Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2001
| Organisation |
Edinburgh Festival Fringe (Festival Fringe Society Ltd.) |
| Project |
Pilot 2-for-1 ticket promotion on the first two days of the 2001 Edinburgh Festival Fringe |
| Artform |
Theatre, music, dance, comedy |
| Location |
Edinburgh |
| Application type |
Full project |
| Date |
2001 |
| Status |
Completed |
| Grant |
£28,700 |
| Total project cost |
£45,000 |
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe exists to protect the open policy of taking part in the Fringe and to maximise both the participants' and the audience's experience of the largest arts festival in the world. Core services include a centralised programme, box office and website.
Pilot 2-for-1 ticket promotion designed to address an identified need for promotional activity in the opening days of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe which are historically slow in sales terms.
- To at least double attendances during the first two days of Edinburgh Festival Fringe
- To tackle price resistance in local audiences
- To encourage a more adventurous approach to ticket-buying
- To develop a collaborative approach between Fringe venues and local commercial organisations
- The project set out to bring together 170 venues and 1,137 shows in the Fringe's first ever joint marketing initiative.
- A total of 150,000 seats worth over £750,000 were offered.
- A range of media was used to communicate the promotion including outdoor posters and adtrailers, newspaper advertising, sandwich bags, door-to-door distribution of A5 postcards, direct mail, PR stunts (pairs of celebrity lookalikes), viral email and microsite.
- Cash and in-kind sponsorship was secured from the Metro freesheet and the printers Pindar.
- More than triple the number of tickets were sold for the two opening days compared to the previous year. The Fringe as a whole also saw ticket sales up by a third.
- The proportion of tickets bought by Edinburgh residents rose from 36% to 51%.
- The promotion did not, however, encourage ticket-buyers to take a risk and try something new. Rather, it enabled them to see more shows within the artform category to which they were known to subscribe. The Fringe attributes this to the range of shows available within each artform category.
- Just under 9 out of 10 (996) Fringe shows participated in the promotion. This represents a level of collaboration across groups, venues and promoters never seen before on the Fringe. It is not known why the other 141 shows elected not to take part.
- A disappointingly small number of local businesses took part in the promotion. Out of 3,000 approached, only three restaurants elected to offer a 2-for-1 concession to complement the ticket offer. Plans to produce a special discount leaflet to insert with tickets and a special window sticker were dropped as a result. The Fringe realises that for this part of the promotion to work in the future, a dedicated member of staff would be needed to meet with hoteliers and restaurateurs to encourage their participation.
- Given the overall success of the pilot, the Fringe plans to repeat the promotion in future years.
Louise Page
Manager
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
180 High Street
Edinburgh EH1 1QS
Tel: 0131 240 1919
Fax: 0131 226 0016
E-mail: louise@edfringe.com
Web: www.edfringe.com
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