Over the last ten years, we have been busy helping audiences discover unmissable events and experiences through our North of England listings website, creativetourist.com. Meanwhile, through our consultancy work, we have been helping destinations and place-based consortia to position culture for visitors and locals and to better understand culture’s role in place-making, place branding and destination management. 

However and wherever we have been working, the basic question of how to make listings work harder to reach audiences has never been too far off the agenda. 

Our own listings platform, Culture Hosts, began life back in 2015, as part of Greater Manchester’s Cultural Destinations programme, an initiative designed to enable arts and culture organisations to increase their reach by working with the tourism sector. It was supported by funding from Arts Council England and developed in partnership with Marketing Manchester and a consortium of Manchester-based arts organisations. A Cultural Concierge was established as part of this programme, working with visitor-facing staff at hotels and visitor information centres to improve their knowledge of Greater Manchester’s cultural offer. We discovered that the combination of high staff turnover and a constantly-changing offer meant that a training-based solution alone was unlikely to provide a sustainable long-term solution – a centralised platform of quality arts listings in Manchester was needed.

To address this need we built a new, integrated online listings platform – Culture Hosts. The transformational point of difference is that with Culture Hosts, arts/culture and tourism partners supply the data directly themselves – manually or automated – and the data can then be shared openly with multiple online channels with increased value and visibility. For the Cultural Concierge, the Culture Hosts platform is used directly by hotels and visitor-facing staff to keep-up with current arts listings in Greater Manchester, and we continue to supply a weekly newsletter of edited cultural highlights direct to their emails. But the Cultural Concierge was only the starting point and Culture Hosts is now a fast-growing platform which powers a number of different listings-driven channels and projects around the UK, and several future uses are live in development too.

With all this experience of developing and building a shared-listings platform, we read the discovery report by Nesta and The Satori Lab published on Culture Hive in 2019 with great interest – they conclude that arts listings are broken and that there is a lack of standards and technical competence (or will) around the use and potential of data across cultural institutions.

We agree and back their recommendation that the arts and cultural sector needs to use standard, structured data fields and embrace the potential of their data. They recommend Schema.org as the data standard – an internationally agreed dataset used by search engines to identify things like events, dates and places – and they suggest API connections to help realise the potential reach of their data – an API is effectively a feed which allows listings to be shared with publishers. These ideas have been the driving force behind our listings platform Culture Hosts since its inception.

In developing the potential of Culture Hosts we embraced these open data standards with the exact intention of making arts and cultural listings more efficient and able to reach new audiences. To achieve this we have invested in building a fit-for-purpose listings database which goes far beyond the capability of the original WordPress site created to power the original Cultural Destinations project in Manchester. 

Using the highly structured data fields based on Schema.org, this new database captures and stores information about venues, events and festivals alongside accommodation, food and drink, and retail. This information can be shared to as many publishers and applications as we wish using API connections. Similarly, the database can be populated by an infinite number of incoming API connections – not just from the Culture Hosts front end, but directly from existing databases, websites and even box-office systems like Spektrix.

With these added capabilities, we rebuilt our own consumer-facing ‘what’s on’ website, creativetourist.com, and we now power it entirely via Culture Hosts. Using the event and venue information from Culture Hosts has delivered a step-change in the efficiency and therefore sustainability of editorial and content management for creativetourist.com. Not only did it bring operational improvements and significant content and editorial time savings, but the data model nearly doubled the traffic to our website and helped connect more people than ever with cultural events in Manchester and across the North of England. 

We opened up an outgoing API connection to Marketing Manchester and they worked with their platform developer to integrate listings from Culture Hosts into their Visit Manchester website, which is powered by Simple View – a widely used website system used by many destinations across the UK. This was really the start of our ‘upload once, publish many places’ thinking which has driven Culture Hosts’ development.

We continue to find new applications for Culture Hosts – it is currently supplying event listings for destination management websites like Visit Manchester and Visit Greenwich, as well as venue data for local listings website Manchester Wire and highly localised listings for the soon-to-launch Manchester Oxford Road Corridor website. 

Other projects have taken a similar approach to creativetourist.com and built their websites on top of Culture Hosts listings – look out for Wakefield’s new visitor and resident facing website, Experience Wakefield (due to launch in 2021), and Manchester City Council’s new neighbourhood-specific website, Loads to do, designed to engage hard to reach audiences with the city’s cultural offer, both coming soon. 

So to come back to the Nesta and Satori Lab call for industry-wide action here – we firmly believe that we have created a platform which meets standards needed to make listings data work harder and that our consultation with organisations and destinations helps bridge the gaps in technical competence. If you would like to talk to us about how this can help you, please contact ben@creativetourist.com.

