Event Case Study.
We were brought into Pitt St. to help sell tickets for Send It 100, a two-day festival. We went into the first meeting with open ears and one caveat: we had never advertised a festival before. Any advice we had came from research, not from practical experience.
It is not the strongest opening pitch in the world. It is the honest one, and we would rather lose a job than win it on a claim we could not back. The leadership team were kind enough to take the meeting anyway.
They told us they had not had time to prepare, because their headliner had dropped out. They also made it clear that a lot of tickets still needed to sell before the thing would break even. The event had been pulled together quickly, because it had to run as part of Portsmouth’s 100 years celebrations. Hence the name.
Pitt St. is a C.I.C., and the directors were plainly passionate about what they were building. So we took the project on at no cost, and spent the next two months selling tickets in any way imaginable.
Once it became clear to us that the average attendee spent £30 on top of their ticket cost, our leading strategy became giving tickets away, using strategic methods that advertised the festival while they did it. Tickets went up as pub quiz prizes. We ran social media contests. We provided business owners with tickets in exchange for on-site posters.
This is a technique used by all major festivals. It works well for them, and it worked very well for us.
We then secured a strong presence across the student body, which had been overlooked entirely, not through oversight but because there had simply been no time. We liaised with our print provider, who generously extended the preferred rates usually reserved for us. And we secured Send It marketing on a local app, putting a message directly into 10,000 residents’ pockets by SMS, at a cost no other platform came close to.
What happens next.
When attending the festival, aware our support had paid off, we captured supplementary photography and drone footage, so that a now successful event has the media it needs when it runs again in the coming years.
We made it clear that this is where the real leverage is. All the knowledge, connections, documentation and processes developed to put the festival on once can be used again. The next festival can learn from the mistakes of the previous one, and has the benefit of the previous year’s event as an additional advert.
Send It will only get bigger and better from this day on.