Cultivate Food Growing Festival
About
Waltham Forest Council’s 2016 Cultivate Festival, in its third year, took a fresh approach – a whole growing season from planting in the spring to harvesting in the autumn.
The Cultivate festival is for everyone interested in growing food in Waltham Forest, whether growing on a window sill, a doorway, an urban garden, community garden or an enterprising market garden.
With around 70 fringe events throughout the period, the highlights of the event included Gardener’s Question Times, a produce show, a Compost Giveaway, Gardener’s Q&A event and a Summer Produce Show.
Cultivate WF
Marketing Challenge
Programme Director Laura Kerry wanted to ensure that local residents and the food growing community both in the borough and beyond were kept informed and updated on the activities throughout the festival. Additionally, a new website was required to reflect the breadth of the festival and provide an information resource for growers at all levels.
Approach
To Market was engaged for the third year to manage the complete marketing of the event, leveraging the highly engaged Waltham Forest growing community online together with stakeholder contacts and networks. This included using social media, email marketing, blogging, placing event listings and creating a new Cultivate website.
We chose to work To Market to deliver the marketing of the 2016 Cultivate Festival for the third year running, their previous
experience gave us a running start in January and culminated in the autumn harvest finale in September. As well as once again managing the social media, email marketing, blogging, press releases and photography for this established event, this year also required the creative design and management of a complete upgrade of the festival website which we are delighted with. Working with Jo and her team enables us to focus on the operations and partnership development of such a complex event, knowing that the marketing will be managed professionally.