This article is an amended version of Open Listings – how Culture Hosts works which was first published on Culture Hive.

Like for everyone else across the world, things got a bit twisted upside down for us over the past few months. On our consumer-facing ‘whats on’ website, creativetourist.com, we’ve started referring to it as “you-know-what”, but the benefit of those reading in the (hopefully much brighter) future, I am of course referring to the coronavirus outbreak. 

In talking about this, it’s important to take a self-aware moment and acknowledge that we have not been working on the frontline for the NHS, we are not in low-paid service industry roles which were suddenly as dangerous as they were essential and our team are lucky enough to all be healthy and able to work safely at home. We are though, an organisation which specialises in arts and culture, heritage and placemaking – you know, all that stuff that people usually leave their homes for. We are also not publicly funded.

Like many across our industry, the moment the Prime Minister took action to help protect the lives of our citizens had an instant impact. Within 48 hours we had to ask our amazing team of freelance editors on creativetourist.com to stop what they were typing and bill us for the last time in what may have been quite a while. With all the events on our website either cancelled or rescheduled and not a single client in a position to pay for a future campaign, key members of the core team were furloughed. 

So what to do with a ‘what’s on’ website when everything has been cancelled? 

Our first step was to pause and see how the industry reacted – we can only point our audience in the direction of cultural distractions once they exist. It became clear very quickly that there would be an online response from the cultural response and we needed to be ready.

Working with our development team at OH Digital, we moved quickly to upgrade Culture Hosts, our integrated online listings platform which powers CreativeTourist.com, as well as content on other websites including VisitManchester.com, VisitGreenwich.com and the soon-to-be-launched Manchester City Council resident-facing website, Loads to Do. Taking the lead from Google, who had launched new emergency data standards around virtual events, we pushed out a new release of Culture Hosts which allowed cultural partners to upload online events. 

While the upload process remained as seamless as ever for our partners, the changes we applied meant that we were structuring online events with the same data markup which we do for all our other listings – in other words, search engines could now tell which of our events were happening online. We have brought this feature onto creativetoursit.com and it’s something which we will be in place for the Loads To Do website when that goes live. 

The Response

While we were tinkering away on these improvements, venues and organisations across the North of England had started rolling out their programme digitally; from watch-alongs of archived work to Facebook Live and Instagram events via virtual exhibitions and concerts. 

We’ve seen some excellent examples here in Manchester, in particular, the work of Manchester Collective stood out. A comparative minnow to the likes of Berlina Philharmoika who simply switched their paid service to a free one, Manchester Collective are incredibly agile and forward-thinking, seemingly switching onto digital overnight. They suit the online space better than most classical organisations who demand scores of players and a concert hall, they are all about intimacy and performing in found spaces and the sense of occasion isn’t lost too much over a broadband connection.

It didn’t just happen though – they branded what they were doing, Isolation Broadcasts, and put together a schedule of performances alongside a proper marketing campaign. They engaged publishers like creativetourist.com to promote their programme and found trusted voices like BBC Radio’s Elizabeth Alker and their own star violinist and Music Director Rakhi Singh who have big profiles to help extend their reach.

“Our work has always been about forging an arresting, personal connection with our audiences, and we knew that we had to continue in this vein throughout this wild and woolly time” says  Adam Szabo, Manchester Collective’s Chief Executive. “As a small, relatively new organisation, we’ve never had huge reserves or an endowment to fall back on. Any measure of success that we’ve had in this period has been due to the authentic and high-quality way that our artists and collaborators have communicated with our audiences. In times of crisis, audiences and stakeholders will not respond to “woe is me” messaging – arts lovers have always been attracted to passion and vision. Right now, part of that vision has to be about how to work effectively and inspirationally in a totally digital landscape.”

It is the way they used their artists and collaborators, not falling back solely on recorded concerts, but engaging audiences across their social platforms to create interactive content. If anything, it feels like Manchester Collective raised their profile over the last few months. 

We’ve seen similar examples from Band on the Wall who were the first to make an event and schedule around re-watching their archive concerts, and the Old Bank Residency – a twelve-month creative occupation of a disused bank in Manchester – who has shifted their entire schedule of tutorials and workshops online, even moving the focus of their sessions to cover things like mask-making and improving the lighting on your Zoom calls – all more relevant than ever in this new normal. 

We asked partners like these to upload their new programme of online events to Culture Hosts, and we published everything we could for them creativetourist.com without charge. While this completely bypasses our business model meaning creativetourist.com is being propped up out of our own pockets, it felt like the right thing to do. We love the cultural industry and the organisations who make Manchester and the North such a special place, and so does our audience. 

