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Oxford Windrush Festival 2021
Promoting awareness and engagement to celebrate the Windrush community
Background
The Oxford Windrush Festival is an annual week-long festival held around Windrush Day (22nd June). It delivers public events including theatrical performances, talks, workshops, activity days and exhibitions that celebrate Oxford's Windrush community, recognise their contributions and pays respect to their hardships.
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The festival is run by the Oxford Windrush Group (OWG), which is supported by Oxford City Council and comprised of many organisational partners including Museum of Oxford, Oxford Brookes University, ACKHI and community agency Fusion Arts.
Leading up to, during and after Oxford Windrush Festival 2021, I was working as the Digital Marketing, Communications and PR Manager at Fusion Arts and had a principal role in developing and executing the digital promotion and marketing strategy of the 2021 festival.
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Brief
"Help us develop the brand and social identity of OWG and the 2021 festival. We want to use our Facebook page to educate people about the Windrush community, give members of the community a platform and promote festival events in an approachable way. Our aim is to keep pre-existing attendees
engaging and to increase awareness, attendance and engagement levels compared to last year."
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Process
In this project, my role was to be the primary communications contact for all OWG organisations and event organisers. I was responsible for aggregating all festival information and creating a cohesive and effective digital marketing campaign. The OWG had a pre-existing Facebook page with around 500 followers and a good engagement rate that had been used during the two previous festivals. I therefore decided that it would be advantageous to continue using this as the central, consolidated platform for sharing festival information and Windrush resources, with the intention to maintain and build on the page's reach.
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The first portion of the festival's publicity drive was the press release. We decided that it would be pertinent to release an initial teaser for the festival on Stephen Lawrence Memorial Day, which falls on the 22nd of April each year. This would allow for several months of promotion leading up to the festival, and would ensure that the topic of dismantling racial inequality was already at the forefront of people's minds, helping the festival promotion to gain traction. To create the press release, I collated information from each organiser about the nine events planned for the festival. I used this to put together a programme, writing engaging and informative copy to detail each attraction. I topped this off with a captivating hook, connecting the ongoing need for racial justice with the timely release of Oxford Windrush Festival's 2021 events programme.
"Today is Stephen Lawrence Memorial Day, a day that both commemorates the short yet impactful life of Stephen Lawrence, who was tragically murdered in a racially motivated attack in 1993, and gives us room to reflect on the part we all play in removing racial inequality from society."
- Extract from press release
After getting sign off from OWG, I shared the finished press release with local press contacts. This led to features published on Stephen Memorial Lawrence Day in both Oxford Mail and Ox in a Box. I also liaised with event partner Oxford Brookes University to get the programme published on their website, and published it as an article on Fusion Arts' website and newsletter. Finally, I launched a social media-friendly copy of the programme on the Oxford Windrush Group Facebook page itself, using images supplied by OWG members from past events. I encouraged all OWG organisations and members to share the programme / Facebook post on their own social media platforms, further amplifying its reach. The aim of this cross-platform, multi-outlet copy-consistent approach was to optimise the festival's discoverability through search engines and social media.
Left: article on Ox in a Box's website; second left: article on Oxford Mail's website; second right: programme announcement on the OWG Facebook page; right: article on Fusion Arts' website
Once the announcement was live, I got to work creating intriguing and platform-appropriate online listings for each of the scheduled events. I used Facebook events first and foremost (posting the listings as the OWG page and inviting associated organisations as co-hosts), and then shared listings on local sites Daily Info, Independent Oxford and OxonArts. An additional task was to create a sign-up page for Still Breathing, a free ticketed performance, using Eventbrite. I wanted to get all of these listings up as early as possible, so that anyone reading the programme and interested in a particular event could access further information or ticket registration by searching on Google. This multi-platform approach again boosted SEO, and led to several of the attractions getting listed as Google events.
A selection of the festival event listings on various sites
Concurrently to this, I was organising a social media schedule for the OWG Facebook page to be shared in the lead up to the festival. The plan was to post a variety of informative and interesting content that drove people both within and outside of the Windrush community to engage. This included festival updates, event-specific information, topical Windrush-related media (e.g. documentaries, articles, radio spots, interviews), features on the work and experiences of Windrush community members, relevant opportunities and support resources for those affected by the Windrush scandal. For new and
unfamiliar followers, I decided it would be helpful to share educational posts on Windrush Day, the Windrush generation and the Windrush scandal, so that they could understand the context of the festival, the need for it and why its theme was 'belonging'. These posts would be supplemented with links to further reading and resources.
A variety of social media content shared leading up to and during the festival
Producing this schedule and the content required for these posts involved the procurement of information from various sources. I created an outline for the schedule, and shared this with OWG members, enabling them to supply information and photography as well as to use the content for their own social media / promotional output. As many of the events were new to 2021's festival, I sourced suitable license-free photography where pre-existing images were unavailable.
Creating the educational, media and support related-posts required me to do independent research and keep my ear to the ground for Windrush news. It was important to be responsive to any relevant media that I discovered or was flagged by OWG colleagues, readjusting the schedule accordingly. A large part of my work was adapting information on this complicated and nuanced topic for a social media-based, potentially unfamiliar audience.
Posts featuring support and educational resources and license-free photographs
Windrush community feature content was sourced from connections within the OWG, including work from a project by Brookes Art and Design students artistically responding to the experiences of members of Oxford's Windrush generation, which I again adapted for social media.
