5pm 21.06.2011 – 5pm 22.06.2011: http://www.fiveminutetheatre.com – a virtual live theatre project powered by webcasting and standard Scottish bandwidth! Join the National Theatre Scotland’s 5th birthday celebrations, showing online 24 hours of live 5 minute pieces of theatre by anyone for everyone. Hannah’s other company Envirodigital have been the technical consultants, and producers. To provide an insight and case study of the complex process of creating the ievent, NTS have built up a video blog over the weeks.
Also in this blog: an update on the digital developments of Timespan Museum, Arts and Heritage Centre, Stellar Quines theatre company and Sadler’s Wells.
Check-out Timespan’s new website: this development concludes a period of investment in Timespan’s core digital capacity (new kit, more operational activities taking place online) and digital capability (training – in how to work all the online systems and create content for the new online marketing channels). Now the fun starts: Timespan will be stepping up their own digital media creation, creating a virtual museum, and curating an artists’ online community. Great work!
Take ten minutes to watch and consider theatre company Stellar Quines‘ case study video. The story tracks Stellar Quines’ learning as they try and blend capturing work digitally into their theatre making process.
Recently, I had the chance to hear how London dance champions Sadler’s Wells’ digital strategy was going. Kingsley Jeyasekera has had a change in title: previously Director of Marketing and Communications, he’s now Director of Communications and Digital Strategy – a subtle change that hasn’t really affected what he and his team does every day, but it’s significantly affected the way the organisation considers digital – its now an explicit part of Sadler’s Wells’ senior management responsibilities.
Sadlerswells.com is a website doing well. With 10,000 site visits a day, 75% of their ticket sales are via online sales. Kingsley reported that multi-buy does encourage multiple booking, and that giving website users the opportunity to pick their own seat does encourage people to book online.
QR codes on marketing posters for the summer production of Fela distributed around London and beyond encourages an immediate response via mobile phone – and users get rewarded with mobile optimised content, including a video of Jay-Z expressing how good the show is!
Kingsley’s team keep a close eye on their Google analytics, and track and archive the results. This tells them, for instance, interesting things like: the referrals to the their website from Facebook have increased 450% in the last 2 years. This data provides a great case for investing in further Facebook page and campaign development, and the new consideration of setting up social selling (coupons) via Facebook and possibly even direct selling via Facebook. “Facebook is social, so is theatre”, Kingsley grins!
Sadler’s Wells take time to create good quality video content – typically, any video created by them is watched 8000 times. The video content they create is all archived on their site and on their YouTube channel, where it creates lasting value – educationalists and students, touring companies and performers and dance aficionados all refer to the content later.
The 180,000 strong e-mailing list is communicated with twice a month, with a 45-50% open rate (good). Again Google analytics can tell the team what links are clicked, and they’ve noticed a pattern that a link to a video is far more likely to be clicked than a link to information.
Their approach to security and back up is as pragmatic as is their approach to Twitter. They protect themselves against server outage and other cyber-threats. With 75% sales online, the website and digital sales are business critical and must be protected. In relation to Twitter they have a simple mantra – “if it doesn’t fit with the aims of the organisation, don’t tweet it!”