Idea
A highly efficient heritage festival outreach platform that is asthetically effortless to locate information, fast to update, supports registration and payment, provides instant reporting and supports shareable content publishing.
Purpose
The National Heritage Board celebrates Singapore heritage with the nation yearly at the Singapore Heritage Festival. Inaugurated in year 2004, the festival attracts a massive crowd of more than 1 million visitors in recent years. The purpose of this project is to create a dynamic, maintainable and expandable online platform which promotes information, activities, contests from festival prelaunch to post festival period.
Online from Multiple Perspectives
From the information perspective, the platform not only boosts a customised content management system that allows multiple festival parties to access and maintain information updates. More uniquely, it is an information sharing platform that allows shared publishing of content pages across multiple websites.
From the logistics and management perspective, the platform allows instant registration and payment of festival activity tickets and performance booking. The event organiser was relieved of the pain of having to manually collate participant profiles and registration details, allowing the event organiser to focus efficiently on the actual event setup and publicity roles. A robust reporting module provides instant views of participation statistics, allowing efficient monitoring of participant rates for the festival.
From the publicity perspective, the platform incorporates social media including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to create greater publicity impact on the festival. Edms (electronic emailers) are another outreach tool used in this festival.
Designing the Components
A major challenge in the design process is the need to manage ongoing and new activity updates throughout a four month period from prelaunch to post launch. Although the site is driven by a content management system, it is flexible enough to cater to ad hoc new additions in terms of ideas and activities. Dynamic project management ruled by logic and design thinking made the project possible.
The site architecture is carefully crafted for information clarity, design efficiency and logical structure-activity correlationship.
The user friendly interface design is a reflection of the festival branding built on an extendable CSS detached from the content itself, allowing the skin to change according to the festival theme.
Workflows from submission to judging design competitions, volunteering, booking of school programmes are incorporated into the platform completed with reports.
The Result
The festival online platform complements the National Heritage Board and the event organiser in publicity and logistics management processes, making changes faster and processes more efficient. A good example of online technologies well used for operational efficiency.