We continued to support these organisations and our audience as much as we could, but without our editors, our content wasn’t quite the same. 

The new normal

We made a successful bid for the Arts Council Emergency Response Fund: for organisations (non NPO) to bring our editorial team to keep audiences engaged with all the great lockdown culture created by organisations in the North and beyond. There have been nearly 300 activities featured on creativetourist.com since lockdown began and Arts Council funding will help us keep audiences engaged into the autumn. What lies beyond then, we are unsure. We know that creativetourist.com is one of the most effective marketing channels for arts and cultural organisations in the North with a click-through rate several times higher than similar sites. However, if can’t welcome back clients in the near future, there is a looming question mark over the longevity of this marketing channel.

Applying structured data to virtual event listings has been one of the keys to unlocking SEO success for some time now. Marking up your venues, places and events with the information that helps search engines to better crawl, organise, and display your content. 

For example, when you see a rich information panel for a venue in a Google search result, this is because of correctly applied structured data. Alongside links to the organisation’s website, contact and social information you might find their virtual event listings, this is because their website is marking up their event data so that search engines can recognise what the event is called, where it is taking place and when it is happening.

Working with developers to apply structured data to your website will allow your events to appear in more places automatically. The standards for data mark up, or schemas, are available on Schema.org. The more data mark up you can apply, the more chances you are giving yourselves to appear in search results. For example, if you mark a stage performance as ‘TheaterEvent’ (schemas are written in American English, but it isn’t visible to the front end) then search engines can differentiate this event from a concert or exhibition, thus improving search results and helping you achieve better organic results.

Very early on in the UK coronavirus lockdown, Google issued a new schema for online or virtual events which distinguished these events from those taking place in physical venues. This is an important update as it allows you to maintain the integrity of your data mark up instead of leaving a blank or misleading venue field which might hinder your organic results.

We have applied this new event type to Culture Hosts, our integrated online listings platform which powers a range of Destination Management Organisation websites and what’s on websites including our own consumer-facing website creativetourist.com. The main source of traffic on creativetourist.com is organic, as well as helping audiences discover things to do in Manchester and the North of England, the website is really our shop window for using structured data along with all the other SEO tricks to draw in this traffic.

Organic traffic is one of the most important channels for a venue, organisation or destination management website. Getting yourself in search results for what people are actually looking for is far more effective than more invasive channels like social media or display advertising. It is because of organic traffic that creativetourist.com is one of the most effective marketing channels for arts and culture in the North.

How can online events from relatively small cultural organisations compete with the likes of Netflix and Disney+? It’s too early to tell, and we certainly would not expect a considerable upturn in organic traffic during the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, but now that there is a proper structure available for online events, it is important to use it. 

Recent events have given everyone a taste of life without culture in physical venues and it has certainly brought to our attention that this, for some, isn’t just a temporary reality. Perhaps one outcome of this will be more consideration for the elderly, disabled and long-term sick who cannot attend events in person. This could be the moment where more culture goes online for the widest possible audience to enjoy. 

If it is, make sure the search engines can find you.

Do you remember the tourist boards of yore? A simpler time, when regional statutory bodies served a regional visitor economy membership community, and fed into bigger national agencies. One model, nice and easy. Well, not quite, but today’s deregulated landscape of DMOs (that’s ‘management’ and ‘marketing’) has as many models and structures as it has, well, DMOs. Core funding is only going one way, but market opportunities are arguably never stronger, even though stability is a word we use less and less.

So how does an emerging ‘place’, without convenient ring-fenced tourism budgets or staff, deliver what they need in collective destination management terms? Well, the short answer is get a clear vision, even clear goals and build from the assets they do have (which will almost certainly be more than they thought). Whether it is Buxton, Calderdale or Barnsley, the collective resource can and will make the difference. We are working with, and seeing, emerging and historic destinations at all scales renew their brand, product offer, packaging, information and market analysis. There will generally be a bigger DMO at a regional level, so these relationships are being challenged and rebooted. Even with no kickstarter funding on the table, progress can be achieved, and a phased approach will find and release new funds and resources over time, as confidence and partnerships grow. We’re working with clients doing this now. What’s happening at your ‘place’?

Image: Creative Tourist Ltd

Stories always fascinate us. Having the (alleged) best story can win you the Iron Throne after all, so they must be important (apologies to the sensible, silent majority who have never visited Westeros). We genuinely love learning about the history of places, the people that have shaped them and uncovering hidden gems before anyone else. We encourage the worlds of arts and heritage to work together to tell stories in relevant, exciting and contemporary ways. We have tried to do this through our work over the last few years in developing Northern Ireland’s cultural heritage. It’s a place with an amazing richness and depth of stories through time. It has had its challenges – often overshadowed by its recent history and the tourism juggernaut of traditional Irish cultures, highly developed and packaged south of the border.

