From the Nominator

Every year at UCD Festival, University College Dublin opens its doors to the local community, staff, students, and alumni, providing a fun-filled day of performances, engaging talks, hands-on science, interactive exhibits, and much more. The festival reached its peak attendance in 2019 with 20,500 attendees, thanks to a campaign across digital channels and physical advertisements. After the pandemic, we struggled to reengage our community around this well-loved event. In 2023, the UCD alumni marketing team took on a new challenge: Promote the festival to get it back to its pre-pandemic engagement levels, using a fraction of the 2019 budget and only digital channels. We tackled the challenge head-on by being smarter with our digital marketing resources. Instead of spending more on advertising, we created a completely personalized marketing strategy targeting four audience personas. These personas underpinned everything: our cross-promotion outreach plan, our email marketing segmentation, our organic social media posts, and our ads across Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. We also leveraged the power of short-form video content and local influencers to broaden our reach and used continuous data analysis to refine our approach and play to our strengths.  As a result, not only did our marketing strategy bring UCD Festival back to its pre-pandemic engagement levels, but it beat all 2019 benchmarks to set a new attendance record. We welcomed 21,033 attendees, achieved a 60% email open rate, and reached 1.7 million social impressions.

From the Judges

Strong segmentation and knowledge of audiences really distinguished this nomination. Great and innovative approach using audience personas. Thorough strategy with good tailoring of content and very organized. Outcomes were successful.