved and we all went around and helped them with the branching parts of their narratives. We were also going to do a section on Gambits, which are digital stories where the reader can choose how the story unfolds by clicking through multiple choice questions. The entering of their stories into the digital storytelling platform took a lot longer than I thought it would, and I recognised that we had over-programmed and would need to jump straight into the last part of the workshop, using Fabler.

We had no time, so adopted a low tech and really easy option and asked each participant to write an A4 page long story about what they had been doing in their digital storytelling or just anything they fancied. This was really quick actually and people needed little encouraging, so once some had finished we gave them the iPhones and explained Ben’s Fabler app and they walked about the studio and listened to the stories. With those who were finishing their stories, once they had finished, I recorded them narrating their stories using an audio recorder (which Paddy had taught us to use for our interviews). The stories will be turned into a Mad Hatter’s Fabler app by Ben and the link with instructions on how to download will be emailed to participants. I used the edit suite to record the stories where possible. We recorded a few more whilst others took the iPhones and then we ended – 20 minutes late!

I asked people to fill in feedback forms even though we had overrun and I felt they wanted to go (they had been concentrating for a while now and had been bombarded with lots of information and new things!), but I needed to see what they had really thought of the workshop. It was also important to get all email addresses for the Fabler app link. At this point, I felt it had gone okay and was not sure if everyone (mainly the adults) had really enjoyed it because it had not gone to plan and I felt a bit stressed about that.

When I collected up and read the feedback I was pleasantly surprised – it was all positive and the parents really had enjoyed being with their children at the workshop and learning new skills. They were very thankful when they left but I could not properly gauge how the workshop had been at that time. One boy who, at 11 years old, was older than the others (who were mainly around 8 years old), and who had come along on his own, stayed on when his dad arrived and we all had a good chat. This young man was really talented and smart and understood all of Ben’s principles really well. He was a keen writer and we talked to him and him dad about the New Media Writing Prize and how he could enter. I felt really happy at this point because it really felt as if we had done something inspiring for the participants and have hopefully inspired at least one new digital storyteller.

As I reflect straight after the event, I still feel frustrated that I had thought we could cover so much in one workshop. I felt positive at the same time about this though because I think Ben could run a course on digital storytelling with some carefully planned sessions. I was a little concerned that Ben was pitching his digital storytelling information and explanations too high for the age group we had roped in, but I think it was alright. If we had had a room of 11 year olds then it would have been totally appropriate and I really think we should do this again!

I’ve come away energised and feeling like the challenge of the workshop was great. It was a steep learning curve re-thinking and reacting to the participants of the workshop and the fact that I had over-programmed. It was a good experience though and Ben, Hannah and I worked really well as a team and the group who came along were lovely. Once the last participants had left, it was time to pack down and really relax – all of the Down The Rabbit Hole events are over…

 

After the events

There were a few things to sort out after the events: Ben’s invoice, receipts, entering feedback into a spreadsheet, the FAF baseline survey, getting the Mad Hatter Fabler app to work and then sending participants the link. Phew!