Essex Book Festival Development Plan 2023-2026

ESSEX BOOK FESTIVAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN 2023-2026

Your Stories, My Stories, Our Stories

About Us

Essex Book Festival is unique. It is the only festival of its kind to take place over a one-month period, hosted by over forty venues, across one of the UK’s largest and most diverse counties.

The festival, which was set up in 1999 by Essex Libraries, is an independent charity based in the Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Essex.

We collaborate with a diverse range of local, regional, national, and international organisations to fulfil our objectives. Our partners include the county’s universities, colleges, schools, and educators; local authorities; libraries, theatres, cinemas, galleries, prisons, and community groups; regional, national, and international cultural organisations; publishers, booksellers, and literary agents; hotels, tourist attractions and the wider business sector. Partnership working and community engagement is our guiding principle. We believe that the whole is greater than its parts.

Over the past few years Essex Book Festival has proven itself to be adaptable when faced with challenging circumstances, i.e., Covid-19, the cost-of-living crisis, and the Climate Emergency. This has resulted in a number of new ways of working, including a rapidly evolving programme of digital and outdoor activities, and increased engagement with national and international partners.

To say that we’re excited about the next three years is an understatement.

Our Objectives

1. To provide a unique collaborative inter-disciplinary platform for writers, readers and artists across Essex that proactively engages people from all communities, irrespective of their age, background, and ability, in our activities.

2. To provide an ambitious and inclusive cultural platform that will help raise awareness of the Climate Emergency with a particular focus on young people coalescing under our Manifesto for Essex Climate Action Project.

3. To improve the quality of people’s lives via culture. Whether that’s helping to address issues of social and economic deprivation by supporting literacy and other story-based initiatives or promoting health and well-being by active reading and other projects.

4. To explore innovative ways of igniting people’s passion for storytelling in all its forms: that is, engaging with a range of art forms, cultural collections, and new digital media.

5. To help position Essex as one of the UK’s flagship cultural destinations.

6. To nurture and showcase local, national, and international writers and artists at all stages of their career.

Where will we be in 2026, and how will we get there?

Essex Book Festival has made great strides since 2015. Both in terms of our audience development and the breadth of our cultural offer.

We have demonstrated our ability to respond swiftly and robustly to recent challenges, and will apply this knowledge to the challenges ahead, including the cost-of-living crisis and the Climate Emergency.

Essex Book Festival is committed to being relevant and accessible to all communities living in Essex: that is, delivering the widest possible range of quality story-based creative opportunities for people to engage with at all stages of their lives within their local community.

We will do this by continuing to develop and nurture our existing partnerships, and by exploring new collaborations with like-minded organisations who share the same vision for Essex. Special attention will be focused on Essex’s young people, particularly those from under-represented communities.

Beyond Essex, Essex Book Festival seeks to be nationally and internationally recognised as one of the UK’s leading book festivals. A festival that asks the difficult questions, that builds meaningful bridges between communities, and most importantly, that transforms lives through cultural activity. Again, we will do this by developing and nurturing our existing relationships with organisations, such as, The Global Association of Literary Festivals, the British Council, Polish Cultural Institute, amongst others.

To ensure that we continue to push these boundaries and realise our ambitions by 2026, it is essential to increase our operational capacity and reach. To do this we need to grow our staff base; increase and diversify our funding portfolio; develop our partnerships and collaborations; be more ambitious, strategic, and creative in our programming.

Our Green Ambitions

The ongoing climate crisis is the defining issue of our time. As such, we are committed to minimising our impact on the environment and aim to make environmental responsibility integral to how we work, where we work and who we work with. To do this, we will take a number of actions over the next three years: -

1. Record, Measure and Analyse our environmental impact using Julie’s Bicycle Creative Green Tools.

2. Establish a Green Group to consider the environmental impact of all our activities and develop an action plan of how we can improve. Work with partners to share knowledge and best practice.

3. Use Essex Climate Action Commission’s Net Zero: Making Essex Carbon Neutral Report to inform our Green Action Plan.

4. Raise awareness of the accelerating climate emergency via our programme of activities.

5. Minimise paper usage and use digital alternatives where practical.

6. Come up with practical ways to minimise impact of travel of staff, audience, speakers, and volunteers.

Our Organisation. Who are we?

A Board of Trustees and Advisers has overall stewardship of Essex Book Festival. Currently, there are two part-time members of the team on freelance contracts, reviewed annually: Festival Director (four days a week) and Festival Manager (average three days a week with seasonal adjustment).

The Board of Trustees and its Advisers offer a wealth of experience and expertise. Over the last three years significant effort has been made to increase representation from different communities at a management level. However, more work needs to be done to maximise the Board’s relevant skills set and knowledge base.

Despite its size and part-time capacity, the festival team has very much punched above its weight in terms of delivering all festival activities and events to a consistently high standard.

