Festival | BBC Contains Strong Language Festival of Poetry & Spoken Word
Clients | Nine Arches Press and Writing West Midlands
Festival Date | October 2021
Project Brief
As part of the City of Culture celebrations, Coventry hosted the annual festival of poetry and spoken word. I was brought in to secure press and media coverage of the festival at a ‘grass roots’ level. My brief was to ensure the residents of Coventry and the surrounding region knew about the festival by securing local broadcast and televised coverage, as well as securing coverage in the specialist poetry media. A multi-stakeholder festival production in the wake of the Covid outbreak, the brief evolved over the contract in line with the ever-evolving shifts in lockdown restrictions and it was essential that I was adaptable.
Campaign
Handheld communications are my speciality and for this festival, I did a significant amount of desk research to ensure that poetry-lovers in the region would find out about the festival both organically and also from writer development organisations in the area. As there were several special interest events including poetry walking tours, I also planned communications which would appeal to people with intersecting interests. I compiled a significant media list and liaised with the clients to ensure that their VIPs and key stakeholders knew about the many events well in advance.
Results
I secured a full-page editorial feature in the Poetry Society’s membership quarterly print newsletter Poetry News months in advance of the festival coming to Coventry. To ensure a long tail to the campaign, I also brokered a full-length feature by one of the co-producers in the Society of Authors’ distinguished magazine The Author, which is sent to over 10,000 members. Broadcast-wise, we had an announcement of the city’s new Poet Laureate on 5 Live as well as televised coverage of the opening day’s festivities. Both the Coventry Observer and the Coventry Telegraph previewed the festival in their print editions. Elsewhere, we benefitted from a two-page spread about a particular event in the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust Magazine.
To ensure organic traffic to the festival website, I posted listings on multiple sites of interest to the poetry readership including Mslexia, Arvon, NAWE, EuroLitNet, Society of Authors and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain while I also reached out to Coventry City Council and surrounding organisations in the region to ask them to share news of the festival with interested individuals.
