Heritage Week
National Heritage Week, run by The Heritage Council of Ireland, is a week-long festival of events, activities and exhibitions celebrating Ireland’s natural, cultural and architectural heritage. In 2010, 370,000 people attended events across Ireland.
An online voice for thousands of years of heritage
Arekibo have been working with the Heritage Week since 2006 on the development of their online strategy. This strategy is underpinned by a registration engine that was developed to allow the public to register their own events across Ireland. Long before crowdsourcing, Heritage Week was encouraging people to start community events in their villages and towns; from medieval fairs to local history walks the site has grown each year to provide the public with a rich and eclectic source of activities for friends and family to enjoy.
Building an online community
Arekibo an the Heritage Council have worked together to develop strategies to harness the capabilities of multiple communication channels. As a result Heritage Week has created a vibrant and collaborative presence on Facebook and Twitter. Each channel being used to communicate with and encourage followers to share and comment on upcoming events, competitions and ongoing campaigns helping to make a genuine connection online.
“This was no straight forward web project – it needed careful planning and bespoke application development to enable us to allow the general public to upload events all around the country. The site also needed to be very robust during its peak time of operation and be visually appealing given the nature of the Heritage Council. On all fronts Arekibo delivered and we were very pleased with the results”
Rebecca Reynolds – Project co-ordinator, National Heritage Week
Socially connected
To further encourage social participation and awareness, Arekibo integrated the events calendar into Facebook, allowing followers to access events within the social network. A online advertising campaign was also created to build international and national awareness of the week which was supported by a comprehensive P.R. and media campaign delivered by MKC Communications.
This year the Heritage Week will go mobile with the launch of an iPhone App.
Find an event in your county www.heritageweek.ie
Be social
Follow Heritage Week on Twitter:
Follow @heritageweek
Connect with Heritage Week on Facebook:
