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

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• 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

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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

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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)

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• 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

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• 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

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

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

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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

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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.

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• 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

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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

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• 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

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• 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

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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

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Any questions and fill in cards

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