For four years, I managed the digital strategy for Beltane Fire Society, the charity behind Edinburgh’s two heritage fire festivals, Beltane Fire Festival and Samhuinn Fire Festival.
As the Communications Coordinator, I was tasked with three strategic goals:
I told each festivals’ story with a combination of copywriting for social media, blogs, video trailers, backstage interviews and press, which expanded their international audience and cemented their reputation as two essential fixtures in the city’s calendar.
In 2018, Samhuinn Fire Festival became a ticketed event for the first time, moving to the Beltane Fire Society’s spiritual home on Calton Hill.
My digital strategy positioned the event as one of Edinburgh’s core Halloween events, with the festival selling out days before to an audience of 4,000. The following year, we doubled the capacity to 7,000.
In 2019, Beltane Fire Festival placed climate change at the crux of its narrative, transforming its central May Queen into a raging mother goddess devastated by the climate emergency.
This environmental narrative attracted lots of attention from the press, with pre-event coverage secured in BBC, The LA Times and The Scotsman, and photos featured in The Guardian, The i newspaper and The Scottish Daily Mail – plus a TV news segment on STV.
With the cancellation of both festivals in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the society elected to produce two virtual festivals instead, which we broadcast on social media.
Myself and the Event Coordinator empowered the volunteers to upskill their digital knowledge and create multimedia content that told the story of Beltane, either through video, audio, animations or other media.
We then stitched these contributions together into a two hour feature-length film, which premiered on Facebook and YouTube to more than 30,000 viewers across the world.
For our second festival, we took a different approach, with a more cohesive creative direction and emphasis on technical quality. Our virtual Halloween celebration was featured in The Times – and later picked up by the BBC’s Have I Got News For You.
