International Science Festival - a hybrid meeting place, for Sweden with the times

Purpose and goal:

New development in the light of the pandemic - festival throughout Sweden, onsite and online: The goal in 2022 was to use our digital successes going forward, and become a festival that benefits both target groups in the West Sweden region, but also in the rest of the country, by doing both physical and digital activities. We upgraded our digital platform to meet the ambition to reach out throughout the country and chose to focus on our school program.

Expected results and effects:

The Science Festival had 36,500 visits, of which 14,500 were in the school program, which is a significant departure from our expectations. Unfortunately, we had major problems with the digital platform which took time to fix, which caused bookings inour school programme to fail. The participants was very satisfied and 66 % of the digital participants in the school program were brand new to the festival.

The media coverage in Sweden was particularly good and covered for ex the opening with Richard Dawkins which was fully booked with 800 people attending and 1500 people on the live stream. Approach and implementation:

The ambition was high - to both make a physical festival in Gothenburg but also reach out throughout the country through digital meetings - from zoom calls to big technical productions. At the same time, we did not have the resources to the extent that had been desired, but had to prioritize. Having a larger marketing budget when establishing yourself throughout the country is an important point, another thing that was difficult to handle was the extensive work that the technological development entailed both in terms of platform development and new productions on top of what we usually do.