Following our work to develop Tourism Northern Ireland’s A Prospectus for Change: A Strategic Framework to Unlock the Potential of Heritage-led Tourism in Northern Ireland, we’ve continued to support Tourism NI and its strategic partners in focusing on bringing cultural heritage to the fore of the visitor offer, where we believe it belongs.

Two of Northern Ireland’s major museums – Ulster Folk Museum and Ulster American Folk Park – tell extraordinary stories of the past that still have resonance today. We are working closely with National Museums Northern Ireland to review and rework the vision and direction for each, applying their values and ethos through a route map to build a resilient, dynamic and socially responsible enterprise culture that delivers rich visitor experiences. Alongside this work, we’ve also been setting some challenges to the NI heritage sector to see how they can work better together through a shared vision. A manifesto is emerging…

Image courtesy of Trevor Cole

We are delivering better-than-ever results for our clients through our consumer-facing, ‘things to do’ website creativetourist.com, with user numbers and click-through rates at an all-time high.

Since relaunching our consumer-facing site – creativetourist.com – three years ago, our move away from a magazine-style to a more ‘things to do’ approach has been a huge win for our readers and our partners.

Built on event and venue data submitted to Culture Hosts by venues and organisations, creativetourist.com uses a suite of cultural and visitor ‘guides’ — curated by experts and optimised for search — designed to help people discover unmissable events, attractions, and businesses in Manchester and the North.

We work with carefully selected partners via a mixture of free listings and paid-for posts to attract more than 100,000 monthly users a month from across the North West and beyond – typically our audience are highly engaged experience-seekers aged 25-55.

Our business model is all about getting our audience to book on partner websites and we are currently delivering an average click-through-rate of 13%. That’s around three times higher than sector averages and — combined with more than the site’s more than 100% year-on-year traffic growth — provides an excellent return on investment for our clients.

View CTConsults’ case study – How do you find out what’s on?. 

More organisations are discovering the benefits of Culture Hosts, our business-to-business listings platform. 2019 has been a great year so far for Culture Hosts, with more organisations and destinations from across the UK using it to share their event and venue information and to develop effective partnerships.

Culture Hosts captures information about places and events from cultural organisations, tourism businesses, and other local partners. It converts these listings into a data model based on open standards, stores them in a single national database, and makes them available for use by publishers who want to help people discover things to do or places to go.

More destinations, projects, and partnerships are also establishing Culture Hosts ‘clusters’ — private microsites where stakeholders can plan activity, hold conversations, share resources, and collaborate on product development and marketing.

Wakefield Council, which is in the process of redeveloping its consumer-facing Experience Wakefield website, has identified opportunities to reduce operational costs and partner workload — while increasing discovery and booking of the cultural and visitor offers — by building on top of the Culture Hosts platform. This model will allow the council’s small culture team to publish more content and generate more traffic by drawing on partner-managed listings from the Culture Hosts data warehouse.

Similarly, we are working with Visit Greenwich — using Culture Hosts to draw upon the events submitted by partners on their bespoke cluster so that they will be in a position to power the events on their existing consumer-facing site visitgreenwich.org.uk.

Closer to home, we have set up The Oxford Road Corridor Manchester partnership with its own cluster, which draws on content uploaded by their members and pulled directly from box offices of venues in the area via API connections. Here Culture Hosts is used to plan ahead while powering newsletters and internal communications.

Interested in Culture Hosts? We would love to talk to you. You can email issy@creativetourist.com or call us on 0161 228 7512.

View the case study on Visit Greenwich & Culture Hosts – Greenwich – Culture Hosts takes the peninsula

Open air museums are amazing places. They invite visitors to step back into a time and place more normally only available in museum cabinets, publishing and sepia photographs. You can discover ways of life and living, (near) lost skills and crafts, and perhaps try a few yourself. But museums cannot stay fixed in time as the stories they tell are. Why? Because their audiences certainly do not stand still. How can you interpret a century-old village in a time of digital technology without ruining the experience? How can the stories of Ulster be told – and importantly with the active involvement of its people – for the next generation? And how can the Museum be a central part of Northern Ireland’s offer to visitors – a must-see?

That’s the exciting challenge we have been invited to jump into – to create a vision and route map that can help enable National Museums Northern Ireland to transform the visitor experience of the Ulster Folk Museum without losing what is so exceptional about it already.

View case study – Northern Ireland – Starting to share its cultural power