Brief
Being the largest event of its kind globally, The Scottish Mental Health Arts & Film Festival required a website that would be able to promote and display all of the approximate 200 events taking place at various times throughout the month of October. The solution had to specifically overcome barriers that they had experienced in previous years in terms of managing and manipulating content for the festival, so a very unique solution was required for this project.
Although there was a significant development process to deliver they also wanted to continue with maintaining and strengthening their core message about challenging attitudes towards mental health.
Our Approach
Although there was a strong focus on developing a solution to specifically address the previous issues with the events calendar, we did not want this development to detract from any visual impact or user interaction with the website. We also wanted to provide a solution that would make good ground work towards creating a sustainable website that could be built upon for the foreseeable future.
Our main focus was to custom build a specific type of events calendar. We designed not only the website but also developed a bespoke interface to manage the multiple events at an administration level. A traditional calendar (which was used previously) was not required for this project as this festival spans over a three week period of one month only. We also included multiple social media networking through services such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and also included podcasts for the users to follow along with.
This project regardless of the amount of development work was on a strict deadline which had to be met. To be sure wouldn’t forget to reach this target we even put a countdown timer on the website so that everyone would see when it was due to go live. The website was set live to everyone exactly as the countdown reached zero, even though it was at the turn of midnight.
Results
We set up a holding page on the build up to the festival that collected a good amount of email subscriptions of interested users. We gathered lot’s of useful analytical information and worked continuously with the festival team throughout the festival to ensure everything ran as smoothly as possible. We are delighted to be working with the festival team again for this year where we look towards enhancing the current features that the website offers.
Festival Director Lee Knifton said “Midgibyte have been a great online partner. They have worked very quickly, developed neat solutions to complex problems, responded quickly to issues and maintained a good sense of humour throughout. Perhaps most importantly to us they work with us to constantly improve things- great development can rarely be fully pre-determined -it has to be iterative- and this ongoing support and advice differentiates Midgibyte from so many other corporate agencies.”
Festival Manager Pamela Clarke continues “We are very keen to continue working with the Midgibyte team building on what we have achieved together so far, and have no plans to look elsewhere for web support”.
Visit the SMHAFF website: http://www.mhfestival.com/