This is not sustainable, or indeed, desirable in the long-term, particularly given the scope and scale of the festival’s strategic vision moving forwards. As a consequence, it is proposed that by 2026 the festival team is as follows: -

• Festival Director (full-time)

• Festival Manager (three days a week)

• Marketing Manager (two days a week)

• Community and Education Coordinator (one day a week)

The festival will continue to contract out certain activities such as national PR. It will also seek to consolidate its work in terms of recruiting and managing Festival Bookies (volunteers), especially during the festival period.

Essex Book Festival is funded by a variety of income streams. These include ticket sales, book sale commissions, grants, and direct and inkind sponsorship. Our key funders are currently Arts Council England, Essex County Council, Chelmsford City Council, and University of Essex.

With challenging times ahead and budgets being squeezed from all directions Essex Book Festival needs to act strategically, that is, to broaden and diversify our funding portfolio to ensure its long-term economic sustainability over the next three years.

Areas of development: -

1. PRIVATE SPONSORSHIP. While Essex Book Festival has had a number of sponsors over the years, to date there has been no strategic plan to garner sponsorship support. A charitable organisation with an enviable countywide reach, we have much to offer potential sponsors. Consequently, by 2026 the aim is to generate £10,000 annual income by sponsorship activity.

3. LOCAL AUTHORITY FUNDING. LA funding accounted for 26% of Essex Book Festival’s annual income in 2022. Given current threats to public funding in the cultural sector, we need to be more creative in our offer to our public sector funders. That is, to ensure that our activity is aligned with specific objectives, particularly those focusing on the Climate Emergency, socially and economically deprived areas, and those suffering from physical and mental health issues.

4. ARTS COUNCIL FUNDING Annual funding from Arts Council England accounted for 55% of Essex Book Festival’s income in 2022. This level of dependency remains an organisational concern. However, by continuing to diversify our activity to be more relevant and inclusive and by prioritising our environmental responsibility we are confident we will continue to receive this funding stream.

The aim is to grow the Essex Book Festival. Treading water is not an option. By taking a pro-active and sustainable approach to developing a mixed funding portfolio, we will be able to realise our ambition to become one of the leading cultural destination festivals in the UK by 2026.

2. EARNED INCOME. Ticket sales in 2022 totalled £12,000 (accounting for 14% of the annual income). This is lower than in past years as audience numbers had not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels. We aim to increase ticket sales income to £20,000 by 2026 which would be a 67% increase. This will be achieved by programming more high-profile events and audience development.

Our Partners

Essex Book Festival is committed to partnership-working. It is undisputedly one of our greatest strengths, particularly in the context of the current challenging economic environment. Essex Book Festival is already seen as being a ‘countywide connecting force’ by its current partners.

Moving forward, we will build on our extensive network of local, national, and international partnerships to reach wider and more diverse audiences with a special focus on developing new partnerships with climate-focused partners who share our principles on environmental responsibility.

Our Audiences

100,000+ people have attended and participated in Essex Book Festival events and activities over the last five years. Our programme has been purposely diverse with talks, panel discussions and writing workshops, as well as performances, creative workshops, film screenings, art exhibitions, family events, guided walks, music, and poetry. While we continue to maintain a very loyal audience base, which regularly attends multiple events during the annual festival period, we are also attracting new audiences with 33% of feedback respondents in 2022 saying this was their first Essex Book Festival event.

Essex Book Festival strives to make the festival accessible to all. 49% of its events were free in 2022. It has worked with a diverse range of partners including Essex Cultural Diversity Project, Roving Heights Book Club, African Families in the UK, English PEN, Polish Cultural Institute, Ake Arts and Book Festival, African and Caribbean Books and Writers Group, Colchester Chinese Society, amongst many others, to reach new audiences.

We have developed our marketing and promotions activity which includes our main Essex Book Festival website and our e-news with a growing mailing list of over 2,100 contacts. Our social media audiences on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram continue to grow year on year.

Our work with a national PR agency to promote the festival in national media has helped us reach over 38 million people over the last three years. Meanwhile, we work closely with local radio,

including BBC Essex, Phoenix FM, and Chelmsford Community Radio to promote the festival. We also are commissioned by Essex Life Magazine to write festival-related articles on an annual basis.

Building on our previous Marketing and PR activity, and working with partner organisations, we will continue to increase and diversify our audience base locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally over the next three years. We will do this in a number of ways: -

• Cultural Communities Collaborate with partners including Essex Cultural Diversity Project, Essex Libraries, Explore Essex, Heads2Minds, African and Caribbean Books and Writers Group, and others, to ensure we consult and work with a range of communities; deliver events aimed at raising awareness of our diverse cultural communities via our Stand Up for Diversity, Human Libraries, and other events.

• Young People

• Continue to develop our Manifesto for Essex Climate Action Youth Project activity, enabling young people living in Essex who are passionate about the environment to come together and share ways of raising awareness via a wide variety of strategic countywide cultural activities.

• Develop a EBF Youth Panel to curate YA and other events for the festival, including activities at Essex Writers House.

• Defining different young age groups and programming activities to more specific age groups (e.g. Middle Grade ages 8-12, younger teens, older teens)

• Host a series of Family Fun Days throughout the year in partnership with Essex Libraries to provide accessible, free events, storytelling, and craft workshops for families.

