Bologna Furiosa | Digital Strategy & SMM

Bologna Furiosa - Festival di Arte e Cultura Ballroom

Bologna Furiosa is a festival of Arts & Culture that specifically revolves around the Ballroom scene and its connoisseurs. For the first edition of Bologna Furiosa, I was in charge of the Digital Marketing Strategy, Social Media Management, Content Creation and PR.

The biggest challenges of this project were:

ensuring a meaningful digital outreach to make people attend the events in-person of the festival;

engaging with a non-Ballroom audience and sparking interest in the festival's content.

What is Bologna Furiosa?

Bologna Furiosa is a festival of Ballroom scene Art & Culture. The first edition occurred on 14-15 October 2023 in Bologna, Italy.

The festival consisted of diversified content that revolved around the Ballroom scene culture, its heroes and core values. The festival's main goal was to spread knowledge about this culture and celebrate its creativity and talents.

The festival included:

dance workshops;

a book reading;

a panel talk;

a theatre play;

a photo exhibition;

a ball (dance and performance event)

The Launch

Being inherently connected to the LGBTQIA+ community, Bologna Furiosa's communications have been launched on the day of Bologna Pride, on the 1st of July 2023.

The different contents have been released gradually over the weeks that lead to the festival to give each of them relevance and avoid the "dump" effect.

The digital strategy

The digital strategy of Bologna Furiosa relied on the following:

creating compelling graphic assets and easy-to-read informational posts;

promoting carousels and stories for spreading information to access and sign-ups;

making sign-up links available and easy to access at all times;

leveraging project partners' digital networks (such as newsletters, collaborative posts, reshare, website mentions, etc);

leveraging guests' and performers' online promotion (such as reshares);

generating awareness through in-target digital publications;

building festival coverage through user-generated content.

A comprehensive approach to the digital space

As Communications Manager, I ensured that all the communications materials for internal use and press releases were branded corrected and accordingly to the tone of voice and graphic set-up of the festival.

For Bologna Furiosa, I created different materials to communicate with project partners and guests, such as:

press releases;

festival presentations;

leaflets;

newsletter texts.

Results

I worked on the Bologna Furiosa project from July 2023 to October 2023.

Over these months, I took care of:

conceiving the Digital Marketing strategy;

creating and scheduling the Social Media graphic assets;

creating the Social Media texts;

writing Press Releases;

reaching out to journalists and in-target magazines;

ensured communications and promotion across partners and guests;

creating internal documents;

booking photographers and videographers for the live events;

reporting.

These digital efforts resulted in (data collected from 1/07/2023 to 31/10/2023 only organically):

439 event responses on Facebook events;

16,100 reach on Meta platforms;

3,900 engagements on Meta platforms;

388 link clicks on Instagram;

4 online magazine articles;

1 radio feature;

4 partners' newsletter mentions.