Getting AmbITion...

Posted by Simon Bedford (Marketing & Touring Manager, Hoipolloi)

It's Sunday afternoon and I'm in the office. It's been a busy weekend, making sure that all was well with the performances of The Wonderful World of Hugh Hughes and preparing for a full day of interviews tomorrow.

At the moment, I'm struggling to make some projectors work. It's ironic that this is happening just as I intended to be sharing with you Hoipolloi's leaps forward into the digital age. But hey, not everything runs according to plan when you're working with technology!

For the past couple of years, Hoipolloi and a select band of arts organisations here in the East of England, along with colleagues up in the North West have been part of an Arts Council England scheme called AmbITion.

As the name cunningly suggests, this is all about helping organisations to engage in new ways with the digital revolution that continues apace around us.

At its most basic, it's enabled us here at Hoipolloi to sort out our IT infrastructure and improve the way we operate day-to-day from the office. If you've seen The Doubtful Guest, it also helped us to work with a far more powerful set of projections within the show.

But from your point of view, as a reader of this blog and, I hope, a visitor to our main website, the biggest change is yet to come!

For the past couple of years we've been experimenting with a variety of social media tools to help provide a greater insight and engagement with our work.

We've posted videos to YouTube, photos to Flikr, we've created a variety of Facebook groups (here and here) and started this blog. My latest mission is to explore the possibilities of Twitter, which I intend to become an integral part of our communications in the near future.

Up until now, these tools have been fragmented across the web. But this is all set to change and in the next few weeks we'll be releasing a brand new homepage into the big wide world which for the first time brings all these elements together in one place for you to all enjoy.

For the time being, you'll have to be patient with us as it's not quite ready. But I'm stupidly excited about it and will launch it with great fanfare very soon.

In the meantime, if you'd like to find out more about AmbITion, please visit the project's website which is ever expanding with case studies, hints, tips and helpful videos like this one...



I'll admit that it does feature me very fleetingly (!) but more importantly it helps to introduce some of the ideas behind successful digital marketing and people with far more interesting ideas than me. Enjoy!