Keeping the Conversation Alive Lindsey Schofield, Festival of Colour Ever wondered how a biennial festival can maintain engagement in between festivals? It’s a bit like a long distance relationship with intense bursts of activity and then long periods of silence. Facebook is the perfect medium however to keep the conversation going and enable both sides to feel involved and connected when it sometimes feels like there’s not much to talk about. The Festival of Colour has developed a unique way of approaching content using ‘content buckets’ to keep conversations meaningful and relevant. In this session Festival of Colour General Manager Lindsey Schofield will show how she approached this dilemma, and why Facebook was the right medium for this in all the plethora of social media channels. She will outline what their initial goals were and how they implemented them with some step by step practical advice on how to manage Facebook content, how to navigate your way through the minefield of Facebook advertising and will share the best practice that she has developed for this biennial festival. Never afraid to show what didn’t work as well as what has worked this will be an interesting and entertaining session ideal for anyone who faces a challenge of engaging with their audiences with a small budget, little resource and sometimes feeling like they’ve got nothing to say! Ideal for festival, production company, and venue management and marketing staff.

1. Its all very well starting a relationship but how do you keep the spark alive when
there’s sometimes not much to talk about and you don’t see each other very often. I
don’t know how many of you have had long distance relationships but I speak from
personal experience when I say it is hard work!! Many years ago (almost another
lifetime) I managed for a year to conduct a relationship with a Brazilian boy friend. I
was in England – and this was the days before texting and email were commonplace.
So we would have passionate get togethers twice a year full of intensity and
commitment and then limp along with weekly phone calls and not really having too
much in common anymore.
Well it’s a bit like that when you run a biennial festival – we have an intense burst of
activity with our audience once every two years – the build up starts when we launch
the programme in February and then then festival itself is a turbo charged 6 days –
we have pictures, stories, content galore, engagement and connections and then
poof – gone! And then what the heck do we have to talk about. For some of you it
won’t be such a long time between activity but whatever the time period, the
equivalent of those once a week phone calls become harder and harder in thinking of
what to say. And no one wants to have those posts that you put on and no one likes it
except your best friend!
So this is the dilemma that the Festival of Colour faced on embarking on a
relationship with our audiences on Facebook and so I’ll take you through a few things
I’ve discovered along the way and how we’re making the relationship work and
keeping the conversations alive, fresh and relevant
1

2. • Set the scene, brief explanation of Festival of Colour, biennial arts festival, lack of
resource, lack of budget,
• Some off year activity
• We are in the fortunate position of having capacity audiences, high engagement
and much trust in our programme and content but
• Back in 2012 when we were planning for festival 2013 we knew that we had to
embark on a social media strategy – partly because it is expected and we knew we
had to increase our capability in that area, but also because we knew it was a
powerful medium to reach some of the new audiences that we had identified –
geographically and demographically ie younger audience and those over the hill in
QT
2

3. So that fateful date was April 14th 2010. I should probably mark it as an anniversary to
celebrate – yes that is when I opened a facebook page for the Festival of Colour. I had
had my own personal page for a couple of years and thought ‘well this is easy’ you
just put stuff on and people will like it and follow us. Hmm
I have no idea what the page looked like and probably just as well because I’m sure it
wasn’t very good. The first few posts were OK but pushing lots of information about
us at people and not asking for anything back. It was very one sided and so we kind of
limped along with a few friends – you know how it is. All my mates ‘friended the
page’
Over time it limped along – Festival 2011 came and went and to be honest as I was
researching for this seminar I didn’t even remember having a page then. It was very
much a secondary medium, forgotten about and hardly used. So imagine how our
partners felt – I’m stretching the analogy again but by this I mean our Friends base.
looking back at insights, it doesn’t go that far back but in August 2011 we had 166
likes and no engagement. The relationship was foundering and so in planning for
festival 2013 we knew we had to up skill in the whole digital and online space so I
Signed up for Optimiser and also listened to all the Optimiser webinars – there was
some fascinating stuff and I just didn’t know where to start first and wanted to do it
all NOW. But we were lucky enough to be selected for the one on one mentoring and
so relationship counselor Vicki to the rescue! Vicki and Jackie Hay helped to focus on
our objectives and goals and we decided to focus on facebook as I had some
3

4. experience and felt most comfortable with this medium with our limited resources
and time.
Talk about our wider goals –
we knew we needed to try and reach a younger audience and also had to develop
into a new market in Queenstown
1. Primary market is what we call the BMW’s – 55-75 – well off – living in the area
(and they bring friends and family – they all come to town for the 6 days).arts
aficionados, well educated, comitted to the arts. But we wanted to reach them in
QT and further afield than Wanaka
2. The audience to grow is younger people = school students and those in their 20s
and 30s (aligned with Stimulation)
3. Parents with young children for family events (aligned with Release)
3

5. • This is not how our page looked then – don’t have an image of what it did look
like but it wasn’t that great so one of the first things we did was to optimise the
page – changed cover shots, changed tabs, cleared up the About Us, added icons
and made it look good. Our objectives were
• In 2012 we had about 300 likes and by the time we started scoping the project
in March 2013 we had about 700 likes with aim of increasing to 1000 by April
2013
• We Wanted to grow Queenstown audience and engagement
• We needed to increase our internal capability and confidence
Then as we hurtled towards April we realized we needed some additional resource
and so Jackie Hay came down to act as our social media manager her networks and
experience had some phenomenal results
4

