CITY OF GREATER DANDENONG FOREVER FESTIVAL, Virtual Festival

Client:

City of Greater Dandenong  |  Virtual Festival  | 22 – 31 May 2021

Background

The nine-day, hybrid Forever Festival focused on the eight themes of the client’s Climate Energy Strategy, which was prepared in response to Council’s declaration of a Climate Emergency in January 2020. All the content across the 9 days was free and accessible to the community.

The virtual component of the event was to ensure that the event was completely accessible to the community and to record the content for post event communications and to be distributed to the community via YouTube. The virtual event allowed an array of climate researchers, activists, doctors and not-for-profit organisations to come together to educate & encourage discussion on climate change and sustainability.

The Brief

The virtual component of the event was to ensure that the event was completely accessible to the community and recorded for post event communications to be distributed to the community via YouTube. The virtual event allowed an array of climate researchers, activists, doctors and non-for-profit organisations to come together to educate & encourage discussion on climate change and sustainability.

Did we achieve this aim: Yes, the virtual platform (Zoom link) was distributed to the community via the website & social media to provide high accessibility of the festival to the community. The live virtual stream of the Forever Festival was also streamed live to screens around the city of greater Dandenong and at Federation Square in Melbourne CBD.

Highlights of the festival:

We connected with the community through the virtual platform – over 500 people connect online throughout the nine days.

All festival content was recorded to create forever content for those who missed sessions. The festival will live on ‘forever’.

We connected with speakers from our local community as well as statewide, interstate and global which has enabled Council to form some great relationships to continue the implementation of the Climate Emergency Strategy.

The Solution

The event delivered an outstanding experience due to;

• Custom designed holding slides and virtual backgrounds that all speakers & virtual stage managers allowed for -Forever Fest to be branded and looked highly professional and a great first impression
• The content was carefully curated with interesting, relevant and informative speakers providing our attendees with tools and resources they need to carry on learning about climate change and sustainability.
• The virtual platform of Zoom allowed attendees to engage via audio, video and through the chat function. This provided the attendees with an extremely safe space to contribute and share stories and ask questions.
• The performance by unique & engaging presenters at Forever Festival had an array of talented presenters from climate researchers, activists, doctors and non-for-profit organisations to come together to educate & encourage discussion on climate change and sustainability
• With a diverse cultural make up, many within the City of Greater Dandenong’s community are more culturally comfortable to attend a virtual event than a live festival. The event enabled a wide range of people to attend.
• Links to the sessions were available on Facebook to reach the audience where they were online.

The Results

Zoom Data: Across the 9 days there were 500 attendees who logged onto the Zoom.

The City of Greater Dandenong also have a wealth of video resources recorded at the event to share and educate their community about sustainability into the future.

Client or Attendee Quote/Testimonial:

“The event was absolutely seamless on our end of there were very few technical hiccups… Again – massive thanks and the wider events team are already interested in working with you guys further – we had a lot of other in person events that were postponed due to this circuit breaker lockdown and forever fest kept going so that should be something we are incredibly proud of.”

Lily Martyn
Sustainability Events & Engagement Officer