Internal marketing for Roskilde Festival

Getting organized

I started working with the Roskilde Festival in 2012 as a sign technician intern, and in 2015 I took over as Chief of Production with Laust Strange as Chief Communications Officer.

Our first job was to get out of people calling or emailing their orders in, as they had done for the past 20 years, since it was chaotic and if one person in charge got sick, nobody would be able to take over the production.

Laust Strange got in touch with Special Orders (Særbestilling) who already had a similar system, that IT and VVS were using. The first year the system was quick and dirty and the clients needed also to be educated to using the new system. I describe my first year like this: “Worse than we planned, better than feared”. And even though it was though we got praise from management, and clients. When I left the organization in 2019, I estimate that less than 10 % was using e-mails to order signs and that 10% were Ad Hoc assignments. 

Getting professional

In 2019 I was asked to find offers on a big format printer for the Fonden Roskilde Festival (Roskilde Festival Foundation) to be used by the Sign Crew (Team Skilte) and we went with HP Latex 315 54″ Print&Cut.

Not only would this save money on our internal production doing Roskilde Festival, but by switching to Latex from the Solvent printers we used to rent, Team Skilte was now also a lot more environmentally friendly and healthier for the volunteers to use, even with the use of proper ventilation that we were using.

This also opened up a lot more assignments that we could do before because we didn’t have time to do the festival or couldn’t print on the material with our old water-based printer.

Using MailChimp

We already had ways of contacting other team leaders, but I wanted something that could help me register who I’ve “spoken” to, and MailChimp was the answer.

I could set up our marketing campaign and have it send out automatically, but the caviar was that I could see who had opened my email, and who hadn’t.

The mailing campaign increase the rate of signs returned that year, and it also opened up some conversations from branches that opened up before we started, so deals were made with them, that they could store the signs themselves since they had that option with their own material.