Speaker 2 (00:00.066)
Hello everyone and welcome to the My Local Marketer podcast. I'm Maria and today I'm speaking with Damien Passmore, Marketing Officer and Web Editor for What's On Reading. Damien, thank you for coming on the podcast. How are you?

I'm doing very well. Thank you for having me on.

What's on Reading has become such an important part of how you find out about events in reading. Can you clarify for people who may not know what is What's on Reading and how did it start?

It's whatsonreading.com. is the ultimate guide to all things arts, culture and heritage happening in the Greater Reading area. So it's not just Reading town. It's a very nebulous bubble that includes various bits outside of Reading. Things that could be defined as being in Reading, even if they're not technically in Reading with a very non-distinct border. So it's a website. It has events, activities, classes, workshops from all manner.

of things in the arts, culture and heritage sphere. we have theatre, have comedy, we have live music, we have kids events, have escape rooms and comic cons and local history walks and historic spaces like the museum. It's kind of a one-stop shop if you want to know what's going on. We've got listings from over 250 active partner organizations spanning the big things like the Hexagon and South Street and places like the Purple Turtle and the Brice and Sonata.

Speaker 1 (01:24.31)
And people like Reading Rep and people like Rabble and Choirs. It's, yeah, one stop shop for all things arts, culture and heritage.

And for me, this is the key point. She said over 250 organizations, but just to reiterate, this is arts, culture and heritage that doesn't cover what a wide variety. I mean, imagine most things that would happen in reading under sports and all those other categories.

That's the big thing. It's that question of if we start putting sports in there as well or other things that don't quite fit under the very broad umbrella that is arts, culture and heritage. It suddenly becomes somewhat unusable. We already split the site down into 22 categories. We launched with 10 and we broadened that out. It's kind of happened once a year as we've kind of identified, okay, what's not being covered? What better ways are there to identify ways?

for people to find things or things to break down. So sometimes there have been sort of hybrid categories that have been broken into specific ones. We used to have theater and spoken word and that's gone into theater and spoken and written words. So one thing is very obviously theater and the other thing is poetry nights, but also book signings and author events and an evening with somebody at the hexagon talking about their career and so on. And also putting in more non-genre specific ways of sorting. we've put in it.

categories for things like teens and young people and LGBTQ plus, just so that it's easier to find those things that are sort of fall by of pertaining to celebrating certain audience categories rather than necessarily event types.

Speaker 2 (02:57.326)
22 categories. It would seem like you've got a whole team working on these categories and refining it, but it's not a whole team, is it?

It's pretty much me. There is a caveat to that. So I don't think I even fully answered the first question, which is that the website was created and is funded by Reading Borough Council through Reading Arts and Reader, which is Reading's economic and destination agency. So they fund it and Reading Arts are a big part of it. So Reading Arts kind of look after their own content for the three Reading Arts venues, Town Hall, the Hexagon, the South Street. Reader do some of their own events on the site as well. And while it might sound like I do everything else, but actually

A lot of our partner organizations are trained up to add the content themselves to the site. So it's not purely me. So I would say something like two thirds of our partner organizations put their own stuff onto the site and, and the rest sort of come through me. it's, if it's those things that happen once or twice a year, or those organizations that aren't based in Reading, we're just, you know, one stop on their trips around. So on the one hand, it is just me. And on the other hand, it's very much not just me. So I take the overall.

view of it all, but I don't put all the content on myself.

So how can people, if they have an arts-related event and they want to list it on the website and they don't already, how can they get it listed?

Speaker 1 (04:15.502)
There is a sign up form on the website. So if you think you are suitable to be a new partner and there's a guide on there that explains the kind of things we do, both in terms of geography and the sorts of events we do, and it gives a few examples. So if you think, right, we sort of qualify as it were, both in terms of the what and the where, fill in the form, you then send an email and you have to confirm yes. And then you wind up on a list and I contact you and say, right, how do we go about this?

