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Oxford Light
Festival 2021
Creating buzz around Oxford's famous Light Festival
Background
Established in 2009, Oxford’s Light Festival has become an iconic way to ring in the festive season, with some 90,000 people attending each year. The Oxford City Council-led festival offers an exciting and varied programme of events and displays that light up the city over one special weekend each November.
Community charity Fusion Arts has been a partner organisation of the festival since it started, and each year works with a variety of artists, schools and community groups to deliver creative and environmentally friendly lantern-building workshops. It also produces and distributes DIY lantern packs, hosts public online workshops and collaborates with partner organisations to run memorable and inspiring community events.
In 2021, Fusion delivered an ambitious programme of workshops and events. As the Marketing Manager for the organisation, I was prominently involved in promoting and sharing the festive events with their digital audiences, as well as shaping the festival's identity and output online.
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Brief
"Oxford's 2021 Light Festival is themed around the importance of community. We want
you to help us get as many people excited for and engaging with the community events and activities in their areas as possible."
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Process
Fusion's largest offering for Oxford's 2021 Light Festival was Finding the Light, a special community event in Florence Park run in collaboration with not-for-profit organisation FloFest. The aim of the event was to bring people together and turn the park into one big magical light celebration, featuring light sculptures and trails, a lantern procession and a glowing lantern garden.
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We needed to to get the community making lanterns to be displayed at the event by reaching as many local people as possible, including schools, groups, artists, volunteers and other organisations. This required a multi-pronged, multi-channelled approach. Firstly, we recruited artists to run lantern-building workshops, and schools and community groups to participate in these workshops. I worked with Fusion's Projects Manager to craft two callouts. Both outlined the exciting theme of the festival and encouraged everyone to get involved with the lantern-making celebrations. However, one was recruiting for session leaders and the other recruited participants. Knowing that the organisation of this festival tends to be a long process, I started circulating the callouts in July 2021. I used the callout copy and archive festival photography to produce attractive mailouts tailored to each audience type. As Fusion has a large artist newsletter subscriber base, potential workshop leaders were targeted using the organisation's general mailing list, along with personalised emails and DMs sent to artists that Fusion had previously worked with. The general public, community groups and parents were also encouraged to express their interest in participating using the organisation's general mailing list, meanwhile schools and teachers were contacted via Fusion's 'Schools' mailing list, with pre-established contacts receiving direct email invites. The callouts were also circulated on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and the workshop leader opportunity was shared on Fusion, OxonArts, Daily Info and ArtsJobs' websites.
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Left: callout for participants on Instagram; middle: callout for workshop leaders on Twitter; right: callout for both participants and leaders in a newsletter
To inspire even more groups to get making lanterns, Fusion offered a 'Twilight Session' for teachers and group leaders to learn how to teach their classes to make lanterns themselves. To help recruit for this, I produced a schools-targeted mailout that combined bright, attractive imagery with enthusiastic, audience-appropriate copy.
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Another portion of Fusion's engagement drive was to sell and distribute inexpensive or free environmentally-friendly DIY lantern building kits to people around Oxford. The aim of this was to include those who were unable to leave their homes or unable to attend community lantern-building sessions in the creative fun. On the communications front, I put out another callout advertising a paid opportunity for an artist to design an instructional lantern-building guide to be included in each kit. The callout was again circulated via social media, Fusion's newsletter and website as well as other arts opportunity websites. Once the artist had been selected and the instructions and promotional materials had been designed, I worked alongside the Projects Manager to produce an online store for the kits on the e-commerce website Big Cartel. As the Projects Manager was responsible for the arranging sourcing, assemblage and distribution of each kit, we collaborated to ensure that kit content information, delivery times and other logistical details were accurate. Armed with the facts, I was then able to add a flourish of excitement and magic to the sales copy, setting a wintry scene and describing the ways that this lantern could add a twinkle to the prospective customer's home or community. We then decided on a live launch date based on material arrival times and proximity to the October half-term holidays. After this, I was able to begin teasing the launch of the store, using a mixture of paid and organic social media advertising, newsletters and targeted emails, and website listings to encourage orders in time for half-term. I used the hashtag #OxLightFest2021 in promotions to improve the social media discoverability and SEO of the campaign, and tagged partner organisations and the contributing artist in social media posts to help spread the word. Once the website was live, I liaised with the festival's Marketing Manager to get the lantern store featured on the official festival website, helping connect it to the festival and reach a broader audience.
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Top left: illustrator callout tweet; bottom left: section in newsletter promoting the store; middle: illustrator callout email; top right: DIY lantern kit online store; bottom right: the completed lantern instructions by Jumana Hokan
Starting in mid-October, lantern-making sessions were beginning to get underway. Taking inspiration from the design of the DIY lantern kit instructions, I produced several posters and social media tile variations that were used by Oxford Business Park and Activate Learning to advertise the workshops to prospective participants.
