It is great to be invited to speak at conferences – the idea that we might have something interesting and instructive to say is rewarding and encourages us in our work. But a good conference is a two-way process and what we take away matters as much as what we input. Our director Alex Saint has been busy being inspired (as well as inspiring) this Autumn. The Tourism Management Institute met in Bristol in October, and we were on the workshop rosta, with our client Martin Pople of Bristol & Bath Cultural Destinations Partnership, facilitating discussions about building collaboration between the tourism and cultural sectors. During the session we picked up an explicit shift in thinking about tourism’s partnership with culture. Tourism partners expressed how they increasingly value and champion culture as more than just campaign content and visitor product offer, recognising that culture delivers the local social value activities that underpin progressive and holistic placemaking – essential for healthy economies including tourism.

We were also in Bucharest as a keynote speaker at the 2^nd meeting of the Museum Meets Museums, a new network, looking to inspire the development of Romania’s museums and galleries through international exemplar.  (A side note on Bucharest – this is a fascinating city where Byzantine architecture nestles alongside the Art Nouveau and Communist-era. Regeneration is being led by a new generation of entrepreneurs, artists and creative industries, who are leading the charge in finding new purposes and tenants for Bucharest’s old buildings. It is exciting to see and somewhere we will definitely return for a weekend break).

But back to the conference. International speakers were united in exploring the theme of ‘leadership’, and whilst we were there to pass on our thoughts and learnings about leadership and collaborative working, we also came away with some intriguing new case-studies for our portfolio.

The War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, which won the 2018 Council of Europe Museum prize just one year after its opening is one to look at for interesting practice in digital engagement, and community buy-in. The museum began its life in 2013 as a digital platform, a mechanism to crowd-source memories from a very particular and dispersed community – for a book. The powerful stories and ongoing participant commitment and support led to the founding of a museum which includes 3000 objects and 60 oral testimonies of Bosnian war-children.

A second one would be the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris, where a private collection of ‘out-of-fashion’ objects of hunting and colonialism, (and with a resulting decline in visitor interest), has been reimagined into one of Paris’s most stylish, must-see small museums. They have done it by being brave and repurposing the collection, turning it inside out, inviting contemporary artists to respond, reinterpret and make fresh, provocative, issue-based displays and exhibitions relevant for our times. Visitor figures are now close to capacity.

Finally, on Romania itself. This is a fast rising tourism destination, emerging post-communism, post Ceaușescu-atrocities. Its cultural-heritage is immense, and a key part of the nation’s tourism destination messaging; but political change is slow and the museum-heritage partners need investment and more international connection and ambition. This is something that the Museum Meets Museums network is hoping to achieve and the green shoots of change are evident.

Image: Ștefan Jurcă, Bucharest – Smârdan Street

The story of our organisation really begins with our consumer-facing whats on guide creativetourist.com, which, back in 2007, we were tasked to create as a means to showcase Manchester’s vibrant cultural offer. The project brought together the nucleus of what became the Creative Tourist Consults team and we have kept the site running ever since, helping connect thousands of people with cultural happenings in Manchester and across the North.

2-years ago we gave creativetourist.com a much needed relaunch, taking away many of the site’s more magazine-like opinion pieces and instead focusing on a structured approach of events and venues to make up a series of more usable guides. Although initially a bit of a shock to the system, our readers and partners responded well to the new never-mind-the-bollocks-here’s-what’s-good approach.

A couple of years on from the relaunch, creativetourist.com is reporting its best ever results, reaching an all-time high for traffic in September 2018.

The site is powered by Culture Hosts, our collaboration and listings platform, which allows our editors to pull event data into creativetourist.com from the content which partners share with us on Culture Hosts. It’s a win-win. This approach gives the editorial team more time to focus on getting content on the site and makes it easier for our partners to share with us (and others) what’s on. Partners’ events enjoy all the benefits of Culture Hosts, such as being shared direct with visitmanchester.com and with front of house Culture Hosts in hotels and visitor centres across the city.  

