Topics and Format

Different aspects were dealt with during the training:

• How to include new and old technologies in our communication strategy and audience involvement, reaching new audiences, minorities, people with less access and how to make them feel art is for them, feel they belong and welcome at our programmes, performances and spaces? 
  
• How to develop a sustainable relation with the - existing - audience?
  
• How can new technologies contribute to the festival experience and generate new audiences? 
  
• How do they help to portray the identity/image of your festival?
  
• What are the tools we can use? 
  
• How to use social media? 
  
• How to look in a new way at storytelling, communication?
  
• How to position your festival within the vast offer worldwide?
  
• What are the marketing strategies from other fields of actions as business companies, foundations, etc.?
  
• How does life experience and mouth-to-mouth relate to these new technological opportunities?

Some topics were further defined by the issues and challenges participants were concerned with.

This first edition offers a platform to provoke its participants to think beyond the existing frameworks, change perspective and shape new ones during a dialogue and collective research with people working in a diversity of geographical, social and cultural backgrounds. ​

• Information or best practice exchanges, peer to peer exchange as well as experts’ presentations; 
  
• Inspiration and introduction of tools from the digital world; 
  
• Knowledge development from the field to be shared with a broader community. 
  

Next to the thorough exchange of knowledge, best practices (and failed attempts) with peers and experts in the field of communication, participants work on the toolkits on accessibility and the use of technology to improve the festival experience, both initiated during the 15th Atelier for Young Festival Managers, Gothenburg - Sweden. Atelier keynote speaker Ruth Mackenzie focused on digital arts and about how to implement a better interaction between artists and audiences in this age of powerful tools as smartphones and social media and challenged the participants to experiment with their artists and audiences.