Background

The Edinburgh International Film Festival is now in its 62nd year and is the longest continually-running, and one of the most respected, film festivals in the world.

Line were appointed to redesign the site in 2005 and have been working with the EIFF ever-since to improve their online marketing and ticketing systems, whilst developing web based systems to assist with their general business processes by saving time and money.

What we did

First and foremost the site design has to communicate the quality of the films and the excitement of the festival. The identity of the Festival is updated by a graphic design agency each year, and this has to be reflected on the website.

By its very nature, the Festival screens première and pre-release films which haven't yet been marketed, making it difficult for the user to know which movies they will like. We therefore developed "Like this, try these" prompts to encourage the user to investigate similar films, whilst the "Suggest-o-tron" feature assists the user to find movies based on their favourite mainstream films.

The back-end of the site is fully integrated with both the Festival's box office/ticketing system and their FileMaker database which contains film and event information. This allows for seamless, realtime changes to the programme and ticket availability. Additionally the site uses our CMS to enable EIFF to regularly update news and photos and also to push key films to the user through a profiled-user email marketing system.

Results

In year one of our involvement, the box office received 40,000 page requests in the first hour such was the high demand for international première tickets. The site 'stayed up' for the first time ever in the Festival’s history, resulting in their highest-grossing first-day sales. It went on to sell almost £100,000 worth of tickets in the 6 week period before and during the Festival, equating to 43% of all pre-festival sales (34.4% of final total) - approximately a 250% increase from the previous year.

The last two years have seen these figures continue to improve and we have recently been focussing our efforts on improving the online business processes to help save the EIFF money; around 200 'man hours' has been saved by automating some of the administration tasks such as delegation registration.

Winner of "Best Website" and "Best Not-for-profit Project" at the 2007 DADI Awards.