We are blessed with a talented team of editors who work well with our sales team to develop long-lasting relationships with partners from across Manchester and the North. We have managed to keep creativetourist.com adfree by creating affordable packages for artists, venues, promoters and even shops, bars and restaurants to help promote their venues and events.

We’ve worked on big projects like Manchester International Festival and Liverpool Biennial, producing full campaign packages as well as weekend city guides, and also with partners with more limited budgets, promoting events in local libraries, schools and even coffee shops.

In total, we have covered nearly 2,500 events since the relaunch with an average click-through rate of around 13%, well above sector averages. These results are impressive and improving year-on-year, testament to our belief that working with carefully-selected partners via a mixture of free listings and paid-for posts can develop trust with our audience. Our posts are always written independently, while we can’t guarantee that everything we preview will turn out to be brilliant, we won’t work with partners who we don’t think can be brilliant.

One of the big contributions to the successful relaunch of creativetourist.com was our partnership work with the Northern Festivals Network and Wild Rumpus, which, though an Arts Council England Strategic Touring Fund, helped us to secure an editor and launch our families section to promote family-friendly cultural events. During that 2-year funding period, we have featured nearly 350 family events with a click-through rate of over 14%. Since establishing itself as a valuable asset to partner venues, we will be continuing to promote family things to do in Manchester and the North.

The audience for creativetourist.com is smaller than regional news websites, but with a team passionate about their content and a good relationship with our partners, we have created something which really does get our readers interested in what our partners are doing and, ultimately, helping them get bums on seats.

If you would like to find out more about creativetourist.com, contact Ben Williams or to talk about promoting your events, contact the sales team.

View our case study – Manchester – The rise of a Northern cultural powerhouse

It’s been an exciting few weeks for Manchester International Festival (MIF) with their two pre-Factory commissions at Mayfield Depot and the launch of their first three shows of the 2019 Festival – with Yoko Ono’s Bells For Peace, Idris Elba & Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Tree and Grime star Skepta’s DYSTOPIA987. These three new commissions are the first of over 20 that will feature in next year’s Festival.

We’ve been working with the MIF team and Marketing Manchester to create bespoke MIF Weekender Packages specifically for the travel trade market. As tickets for MIF shows often sell out well in advance, we’ve created a series of special packages for international visitors to experience both the Festival and the city, to be sold through travel operators targeting both the USA and European markets.  This is another first for the Festival and signals the start of a new approach to attract and help international visitors to experience the best of the city’s cultural offer.

Image: Festival Square, courtesy of Manchester International Festival

In October, Andrew was delighted to be a contributor at a major conference in Derry, entitled ‘Unlocking Heritage-led Prosperity’, discussing a heritage development strategy for the city. Derry is an amazing walled city, with a powerful and turbulent 400-year history. Almost 150 delegates came to explore how the city can release the potential in its heritage. So Andrew shared some lessons from places where heritage has been a real catalyst for regeneration, civic confidence and the visitor economy. Like the Piece Hall in Halifax in fact!

Fellow speakers – a leading architect, urban planner and the designer Wayne Hemingway amongst them – then set out how development strategies (from the top down and grassroots up) can transform a place to live, work and visit. We all then took these insights into a series of workshops to look at how they might apply for Derry. With a really engaged and open mix of public, private and community leaders, the conference buzzed for two days as we challenged, provoked and debated how Derry can seize the opportunity that its current plans, investments and partnerships are clearly presenting.

If the positive, focused people Andrew met in Derry are anything to go by, the next few years in this city should be worth watching.

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

Image: Derry Guildhall

Since joining us in January, Rabea Schwarzmann has been working with director Dan Lukas to formalise and streamline our digital audit and optimisation programmes. This has allowed us to work with even more destinations around the country on improving their digital assets and capabilities. Right now we’re working with Coventry, Stoke-on-Trent, Wakefield, Calderdale, and Bristol & Bath on bespoke programmes aimed at defining digital best practices, training key staff, and supporting digital marketing.

