The brief
At Solas Festival, a celebration of the arts in Perthshire, I navigated a challenging period for the live performance sector.

My role
I steered the communications strategy, and commissioned a fresh visual identity by a Scottish illustrator, which has a hand-drawn look to represent the festival across all platforms. To develop the national campaign, I created a ‘heat map’ of ticket booker postcodes. This allowed me to visualise the location of previous attenders, and to select key areas to focus on for print distribution and online and offline advertising.

For a new strand of author events, I contacted bookshops across the central belt to arrange social media swaps.

To encourage local audiences to come, I organised a launch photocall with The Courier, which led to extensive preview coverage.

The result
The campaign drove a substantial increase in ticket sales (1,000 attenders, the highest for 8 years, up by 80% on 2022), website visits, and social media engagement. Website users have increased by 24% for the year to date, and Instagram reach and Facebook engagement went up by a factor of three.