6. • Festival is on so there is lots to say – Jackie spent 24/7 on facebook posts and
tweeting. Our social media was buzzing and we had great results amongst the
arts community nationally a well as our local audiences. There was a high level of
interaction and collaboration with other arts organisation, performers, sponsors
and local stakeholders to share and engage with content. So the relationship
doesn’t exist in some kind of vacuum, use your other friends and contributors to
keep your content alive and relevant
5

7. 6

8. • Working with other festivals, theatre companies etc where of relevance and
using their content and hopefully tapping into their networks
7

9. • Working with all of our performers to encourage content sharing and being able
to raech their fan base
8

10. Jackie tweeted and posted and achieved some amazing results – likes increased to
2300 by the end of the festival - an increase of 228% (however word of warning you
never know who is going to try and go on a date with you and we had a big increase
in likes from Egypt looking for Holi festivals and other festivals of Colour so this skews
our demographics) I am in the process of trying to unfriend them and also make sure
that boost a post and ads are targeted primarily within NZ
It worked - engagement peaked at 32% during the festival and we grew our
proportion of QT followers, there were 26 at the start of the festival and now 264
(8.5% of our likes) However if we took out the Egyptians then QT would be second
behind Wanaka at 13% of our audience.
And I think we can safely say that our overall page looks smarter and I am certainly
more confident about using facebook – even though they often throw in curve balls
like with their new layout recently.
We had so much to say and share and the images are great and colourful and the
piece de resitance was our final photo album, see here.
These are two of the most successful posts during that period of intense activity
9

11. And this one had amazing number of likes – strong visual image
But then like with a long distance relationship when you have been together 24/7 and
done so much and been places and had a great time and then it’s all over and you’re
apart again and then what do you talk about…… well the thing that no one likes just to
keep talking about yourself so make sure you’re not just a megaphone about your own
organisation, and don’t just talk to people when you’ve got something to sell! And best
to try and be planned in the conversation, not just spur of the moment otherwise it can
sometimes be something that’s not of relevance. And sometimes it might be things that
you personally are not that interested in but if you think your audiences will be
interested then comment on it.
10

12. • So post festival when the dust had settled I embarked on some intense training
with Vicki and we started the one on one mentoring in earnest. It enabled me to
analyse which had been the most successful posts, and with Vickis guidance to
understand the Insights in facebook, which is quite scary but worth doing. I
analysed which were the most successful in terms of likes and engagement and
found some interesting results. And this could be totally different for your
organisation, but the most successful for us were 1) posts about Wanaka and
surrounding area, 2) performers that had played at the festival and 3) posts about
our people. And those with images worked best, although not so much video. So
we developed a content calendar using the idea of ‘content buckets’. So when I
plan my content it has to fit into one of the following ‘buckets'
Our organisation including the people
The performers who have links with us ie have performed at the festival
Other arts organisations
Local events
Local environment
• I develop a monthly content calendar and for festival 2015 will make sure this is
done well in advance. I ensure that there at least 2-3 posts per week and plan them
out in advance in a monthly calendar to ensure that postings are targeted and not
just random reactions to event.. So even if the festival isn’t doing anything there is
often something to say. The 2 pictured are 2 of our most popular This seems to
work in terms of maintaining our frequency of engagement and conversation so we
11

13. continue to post about the region and I also post regularly about other arts
events that are going on in the area – theatre and music of all types - to become
a curator for local and regional arts activities.
• Link this with other medium too – email newsletter and quote from mayor of
QLDC
11

14. • Post festival we also continued to grow our likes and tested various campaigns
and targeting which was a really useful exercise for quite low spend. We tested
event ads, promote a post and boost a post and we have increased our likes to a
further 3177. And its growing all the time.
• Now when we have any off year activity we can talk about it eg at present we
are going to be showing an Arts on Tour production of nick so I did a boost post
just to push it a bit further
12

15. • In the meantime we are launching a new ideas festival called aspiring
Conversations in October and so have debated long and hard about whether to
set up a new Facebook page and have to start the relationship all over again, and
have decide to run it as en event off the festival page so we can continue the
conversation with our existing fans and hopefully they will like it and we’ll have
something else to talk about.
• So we have all the foundations to enter into the next meeting (‘date’) with a
strong fan base, and some engagement to capitalise on so that hopefully we can
continue to have a really big conversation in April 2015
13

16. Its all very well starting a relationship but how do you keep the spark alive when
there’s sometimes not much to talk about and you don’t see each other very often. I
don’t know how many of you have had long distance relationships but I speak from
personal experience when I say it is hard work!! Many years ago (almost another
lifetime) I managed for a year to conduct a relationship with a Brazilian boy friend. I
was in England – and this was the days before texting and email were commonplace.
So we would have passionate get togethers twice a year full of intensity and
commitment and then limp along with weekly phone calls and not really having too
much in common anymore.
Well it’s a bit like that when you run a biennial festival – we have an intense burst of
activity with our audience once every two years – the build up starts when we launch
the programme in February and then then festival itself is a turbo charged 6 days –
we have pictures, stories, content galore, engagement and connections and then
poof – gone! And then what the heck do we have to talk about. For some of you it
won’t be such a long time between activity but whatever the time period, the
equivalent of those once a week phone calls become harder and harder in thinking of
what to say. And no one wants to have those posts that you put on and no one likes it
except your best friend!
So this is the dilemma that the Festival of Colour faced on embarking on a
relationship with our audiences on Facebook and so I’ll take you through a few things
I’ve discovered along the way and how we’re making the relationship work and
keeping the conversations alive, fresh and relevant
14

17. Any questions and fill in cards
15