And for some people it's, yeah, I'm just doing this one thing. So I send them a template and they send me the stuff and I put it up. And for other people it's like, right, when can we get together? And it's training over usually zoom or teams, other digital telephony products are available, of course, sort of run through it that way. And then that puts the partner in control of their content, both in terms of uploading it, updating it, and making sure that it's as accurate as possible.

and from there it's my job to tell everyone else that these things are happening.

We didn't say at the start, but like you, it'd good to know your background, how you actually got connected. Because I mean, for me, you are synonymous now with what's on Reddit. Have you been there since the start?

Technically since before the start, because I had to be in post before the site went live. But yes, wasn't my dream by any chance. It wasn't my project or my baby or anything. I was recruited into the post by Reading Arts and Reader just over six years ago now. So just before it launched and I came in and I did get involved in the development process, but many steps have been taken before I came into post. My background.

Speaker 1 (05:41.42)
I worked for many years in customer services as so many of us did. And I got to a point in my life where it was like, I can take voluntary redundancy and try something different, or I can carry on working hard at this. And I took the second option, retrained as a copywriter, started at the bottom and very much at the bottom. Trial by fire of lots of digital copywriting very, very quickly. And went through various different companies. I got a bit more involved in things like.

user experience stuff and pays design and user journeys and that sort of thing. And that has come really handy when it came to both interviewing and getting the job at What's On Running, because I'd already done that sort of thing. On my personal side of things, I was a volunteer at the Verizon Sun Art Center and I'd done a lot of social media stuff for them and web content as well. And I helped really sort of build up how their social media pages, especially Facebook, have worked.

and what are things like press releases and stuff like that. So I got one foot professionally in copywriting and a bit of UX and one foot personally in local arts and culture. And suddenly there's this job that is just like, you can do both of these things. And to this day, I'm still really fascinated as to who else went for it.

Well, you were clearly the best candidate. I'm very glad that you mentioned your personal interest in arts and culture because I wanted to ask you, I know you do directing and everything, you're very embedded in the local arts and culture, so to what extent has that helped you develop or influence what you do on Mots on Reading to make it even better?

I think it certainly helped me in the beginning because through my involvement with the Risen Sun Art Center, for those of you who don't know, I've been playing music in Reading for up to 25 years now, I think. Basically, I left university and discovered the local open mic and it kind of just went from there. So I'd been involved in various things and people around Reading knew me already. I don't know if you're listeners are aware, back in 2016, there was a year of culture in Reading and I got kind of stuck in with that. And through various

Speaker 1 (07:37.506)
parts of that, got to meet other people who were doing things in Reading. People who ran orchestras, people who ran club nights, people whose name I'd seen, but I'd never met. And there was that kind of, you're that person, you're that person. So I had sums in various pies. My first day on the job, I came in to do like a workshop on the web design and they were doing a bit of an introduction to various stakeholders from across the sector. And there were people on that day who came to me and said, I've

feel much more confident knowing that you're doing this job. Because I had, I guess, an element of legitimacy.

credibility. It makes such a difference. What challenges have you faced while you've been setting up? Because I imagine once people know about you, they will automatically send you their events. But there must have been a point at the start where in order to get it going, you have to get events on there. You had to get people looking, which is a challenge.

absolutely a challenge. was a lot of kind of, right, I'm to start emailing people. Do you want to have your events on here? And then we had to do big bulk training sessions. So as I said before, I do it nowadays. I just do it over Zoom or what have you and it's one to one and we do it in an hour and so on. But when we first started, especially in the run up to launch, we'd get a

nine people around the table or today that they could all do. you know, I'd only just been trained. And then suddenly I was training all these other people and it's just like, right, this is how you do this. This is how you do this. We launched with 60 partner organizations, which included, you know, the three Reading Arts venues as separate venues. Again, that comes to the credibility and that came out of basically a lot of emailing and ringing around and, here's a form you can fill in and getting those people trained up and getting people.

Speaker 1 (09:18.402)
to get their stuff on the site ready to all go live. You know, there was a lot built in those relationships and having those interpersonal skills to be able to be in a room with people who are all from disparate backgrounds. There are some people who are good at doing things on computer and there are some people who are good at doing things in front of people. And I think I'm quite lucky in that I'm able to do both. And from there, keep reaching out to people when you see things that you don't know about or that you haven't seen before. And, you know, there are some people who were kind of, I finally got them on board.

