D&G Arts Festival – 2021 Hame’ll Dae Me Festival 

I was proud to be part of the team that delivered the 2021 Hame’ll Dae Me Dumfries & Galloway Arts Festival 16^th – 26^th July 2021. We placed audiences and artists from the region first and foremost, ensuring that every event was made by, featured, or directly engaged with artists and audiences across the region. 

We were able to inject pride and excitement into each element of our programme, allowing us to support our diverse communities to tell their stories through different platforms, keeping Dumfries & Galloway on the map as an area of artistic national importance. 

Our team faced a number of challenges after the cancellation of our 2020 Festival, including rescheduling of dates for 2021 and creating a completely new concept for a reimagined Festival. Throughout the process of delivering the Festival we showed resilience and the capability to adapt in the face of adversity. We produced and delivered a festival that was unlike what we would usually deliver. It forced us to think outside the box, be creative, adapt to new situations and challenge ourselves.

At our live events across Dumfries & Galloway, we had over 950 people attend the events and 6,639 people watched our online performance programme. 

Due to the challenges with print marketing throughout the pandemic, the feedback received through our Festival evaluation showed that 39.5% of people had attended our Festival directly due to the Facebook campaign that I had created.

During the 2021 Festival, we received 1.23million views of our published press, significantly increasing our national brand awareness working in collaboration with Storytelling PR. 

I also ran strong local and national advertising campaigns to market our Festival and I have built strong partnerships with DG Standard, DNG Media, DG Life, Galloway Gazette, The Skinny, SNACK Mag, Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, Castle Douglas Journal, the Stewartry Bulletin and regularly work alongside Derek and Robin from DGWGO on a number of projects.

During the run up to the launch of the Festival, I also managed the redesign of the Festival website to ensure it aligned with their new strategic and business aims. Throughout the Festival period in comparison to the 2019 Festival, I increased users by 28.76%, new users by 30.89%.

There was an increase in social media traffic to our website by 284.69% due to the social media campaign I ran for the Festival. The social media campaign consisted heavily of video content from artists. This worked well and we were able to see a pattern develop across our ticket sales where we sold out all shows at the Theatre Royal after posting the videos for each performance.  

During the 10 day Festival, we reached over 121,000 people through our social media campaigns across Facebook, Instagram and X.

I also organised artists spotlight videos with local artist Grant Dinwoodie of The Lucky Doves where he spoke about his time in lockdown and how that had influenced his creativity and development of his practice. 

Here are some examples of the successful videos I produced alongside Purple Box Productions – who are a great team, go check them out if you’re looking for the best high-quality videography.