Brief Explanation

Challenge: Since 1986, the Melbourne Writers Festival has been a cornerstone of the city's culture and the world’s literary circuit, featuring thousands of writers and attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. But the festival had two key problems: the first was that it struggled to overcome its stereotypically literary image of being stuffy and academic. The second was that it exists for only ten days a year. We needed to not only re-engage with our core audience of young, ambitious professionals, but find a way to do so all year round. Strategy: Our festival theme ‘Stories Unbound’ was inspired by the notion that ‘the universe is made of stories not atoms’. Stories exist everywhere and can come from everyone and anyone. Our belief was that if we could nurture and encourage this “story-telling-ness”, we could make the festival an up-close and personal experience. So we decided to create a digital platform that not only brought the Festival theme 'Stories Unbound' to life, but one that allowed the Festival to have a continuous and open dialogue with its audience. Creative Execution: 'Stories Unbound' is a digital platform designed to open the ‘wellspring’ of stories in each one of us. The platform features an iPhone app (and accompanying website) and allows users to read and write and importantly, GeoTag stories to specific location. The location can be anywhere in the world; a place of creation or a place of inspiration. Users can write stories about whatever they like, publish and then share via Facebook and Twitter. Stories are depicted as books on the map and exist in both standard view or Street View (on the website). Users can search for stories by location, keyword, writer, genre, most popular or most recent. Results: 'Stories Unbound' is a participatory idea that will continue to grow and evolve, even alongside future festival themes. It facilitates an open dialogue between the Festival and its audience and has witnessed hundreds of stories being told, shared and GeoTagged. During the time ‘Stories Unbound’ has been active, awareness of the festival has grown from 52% to 61%, ebulletin subscribers now number 20,000, attendance at regional events has increased 100% and ticket sales during the festival increased a rather pleasing 37%!