It took us over a year to get sub 89, it took us even longer to get the face bar and to figure out the best way to get their stuff on because this isn't a disparagement but they're effectively receiving houses. They don't run their own events, they're a space for other people to put events on. So it's just like, okay, how are we going to do this for you? Yeah, it's building and keeping those relationships. So I reach out to them on regular basis via email. We try and get together as best we can once a year with as many people as we can to say, right, this is where the state of play is.

thing that goes to show that it's the relationships and the framework, the groundwork you've done in order to get the systems in place that has made such a difference to the success of What's On Reading? So you've got the website. I know you've got the podcasts, as you said before, you do the monthly podcast, and I know you do the socials. Could you give a bit more about those or anything else that you do? How do you tell people about what's on a path, maximally reaching out to people?

So yes, as you say, we're on social media with currently on Facebook, Instagram and Blue Sky. We were on Twitter and then, you know, various things happened to Twitter and the follow account didn't drop, but engagement definitely did. So it's just like, these are just dead accounts that are allegedly following us. This isn't, this isn't an active place to be talking. So part of it is recognizing, okay, who's your audience, where your audience is and sort of managing those social channels is a big part of my day.

We're recording this. don't know if it's useful, but we're recording this on the Friday before a bank holiday weekend. I've thus far spent my entire day scheduling posts for the rest of the weekend. And I will probably spend the rest of my day when I go back to the office, scheduling the rest of posts for the rest of the weekend. And that generally is what my Friday is because weekends are a time that I'm not at work and thus I'm not actively posting. But part of it is that, and it's figuring out what sorts of events, what sort of things work for the different audiences across the different platforms.

Speaker 1 (11:43.008)
Instagram is our fastest growing platform without a doubt, but there are some things that just don't work well on there because of who the audience is on our Instagram followers. The best example I can give of that is kids' family stuff works really well on Facebook, doesn't work on Instagram. The people who follow us on through the different platforms are different people. And there's always a big amount of crossover. So I would say something like 80 % of the stuff I post, I post across the different channels.

always at different times as best I can, because if someone's following us on Facebook and then they switch to Instagram and they see the same content, they start unfollowing someone. So it's that spreading out the content across the different platforms to catch as many people as possible and trying to gain the algorithms because anyone who knows anything about marketing and anything about social media is that you cannot predict when something is going to show up in Facebook or Instagram these days because they are interested in keeping you scrolling. So they're not interested in, I've caught up and moving on.

This is a really interesting. think it's interesting anyway, something I really noticed this year because April Fool's Day has historically been a really fun day on social media because you get all the brands doing their ha ha ha. We're launching this new rainbow color paint or this is our new supersized version of this or we're changing from being this to this, you know, the hilarious April Fool prank. And one thing I noticed this year is that I wasn't seeing some of those until three days later because the platforms

weren't putting it out. They weren't putting it into my feed the day that it was being posted and made me realize this is the best microcosm of how you need to change your social media strategy. I even wrote a blog about it. I've never really written blogs about anything. It was just like, I need to get this down while I'm thinking about it. it's saying today, tonight, isn't that useful anymore because they won't necessarily see it today, tonight, this week.

Even saying this weekend might not be seen until the following Monday. So immediacy is no longer key on social media. And it's making sure that if something's happening on a certain date, you don't say this Saturday, you say Saturday, the 23rd or whatever the Saturday ends up being. So it's little things like that. And that's not the thing that you get from the insights. That's the thing you get from your own use and through scrolling your own feeds and reacting with other people.

Speaker 1 (14:07.854)
A lot of people forget that the key word in social media is social and it's not just about throwing things out. I first went on a social media course when I was still doing customer services in 2010. I think it was might've even been earlier than that. There were already lessons being taught from people who were doing it wrong and people who were doing it right at that point, because there were companies who just didn't understand that.

Social media is how your users want to use it and not how you want to use it. And there was some really interesting examples about how some people thought it was a custom service tool and some people thought it was a marketing tool. Not enough people realized it was actually both. And I always think of it as a communication tool and communication always goes two ways. So it's about you talking to your followers about what you're doing, but it's also about you talking with your followers. They're going to ask you questions and you need to be there to respond to comments.

