Creative City Awards

Helga is back from her Clore fortnight and holiday in America, it has been around five weeks since we were both in the office at the same time!

Last time at the office Simon and I discussed the possibility of helping Kevin with the North East project on one of my Fierce days and that he was going to run it past Helga. This seems to be going ahead which is great news. “The North East Project” as I keep referring is a NEW Live Art and Performance festival (biennial) which will launch in 2009 in the North East.

Ilana Mitchell is the project manager in the North East and stakeholders, venue partners etc are all seemingly in place (from what I know). There is already a proposed programme and audience development strategy in place, consultation over the name of the company/festival have all been executed and from what I can tell…successfully. So I am thrilled and excited about being a little more involved with the project as Live Art is my personal interest. Kevin gave me a little bit of reading to do surrounding the project, which I managed to shoehorn in on my train journeys.

Anyway, my main focus for this week was the nomination forms for the Birmingham Creative City Awards 2008. Putting together the information to be included as support documents: background information, press cuttings, figures, feedback received, etc. All for the Deadline of the 24th October. (That Friday)

I managed to pull all the information together and answer the questions requested by Friday afternoon giving Helga and Mark the opportunity to edit and send on to Birmingham City Council. Fierce Earth has applied for two awards: Creative Industries Award and Outstanding Market Development Award for My Fierce Festival (WIKIFEST) on the ground-breaking concept, where the public could “curate your own festival”; the received international and national press the visitor stats and votes cast were massive for an online project such as this. There marketing strategy was highly focused on there target audience, focusing on social media and viral marketing through blogs etc, and was highly effective. Visitors to the site were from 82 countries, casting something in the region of 21,000 votes (I am trying to remember these from memory so please take this into consideration). Here are a couple of sources to take a look at:

• The Guardian
• Radio 4, Today Programme
• My Fierce Festival Performances on YouTube:

• Created in Birmingham
• “Play Me, I’m Yours” by Luke Jerram

The next step is short-listing and presentations and the event takes place on the 29th November and we’ll be going along, so fingers crossed!