What's On Partner catch-up

If you've landed on this page, it's hopefully because you were pointed here by my email.

Thanks again to everyone who made it along to our first Partner catch-up in three years - and I very much plan for it not to be so long before we do it again!

First things first, then - here are the slides from the presentation, and our Top 500 pages for 2022 for those who are interested:

Discussion points

As best as I and my hastily-scribbled notes can remember, these are the things that came up in discussion during the session:

The need for a way for Partners to ask questions, look for resources etc with each other

Setting up a Partner forum was discussed, but...
The Reading Art & Heritage Forum on Facebook already exists and was designed to fulfill that community purpose (rather than being a place to promote events) - if you're not already a member, you can sign-up here

Better ways to match people who need venues and venues who need people

Better use of the Facilities and other practical resources page in the hub (feel free to email me if you have/know of space that's not listed there)
Some sort of directory of Partners that splits by category (or at least by "someone with a space" / "someone using other peoples' space") to sit within the hub, too?

More Partner events

Both informal mingling/networking catch-ups and more formal, focussed sessions
We talked about looking at workshops/seminars on things like SEO, social media best practice and so on - if there's any topic or area you want to attend (or lead on) a session like that, do let me know. In the meantime, there are plenty of insights in the hub including my webinar on digital marketing

Genres - are they right?

e.g. Community & Networking - does the "catch-all" work for people looking for one area covered by that?

When is the best time to add an event to the site?

The earlier the better - the longer a page exists, the better chance for Google to index it, and the greater likelihood of people finding it.

Is everyone getting/reading my newsletters?

About half the people in the room put their hands up as getting them. Not sure if this is a "going into spam/other folders" thing or a bigger issue with simply trying to send bulk emails. I'll be looking into alternatives as best I can!

Is there anything the What's On platform can do to support the struggling grassroots music scene?

We probably have more gigs than anything else on the site, but it's a fair question that we'll look into

Is there a better way to promote the Partners/venues on the site?

"Venue of the week" or similar was discussed as an option

Is it time we started sending our own newsletter insteading of piggy-backing on the Reading Arts one?

Almost certainly! This could definitely help some of the above, too

Talk of some kind of combined volunteering platform or portal

How can we get more volunteers helping more of us?
Some orgs have different requirements (safeguarding, training etc) plus GDPR to consider
Could be a very fulfilling and useful tool if we can make it work right for everyone

Reading Independent Festival Forum

Looking to get some multi-festival promotional material printed up in the coming weeks
If anyone is involved in a festival and not part of the forum, now's a good time to link up by joining their Facebook group

If there's anything I've missed that you can remember and I can't, let me know and I'll update this page!

And a few things that came up in emails and conversations after the session:

The potential need for a Partners' area of the site