Social media advocacy is really key. My posts are not about me. They're not about my events. They're about other people's events. So if I'm tagging you, like it, comment, share it. I think part of it is down to people's time and part of it is down to who is controlling different social media within different organizations. The social is such the key part of it.

For me, the social is still about engaging with other people, but I think you've got to be living it. Like you said, with the April Fools thing, if you went on there and noticing those patterns, you would have no idea if you were just popping on to post something and then forgetting about it. So you need to really be living it and gaining experience on it yourself. I'm fascinated by this because obviously in businesses, one of the first things everyone wants to know is how has that generated me money? So do you see a pattern between the posts that are getting the most engagement and because you control the website,

Can you see that the posts that are getting most engagement are getting click throughs?

Speaker 1 (16:03.202)
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, especially when we talk about the podcast. I don't know why. And I think it's because people may even just have it lined up in whatever platform they listen to it on. But you can see something with like several tens of likes and several hundreds of viewers and three click-throughs. And sometimes like, I putting the link in the right point? Is that peering too far down that people who already have to read more to even get to the link? And obviously with things like Instagram, there is no click-through.

You've got to trust you either put it in and hope that someone wants to copy and paste it, or you put in the wonderful C link in bio. it's another bugbear of mine is when people just use the same content from both platforms and they say C link in bio and Facebook and just like you could put the link into Facebook. You could literally, it's going to take you 30 seconds more to split that post up and write it uniquely. This is what I consider best practice because I've seen C link in bio on a Facebook post and there's no link that's at all relevant.

Going back to what I was saying with the sharing and liking. Engagement begets engagement. When you are seen as a platform that engages people, the algorithms will put you in more people's feeds. I do my best to like as many posts that come up in my feed as I can. I can only do that a couple of times. Hey, you know, and I put comments on there. The tone of voice developed for what's on rating. It's a little bit cheeky. It's about saying everything is great. My job is to champion.

everything that is on the website as best I can and part of that is to have those conversations. If nothing else, that might be the first time someone sees what's on Reading and wonders, okay, who's this? You know, every opportunity to sell yourself in some way should be taken.

Everything in the public sphere is a touch point for someone with you, so you need to make sure that every touch point is a positive one. The website fascinates me, so let's go to the website. my goodness, the data you must be sitting on is amazing. Could you share with me about patterns or what does well, how people can do events that will catch attention?

Speaker 1 (18:08.494)
I share some stuff. Absolutely. Certainly the volumes and the engagement has grown year on year. I can't remember exactly all the stats, but I usually do kind of an end of calendar year thing because January tends to be a quiet month for arts, culture and heritage and hospitality in general, you know, after the big rush of Christmas in 2024, we hit 2 million users, unique visitors to the site. We'd only hit 1 million the year before. So

That's the sort of the speed at which things are growing. We get something like two and a half thousand events listed on the site. And again, it was one and a half thousand, twenty, twenty three patterns. We've noticed is that comedy, live music and children's events are the top three performing event types. We know it works well in search engines. We come up first. Sometimes our web pages perform better than.

the organization's own web pages because we've got that clout, especially if they're a newer organization. When Reading Comic Con came back after a few years of not being around and not having a website that was updated for many years, we were always performing better for their listings than they were because we had that SEO authority that their site didn't. If we can be that first thing that someone finds for anybody who is trying to find a new audience.

That's kind of what we're here for. And we know that people browse by genre. We know that people browse by date. They didn't used to be able to do this sort of today, tomorrow, this weekend, especially during the post COVID years. I also have the biggest FOMO of anybody because I see these thousands of events a year and think I can go to about eight of these a month if I'm lucky.

I'm a big fan of collaboration. So I think that's a huge opportunity for businesses to use things like events in order to collaborate and promote local artists and groups and help business in return. But I think as we were saying before, businesses are quite rightly as a business focused first and foremost on making money, generating leads. But as you've correctly said, it takes a while to generate traction and to get something going. So do you have any advice for

Speaker 2 (20:28.29)
business owners on maybe what they can do to help promote their events or why it's important to events.

