The Edinburgh International Science Festival received money from Ambition Scotland’s Digital Content Development Fund to help us expand our content capture and establish an effective distribution strategy. As an annual Festival, we face challenges around how best to showcase our work, keep people engaged year round and deliver wider benefits for our sponsors and stakeholders.
We’ve worked with our video partners for two years but we applied to the fund to help us do more with the content that we have. As part of this project, we’ve reviewed our content bank and established a project plan for future capture and delivery.
WHY FOCUS ON VIDEO CONTENT?
Science is pretty popular right now but lots of people still think a science festival event isn’t for them. We want to grow our audiences so packaging some of our fun sociable science events into short videos is a great way to highlight exactly what we offer and challenge those preconceptions. We’ve partnered with organisations like The List Magazine who now host our content and help reach one of our key target markets.
We have over 200 events during the Festival each year and a large number of programme partners. Working with an act from our programme in 2013, we produced a short video that provided an entertaining summary of his show. Joint promotion of this film has resulted in over 60,000 views to date – we all benefit from this raised profile.
It’s not all about having fun; we have an education remit and bring high profile people together for interesting and challenging discussions and debates during our Festival. At one of our events, we discussed whether a mission to Mars could be successful. To populate our content hub, we’re producing longer versions of these types of videos – summarising and showcasing what happened at Edinburgh International Science Festival and engaging our audiences in wider discussions.
Our short videos help sell what we do and form an important part of the pitches to sponsors, stakeholders and international clients. They help visualise what we do and what is unique about the experiences we offer.
THE FUTURE
We’re launching a new website in 2014 with a content hub to host this work more effectively. We’ve been working with our video partners on a year round strategy and on re-editing our content to suit the new site. This pilot year has shown us what works best for our programme and our current and future audiences so we’ll be taking those learnings into our future content development.