Festival of Social Science 2022 home page
Individual event
Partners index
Event search and filter facility
Festival of Social Science 2022 mobile view
Visit Live Website - https://2022.festivalofsocialscience.com/
Festival of Social Science 2022 Case Study
The Festival of Social Science is an annual event, hosted by the The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and a collaboration of UK universities. In 2020, due to Covid restrictions, the festival took place exclusively online for the first time. We were delighted to be comissioned to design and build the original FoSS website in 2020 and in 2021. For the 2022 Festival we have created an even better, more sophisticated website to promote more than 200 events from 34 partners on the theme of 'my local area'.
As in 2021, the 2022 the festival is held both virtually and in person, from 22nd October to 13th November. Building on previous years' experience, the creation of the website and populating it with the events was eased significantly as the administrators from all 34 partner organisations were familiar with the content management system with previous training and use. Organisation of the considerable amount of content was honed and an even more powerful event search and filter system put in place.
The ESRC branding was incorporated with a fresh new design and layout and with illustrations created by our colleague Lydia at Thoughts Make Things. For this special 20th anniversary of the Festival, Jez at Make Hay designed a new celebratory logo.
As well as a detailed calendar of events, showing daily talks, workshops and presentations, each event has its own page giving further information and booking links. Filters can be applied based on a range of parameters including region, academic subject, format, audience and more. Other website sections inlcude details of the partner organisations and information about the ESRC and the festival itself.
The 2020 and 2021 FoSS websites are archived and still available to view online.
Written guidance on how to use the website was provided to all partner organisations and an ongoing support plan is also in place. The website is hosted of course at our very own Green Hosting.
Here are some words from the Festival of Social Science Manager:
“As an annual national festival with 34 partner organisations the website is critical to the successful promotion and delivery of the Festival.
From the start we really appreciated the collaborative approach to this project and Make Hay immediately became part of the core Festival team.
Jez was very open to our input into the design and functionality for the website as well as advising and guiding us to what would best achieve our objectives.
Jez was also very responsive throughout, building on the previous website design and incorporating our new requirements. He was always available to us and responded very quickly to requests for support and developments. The design and functionality evolved as we progressed and it was refreshing that we could keep developing and enhancing website features and functionality – we weren’t restricted to our original outline or the original proposal from Jez. As a result the process was a very productive one and the website is something we are all really pleased with, both the look and feel and the functionality provided.
We were also able to open up access to the website content management system to all of our partners, enhancing the service we provide to our partners.
This made the process of keeping the content up-to-date really efficient and they found it very intuitive and user-friendly and really appreciated the ability to edit their own content.
The website was a great success thanks to Jez and his team. We really valued the collaborative approach and the willingness to continually develop the site and we cannot fault the level of service provided which was excellent.”
