British Council

From 18-20 January 2019, the British Council in Hong Kong held the first-ever SPARK: The Science and Art of Creativity, a brand-new festival of ideas. Free and open to the public, the festival took place at Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts and celebrated creativity across the arts, sciences and education with 37 events presented by 50+ partners from the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. We were hired to develop and implement a media and social strategy to announce the festival, communicate its key messages, encourage visitors and, most importantly, garner media coverage.

Research and Planning

We researched the world’s most successful arts and science festivals in-depth, developing a detailed media and social strategy based on our research and our experience of working with the British Council on their previous Science Festival in Hong Kong. 

 

Implementation
Our campaign covered the festival launch and building anticipation for the festival through regional media relations and festival programme updates, interviews with ​British Council spokespeople and festival partners, and executing a social media campaign across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to drive registration and attendance and engage festival partners. On-site, we managed the media attendance for both the opening ceremony and the festival itself, tailoring invitations to highlight select events that would be of interest to journalists; full-time on-site support throughout the festival, including daily media updates with photo and video highlights; distributed bilingual opening release and post-event release; facilitating on-site interviews with the British Council and programme partners; live social updates, including Instagram stories and daily highlight videos produced, edited and published on-site.

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Measurement & Evaluation

• 125 items of coverage from the launch on 14-Nov to the festival on 18-20 January

• Coverage across print and digital, broadcast, radio and social media from English and Chinese publications

• 100% of coverage was positive, and 89% of coverage used SPARK images for visual impact

• Top-tier publications, including RTHK, The Standard, Sing Tao Daily, SCMP, China Daily, CCTV and Hong Kong Economic Journal, conducted 17 interviews

• 90% of print / digital coverage were feature articles; the remaining 10% were listings 

• 78% of coverage appeared in tier 1 media

• All 3 social media channels grew organically during the campaign period, with 1818 new followers in total

• The social media campaign successfully drove people to the website with 600+ clicks through Facebook alone.

• 14,000 people attended the Festival.