Yeah, that's a tricky one. There's no easy answer to that. Finding the right partnerships can work. Sometimes it's down to sponsorship. There are certainly events that are crying out for sponsorship and there are certain events that probably don't necessarily want sponsorship because they're worried it might impact their credibility or what they're able to do with the event. But there are ways to partner up. I've seen happen in this town. I've seen art exhibitions in pubs. It was a way of bringing

different people in and say, well, I'm here for, may as well buy a pint, you know, and it's that kind of, how do you find those ways to draw in? think it's, it is about finding the right partnerships and finding the right, the things that sort of work well with your brand. There may be a tech company that will never work with a choir, but there may be a tech company that brings a choir in one day, you know, as a way to entertain their workers. Sometimes it's about showing that you support something and hoping that that support will rub off on you.

It's an interesting one and it's something I had a conversation with and I'm sure that won't me say it. Someone at Launchpad, it was more about how charities and the arts can work together. What I said was the dream situation is basically speed dating where you get a bunch of people who might want to support someone or get a partner in a commercial way on one side of the table and you get all the businesses and charities on the other side of the table. And that's the way you find that connection that you may not have found before.

really like the way you phrased that and actually it sort of struck something with me that we think of events, we think they cost a lot of money, there's a lot of time and effort that's gone into them. But actually, as you correctly said with some of those examples, you can look at very low risk activities like having someone's art in your space where it's lowest to you, it doesn't really cost you anything or much at all once the partnerships are in place. And it's just there and it's something that will happen and then it can grow over time.

Speaker 1 (22:35.232)
or even just, you know, having a notice board in the window where people know they can come and advertise. And if you're careful in what goes in there, then you can become a trusted partner in a way. And then hopefully that begets footfall. As I said, engagement begets engagement.

We've spoken about the website and social and data and how businesses can be helped. Is there anything that you think you're not doing at the moment that you would like to do for What's On Running or anything you think of for the future, any future things you want to do to improve it?

Print would be nice, but it's a tricky one. And I guess not just print, but sort of physical advertising. We've got some very big screens around that seem to do a lot advertising events that aren't happening in Reading and big corporate things because they're the people who've got the money and we don't. It used to be you could put flyers in the newspaper that got sent around to everyone's house once a week. And, you I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking, well, how else do I reach people who don't know who I am?

And we experimented with getting posters up in various places with sort of highlights of this month. So maybe that's something we could pick up again, but again, it's finding those spaces. It's finding those businesses who willing to put that poster in the window. And also it's that kind of, do I do this once a month? Do I have to drudge around places once a month to put these up? And that's the big part of it is the time and the effort. And it's one of those things where you get no visible return on investment. So much of what I do has no visible return on investment.

But every so often I will hear from someone saying, yeah, when people feel like they're sure questionnaires and they say, well, how did you find out about us? So many say what's on reading and heard that enough times to know that what I'm doing is making a difference, even when tangibly it doesn't always look that way. So much as it feels like I'm just shouting into the void, but I know that that void is not so deep.

Speaker 2 (24:28.928)
Is there anything you would like to leave our listeners with?

Yes, Reading is a wonderful place and there are lots of people and I see it on social media, especially on local newspaper listing the pages and things like that, where people just want to say how rubbish Reading is and it's not. What I have learned both before this role and continue to learn as I'm in this role is that there is so much going on all the time.

whatever your taste, whatever your budget, whatever your age, there is something going on that is for you. And it may not be happening today and it may not be happening next week, but it will be happening. We have so many choirs, so many theaters, so much live music, so many venues willing to put things on, so many venues willing to take a chance on something unique and different who needs your support and who you might find is the absolute place for you. Reading is wonderful.

Arts, culture and heritage in Reading is absolutely wonderful and if you ever hear someone saying, nothing's happening in Reading, point them to the What's On Reading website and prove them wrong.

I don't, I think that's the brilliant way to leave it. Thank you so much for your time and yes everyone please go to What's On Reading and the two and a half thousand events posted there every year.