Our digital optimisation process always starts with a close analysis of the points where local partners interact with audiences online, including their websites, emails, and social media. Working with questionnaires, checklists, and Google Analytics data, we determine how each partner is performing in terms of their own digital engagement goals, and where they might improve.

From this, we develop a list of actions for individual partners to address any weaknesses in their own digital strategies. We also look at the bigger picture: how can partners — working together and with support from local or national stakeholders — position their city or region online as a cultural destination. Based on these findings and recommendations, we develop a bespoke programme of digital optimisation.

While getting the technology right is important, we tend to find that the main factors holding partners back are more conventional: they lack skilled resource, clarity on what constitutes ‘best practice’, quality content, actionable engagement data, and local support or coordination.  So the digital optimisation programmes we’re delivering on the back of these recommendations emphasise a holistic approach. Ultimately, the challenge is to ensure that our digital optimisation programmes not only deliver a measurable impact on the cultural and visitor economies, but also nurture a cohort of skilled and motivated digital practitioners.

For example

• Building on 18 months of digital training in Bath and Bristol — we’ve established a series of quarterly partner marketing activities with deliberately tight deadlines and clear goals.
• In Coventry and Stoke-on-Trent, we’ve launched programmes that combine up to 8 separate strands of training activity to ensure a balanced and supported approach.

If you work in a destination marketing partnership and feel that you could benefit from looking at collaborative digital marketing practices then get in touch with Rabea.

Sæl (that’s hello, old Norse). Where do you expect to find Viking explorer heritage, once they struck out from Scandinavia in their iconic long ships? Northumbria, Francia, Iberia, Wessex? How about ‘Viking Ireland’? We know what happened when they found land – raiding, exploring, then trading and eventually settling. It’s an epic (and often bloody) story, told across Europe from the Liffey to the Danube. Our challenge was to look at whether, and if so how, the beautiful south-east of Ireland could grow its heritage tourism offer to have genuine international appeal.

Their story is phenomenal, with the cities of Waterford (Vadrarfjord), Wexford (Waesfjord) and Wicklow (Wykinglo) all founded in the 10th century by Norsemen in ‘Viking Ireland’. The hit MGM-produced Vikings TV series is even filmed in the region. We are currently working with our colleagues at TEAM Tourism, and BOP Consulting too, to help Fáilte Ireland and its ‘medieval partners’ explore how a coastal region can once more provide rich pickings.

This time it’s the Viking stories we want to capture, weaving together attractions, events, arts, waterways and landscape to create an immersive, and hopefully not too brutal, visitor experience. The Vikings are coming. Again.

Pakka Fyrir (thanks, old Norse)

The jury may be out over which version is best (Joan Baez, Bryan Ferry, The Dubliners, Van Morrison, Bryn Terfel, even TV soundtracks from Boardwalk Empire and Peaky Blinders), but whoever is singing, this famous folk ballad is guaranteed to make any self-respecting Irish émigré shed a wee tear for the homeland. And why not? Carrickfergus sits proudly on Belfast Lough just 10 miles from the capital, a 12th century Anglo-Norman Castle garrison as its focal point. This landmark has been a lightning rod for Ulster’s complex, fascinating and often turbulent story. This is a place which has shaped history, literature and industry: William of Orange landed here, Robert the Bruce laid siege to the Castle and razed the town, the 7th US President Andrew Jackson’s parents emigrated from nearby, Jonathan Swift was a clergyman in the town, poet Louis MacNeice immortalised the town in verse. WWII Churchill tanks were built here. Energy was a major and innovative industry in the town – gas, coal and salt. So plenty for Carrickfergus to shout about, especially from a heritage tourism perspective.

