The Ultimate Culture Hack Scotland Video

This is what all of us at Culture Hack Scotland did in 24 hours:

Understanding users: Chris Thorpe from artfinder.com

Artfinder is brilliant. Chris Thorpe is brilliant. Here he is talking about the thinking behind Artfinder and how arts organisations have to think less about what they want and about what users want.

Festival business model – generic canvas

Hello. As we’ve said before here at festivalslab we’re *big* fans of the visual business model tool called the Business Model Canvas.  It’s a bit beyond this post for me to explain exactly how the canvas works and how practical a tool it can be for you but you can find out more by reading the Business Model Generation book of which an extract is here.

So this is the start of a little series of posts – which in time will probably become a section of the site – all about the visualisation of festival (and other) business models.

There are 12 festivals within the Edinburgh family as you know but here at festivalslab we think about there only actually being only 5 main types within that:

1. Curated – curated programme across multiple venues over a set period of time.  This applies to International, Jazz&Blues, Book, Storytelling, Imaginate, Science & Film
2. Open platform - democratic programme which is created by participant entry and no overall curator.  This applies to the Fringe
3. Aggregator – festival comprised mainly of existing events.  This is how the Art festival works.
4. Field festival – more of the music festival format with a bound area and one ticket.  This is Hogmanay and the Mela.
5. One-off event – a high-profile, high-production single event over multiple dates.  This is of course the Tattoo.

There are of course many subtleties within this and every festival is different but thinking in these general terms can be very useful from an innovation perspective.  To that end we’re going to start sharing how we think festivals (and innovation in festivals) work through the canvas tool.

So to start, here is our first draft of the most general view of the most common type of arts festival – the curated festival.  And since the nice people at BMG have launched their sexy new iPad app we thought we’d use that.  Again…if the taxonomy doesn’t make sense – and you’re suitably interested – we strongly recommend you look at the BMG methodology but hopefully it’s intuitive enough at this point.

Business Model Canvas: curated festival (general) v1

Download the large version here

Distrify and the Film Festival

Many of you will have noticed that the Film Festival launched it’s exciting programme last week.  What however you may not have noticed is a really elegant innovation they have embedded into their online booking.

Distrify is an exciting Edinburgh-based startup led by Andy Green and Peter Gerard which – based on their own experience as independent film-makers – empowers filmmakers by allowing them to make sales through trailers – one of the most common points of discovery, especially in the social web. And what is especially exciting about their business model is that anyone who embeds a video and their embed returns a sale…they get 5%. Simple.

So we’re delighted that Distrify have partnered with the film festival and so you can see distrify’s deceptively simple (but very clever) tech in action but clicking the screenshot above and playing the trailer.

Festivals Economic Impact study

Today sees the launch of a major new Economic Impact Study which demonstrates the amazing power of the Edinburgh Festivals.  And as with reports like this, there’s a bunch of data and so we’re excited that we’ve partnered up with the Guardian’s Data Blog to see what might be done with it.

Click here to see their introduction to the data and also also to download the data itself.