A couple of the community features
Content was scheduled logically, relating to the immediacy of an event or feature and the level of information that I had for it. Around these posts, I planned the educational and support content, so that there was an average of three posts shared a week in the 6 weeks leading up to the festival, and at least one post a day in the week preceding and during the festival week. This would allow the Windrush Festival to stay present in people's feeds without being overexposed, and allow more opportunities for engagement and topic / festival awareness amongst users. Most of the posts linked to further information or support and made use of the #WindrushDay and #OxfordWindrushFestival hashtags to enhance discoverability and ensure that the content was part of the online Windrush conversation. All of these posts were then pre-scheduled using Facebook Business Suite.
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Several weeks before the festival, I started boosting the Facebook event listings, using paid advertising to promote the festival more prominently and circulate the events to the wider Oxford community. I also shared various events on suitable local activity pages. For instance, the family-friendly discovery day was promoted to the Oxford Families Facebook Group.
I also capitalised on Fusion Arts' Oxford-based, socially engaged online following and network of contacts, using their tone of voice to share content on their social platforms promoting the festival and its events.
Posts shared by Fusion Arts to promote the festival
As the festival approached and the schedule was confirmed, we worked with talented Graphic Design student Rossilyn Baker to produce promotional materials including posters, flyers, social media tiles, and banner art that centred the festival's 'belonging' theme. Rossilyn combined the colourway of the group's logo with a screen print of HMT Empire Windrush docking at Dover to create a distinctive visual identity for the festival. I rolled out these materials across communications platforms, using the banner art for the OWG page cover photo, and sharing the posters and social media tiles on the group's Facebook page. These materials were made available to all OWG organisations, who were encouraged to use them in festival communications to amplify its visual identity.
The marketing materials created by Rossilyn and examples of how they were used on the Facebook page
Another visual identity-related task for this campaign was crafting an online presence for the Caribbean Living Room exhibition. This is a popular permanent show and social space for the African heritage community run by OWG groups ACKHI and BK.LUWO within a meanwhile-use unit managed by Fusion Arts. In May 2021, the exhibition was able to reopen part-time following lockdown restrictions, and was due to open full-time during the Oxford Windrush Festival week. To advertise the attraction, I developed a simple flyer using a pre-existing photograph of the show combined with a bold orange and black colour scheme based on accent colours from the photo. This asset was shared with the exhibition curators and other OWG members for their use, was printed and distributed as a poster around east Oxford, and was posted on the OWG Facebook page to announce the show's reopening to great fanfare. I also used the graphic to create a striking Google Business profile for the room, as well as a listing for the space on Fusion's website. Variations of the graphic were used for subsequent exhibition updates such as temporary closures and as a paid advert on Facebook. In the run up to the festival, signage using a similar colour scheme and typeface was installed onto the space's hoarding, helping create an embodied brand identity for the attraction.
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Top L-R: Caribbean Living Room social flyer; CLR poster; CLR poster seen in-situ; bottom L-R: CLR flyer used to announce its reopening on Facebook; CLR temporary closure announcement using same graphic style; CLR Google Business listing; CLR flyer used to advertise it in Fusion Arts' newsletter
Around a week and a half before the festival, I wrote and distributed another press release. This again teased the dazzling array of events that would mark Windrush Day 2021 in Oxford, and included a quote from Still Breathing creator Euton Daley. The release led to prominent features on the Oxford Mail, Ox in a Box and Daily Info websites.
"Oxford will mark Windrush Day 2021 with a jam-packed week-long festival including theatrical performances, taster workshops, and exhibitions."
- Extract from press release
Media features promoting the festival
"Still Breathing is a heartfelt piece for all involved in struggles for equality and justice. I sincerely hope I have captured some of their spirit of determination, joy, despair, anger and anguish whilst contributing to the conversations to be had and the actions to be taken."
- Euton Daley, quoted in press release
During the festival, I shared live updates from events on the OWG page to entice viewers to come and join in. Post-festival, I continued to use the page as a platform to sporadically share related local events, opportunities and resources. The aim of this was to keep OWG and its motivations relevant / present, keep the Windrush conversation going (showing that the need for awareness and support is ongoing and not constrained to one week) and to generate momentum for next year's festival, starting the promotional push earlier than ever before.
Social updates shared during the festival week
Results
Over the course of this marketing campaign, Oxford Windrush Group Facebook page followers grew by 8.5%, whilst engagement increased by 560% in comparison to the pre-campaign period. The average engagement rate per campaign post was 6.1%, a significant improvement on the 1.9% average engagement rate on posts made for the 2020 festival. Anecdotally, it appeared that commenters were a mixture of pre-existing and new followers.
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The 115 tickets available for Still Breathing sold out on its Eventbrite listing a week in advance of the performance. Meanwhile, approximately 100 people, including families, attended the festival's educational discovery day, with the event managers reporting lots of positive feedback from attendees, who requested that the event be repeated soon.
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The Caribbean Google Business listing came up in 462 searches during the festival month (June 2021), and continues to maintain an impressive online and physical reach to this day.
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Oxford Windrush Festival received numerous positive write ups from local news outlets, helping to solidify / legitimise the reputation and cultural standing of this recently established celebration.
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The Oxford Windrush Group were extremely pleased with my management of this campaign and asked me to continue maintaining their Facebook page and publicity drive on a permanent basis.
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Overall, an estimated 2,000 people were engaged online and / or in-person for Oxford's 2021 Windrush Festival!