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Left: social media flyer advertising workshop; middle: poster version; right: mockup of the poster in situ
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Another avenue of engagement offered by Fusion was a free, online family-friendly lantern-building workshop for the general public. The session was run by artists Dee Moxon and Amy Peck, who showed participants how to transform household rubbish, craft supplies and found natural objects into beautiful wildlife-themed lanterns. I was responsible for setting up the Zoom event, producing a registration system for the session and promoting it. I did this by mixing photos of the impressive results from the previous year with punchy copy that sold this fun, environmentally-friendly opportunity to upcycle household rubbish into stunning lanterns. The registration page was hosted on Eventbrite and promoted on local events listings sites, Fusion's website and newsletter, the festival website, social media posts and tweets, Facebook's events listings and the Light Festival central Facebook events page. It was also featured in a festival press release appearing on Oxford City Council's website.
L-R: Eventbrite registration page; workshop advert in newsletter; workshop promotion on Facebook; workshop promotion on Twitter
As the event drew closer, I made sure to take online audiences along for each step in the lantern-making preparations, sharing different groups' creations (where permission was granted) in order to build anticipation for and awareness of the festival. Snapshots were shared on social media, Fusion's newsletters and website, with updates encouraging followers to order their own lantern kits, or come along to one of the lantern-building workshops.
The Finding the Light event itself was mostly advertised through FloFest's social platforms due to their follower demographic, as the event was intended to be just for local people owing to capacity restrictions. As such, attendees were encouraged to walk or cycle to the park. To include those who were not able to attend in the celebrations, Fusion decided to stream parts of the festivities on Instagram live. Taking inspiration from the event poster, I designed social media tiles and stories cards to help advertise the broadcast.
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Several days before the Light Festival, I wrote and released a newsletter which built anticipation for the weekend and gave readers details about Finding the Light and Glow Your Own, the two festival events that Fusion was supporting (encouraging users to head to the festival website to view the full programme).
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I also let local press outlets know about the events so that they could send journalists to cover the celebrations. This resulted in several articles in the Oxford Mail.
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On the day of Finding the Light, Fusion went live on Instagram a number of times, capturing the festive fun as it lit up the park. I helped the livestreams gain traction by tweeting and sharing stories signposting to the broadcasts. The night was a spectacle from start to end, with some 3,500- 4,000 people attending throughout the night to experience the tree cathedral, light sculptures, dance performances, light trails, a lantern procession and laser disco party.
Post-festival, I kept up with communications, sharing the wealth of spectacular photos and footage that had been taken of both events on Fusion's social media platforms alongside engaging rundowns of the nights' events. I felt it was important to acknowledge the fantastic efforts of the community, groups, artists, volunteers and organisations who had worked so hard to make both nights possible. It was also an ideal opportunity to publicly thank the event sponsors, foster a sense of community, preserve memories of the nights, showcase the beautiful light creations, highlight the value of these community events to prospective future funders, and build hype for next year's celebrations.
For the same reasons, I wrote a blog post on Fusion's website that gave a lively synopsis of the organisation's festival activities.
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With permission from the artists and community groups who made them, we decided to keep the magic going by installing some of the larger lantern pieces in Fusion's central Oxford pop-up creative space 95 Gloucester Green over the festive period. I again shared this on social media, in a newsletter and as a news article on Fusion's website, encouraging people to visit the luminous creations.
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Fusion had also commissioned media students from Oxford's Activate Learning college to produce short films documenting Finding the Light as a memento of the night. They produced some brilliant high quality work and with a few tweaks on my end (switching to royalty-free soundtracks and adding organisation logos), I was able to share their lovely pieces on Fusion's YouTube channel and social media pages in January 2022, keeping the spirit of the festival alive even longer.
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After the festival, myself and other festival partner organisations worked with the festival's Marketing Manager to produce a press release that did justice to the phenomenal success of the weekend and the spectacular efforts of all the neighbourhoods, groups and organisations who shaped the events. This got picked up by Oxford Mail, and also sits on Oxford City Council's website.
Results
In the months leading up to the festival, Fusion worked with 13 community artists alongside teachers and group leaders to run workshops that engaged over 960 people in building more than 980 lanterns to be displayed during festival events. Almost 800 of the participants were young people.
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The organisation sold 77 lantern kits through the online store as well as material for a further 100 lanterns, which was purchased via bulk order. 12 families and individuals tuned into the online workshop to learn how to upcycle household rubbish into stunning lanterns.
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Finding the Light was a resounding success, with all the beautiful lanterns made by schools, groups and artists proudly displayed in a community lantern patch and along the pathways of the park. Some 3,500 - 4,000 local residents visited the event throughout the night, adding to the celebrations and sharing in the experience with their own lanterns, torches and lit-up hula hoops. An extra 106 people tuned in via the event Instagram livestream. Public responses to Finding the Light included:
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"Such a lovely event. Thank you so much for doing this and bringing some light into the community."
"Catered for real life people from every background coming together to enjoy the start of Christmas – magical!"
"This is brilliant, thank you so much! Please repeat!"
It was wonderful to help promote such a memorable, unique and inspiring event that clearly held social and cultural value. Being able to facilitate creativity and connectivity amongst people was also a rewarding part of this campaign. Finding the Light 2021 pioneered a community-focused aspect to Oxford's Light Festival, which was taken to greater heights this year with an even larger Finding the Light that ran over both festival nights.