Poised as it is at the start point of the stunning Causeway Coastal Route (the full route is almost 200 miles from Belfast to Derry) the tradition of welcoming new arrivals continues today. The UNESCO World Heritage Site that gave its name to the route, the Giant’s Causeway, hit 1m visits last year. Some of these visitors do pass through Carrickfergus, but many simply don’t stop – and there lies the rub. The late 20th century has been less kind to Carrickfergus than this pivotal, medieval maritime town deserves. ‘Progress’ has driven a highway between the town and the waterfront castle, has built up against and through its medieval walls and has pushed shopping out-of-town leaving its core a shadow of its potential self.

We are thrilled to be working to help put Carrickfergus back on the map, building on the national heritage tourism framework we created in 2016 – all at a time when Northern Ireland is attracting record numbers of visitors. Jumping ahead a decade, we foresee a fully ‘switched on’ Carrickfergus will be one that has re-energised, but not through gas or coal this time. Instead, through its heritage, through bold new storytelling, imaginative and ambitious events and activities – all plugged into the heart of the town’s regeneration. It will have established itself as a must-see jumping off point for the Causeway Coastal Route, helping to make the North ever more visible in international markets.

Sounds great, and our work – place branding, heritage asset management, cultural events, target marketing and community engagement – is importantly part of a masterplan that is setting the road map for significant investment in Carrickfergus’ future – with culture and heritage making the lights shine that little bit brighter once more.

View CTConsults’ case study – Time to renew in that place where it all changed

To paraphrase Monty Python, what have consultants ever done for us? Yes, we can plan, strategise, do blue sky thinking stuff (whatever that is), crunch the numbers, make bold forecasts, but what actually comes of it – except perhaps yet another report, right? Well, actually, wrong. We like to work with clients to deliver fresh thinking and insight that can actually be used to transform their cultural tourism offer, and we can prove it! We’ve been working in cultural tourism for a long time now, and we can see the positive impacts build. We can point to new investments, partnerships, capabilities and products, and most importantly new and growing visitor markets.

We helped to launch Elizabeth Gaskell’s House here in Manchester, have guided Northern Ireland’s invested programme response to 2018’s European Year of Cultural Heritage, and we set the blueprint for the National Forest’s amazing new festival, Timber (pictured). The strategic DNA in our Cultural Tourism Vision for London can be seen in the capital’s London Borough of Culture initiative, which has recently awarded over £2.35m to help eight boroughs deliver cultural transformation. We are busy helping to attract new international audiences to England’s great northern cities and cultural events, and our work with Cultural Destinations is creating better digital marketers and cultural partnerships, delivering new audiences through new cultural experiences. We do write strategies, plans and feasibility studies, yes. But we make sure they are always looking to turn innovative vision into deliverable action.

Destinations have tourism strategies – cities, countries, national parks. And if you are big enough, even festivals. We recently contributed to Manchester International Festival’s new Tourism Strategy, and we’ve been invited back to provide some more strategic thinking to help the UK’s largest cultural festival grow its national and international audiences.

Manchester International Festival is already busy building up to its 2019 festival with two autumn trailblazers (Special Edition and Everything that Happened…), as well as planning for its £100m+ arts venue Factory, another potential cultural game-changer for the city. Within this context, we are busy working with MIF’s marketing team to spot the opportunities to engage more effectively with the travel & tourism sector and so attract some markets that we have helped to identify and define.

Through our work with Manchester’s Cultural Destinations programme and the Cities of Northern England Discover England Fund project we are also looking at how to create MIF bookable product, suitable for the burgeoning Fully Independent Travel (FIT) market. As tickets for MIF shows often sell out well in advance, we’ve created a series of special packages for international visitors to experience both the Festival and the city, to be sold through travel operators targeting both the USA and European markets. This is another first for the Festival and signals the start of a new approach to attract and help international visitors to experience the best of the city’s cultural offer.