• Develop our Midsummer Madness Family Day at Cressing Temple Barns with multiple partners including year-round ‘feeder’ workshop activities.

• Build on the current objectives and impacts of Spoken Word Power Project led by Eastside Educational Trust to encourage and embolden a next generation of Essex youth poets.

• Continue working with Essex Childrens University to build connections with families and schools.

• Programming more Young Adult authors

• Writers Work with writers at all stages of their lives: Essex Writers House will focus on writing/mentoring opportunities for new, emerging, and diverse writers; Essex Authors Day reaches out to local writers at all stages of their writing journey to provide advice and new networking opportunities

• Digital and Streaming audiences Develop our digital content to offer additional resources such as author interviews, writing tips and blog posts; Pilot hybrid and live stream events making use of partner technical resources to make more events accessible to more people; Make use of digital events to include

international authors and those who are not able to attend in person; Feature the festival in relevant local and book-related podcasts; Partner with film students at the University of Essex to make event videos to feature on our website and social media.

Our Activity / Programming

• Social Media Work with a social media agency to develop our strategy and content for our social channels including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok to reach wider audiences and people who may not be aware of Essex Book Festival.

The festival has worked tirelessly over the last five years to develop its programme of events and other related activities. While maintaining its commitment to programming popular mainstream fiction and nonfiction authors, there has been a dynamic shift towards producing a more ambitious, inclusive, and challenging programme that has greater appeal for our increasingly diverse audiences.

We have approached this in a number of ways with demonstrable success:

• Creative Career Pathways Offer Industry-led Publishing World Day for students at University of Essex to learn about different roles and the realities of working in publishing; Mentoring opportunities at Essex Writers House; Author workshops at Essex Authors Day; continue working with Harlow College photography students on The Book Project.

• New Creative Platforms including exhibitions, theatre performances, storytelling, silent disco, Zine-making, underwater audio-visual experience, podcast workshops, creative workshops including A Living Almanac and Hope Tales, writing competitions, large-scale paste-ups, and live music events.

• International audiences Develop our cultural links between Essex and other like-minded international partners via our membership of the Global Association of the Literary Festivals; our ongoing partnership activity with British Council, English PEN, Polish Cultural Institute, and other appropriate organisations/and individuals.

• National and International Links with Melbourne Emerging Writers Festival; Roving Heights Book Club (Abuja, Nigeria); Eastside Educational Trust (Spoken Word Power Project); Peace Matters Project: The Mothers Bridge of Love, China/Storyland Project (Nagasaki, Japan); Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum R&D Project, British Council (Sopot, Poland); Global Association of Literary Festivals and Ake Arts and Book Festival; British Council Marketing Platform London Book Fair.

• New and Unique Venues including Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker; Riverside Swimming Pool; Prison Van; Cressing Temple Barns; Hylands House; Electric Palace Cinema; Mi Amigo Lightship;

Saffron Hall; Talliston House and Gardens; Cuckoo Farm Studios; Chalkwell Hall; St Peter-on-the-Wall Chapel; Othona Community.

that will grow organically, and that will have a real legacy for participants and the wider community.

• Focus on Writers. Essex Writers House, Essex Authors Day, ReWriting the Archive Workshops, Storyhunters Flash Fiction Competition; Beth Chatto Writers’ Prize

• Taking Environmental Responsibility. Under the banner of our Manifesto for Essex project, activities have included Zine creation, Youth Summit, CCR eco-casts, Earth Poems and Bunting exhibition, Escaping Climate Change Day, Tree-Mend-Us Day, Makerspace printing workshops, Fashion/Remade live Instagram events, eco-poetry workshops.

We will continue to work closely with the following communities: young people; prisoners; LGBTQ+; neurodivergent; low income; migrant, refugee, and asylum seekers; people with physical and/or mental health challenges; other marginalised/hidden communities. Where possible we will endeavour to bring different communities together via our activities and projects, providing a relevant, collective platform for all. Once again reflecting the maxim, that the whole is greater than its parts.

As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the timing of Essex Book Festival moved from March to summer months to allow for flexibility in programming outdoor events. This has proved popular with audiences who enjoy attending events in warmer weather and travelling during daylight. The festival now takes place in June which provides opportunities for us to extend our outdoor activities.

Going forward, we are committed to developing a programme of quality events and activities that has something for everyone, giving people an opportunity to develop and express their creativity, whatever their stage of life.

Sustainability, partnership, and inclusivity will be central to all our activity. The festival is not interested in a ‘one hit wonder’ approach, but rather seeks to work on projects that become rooted in Essex,

There are a number of key actions moving forwards that will support the sustainable growth of the festival over the next 3 years: -

• Hubs The development and consolidation of our festival hubs including Criminally Good Day, Midsummer Madness, and The Pleasure Garden. Not only will this create a more vibrant and dynamic festival experience for participants and audience members, but it will also offer several logistical and economic advantages, plus help address ongoing issues of accessibility, diversity, and geographic spread. Each hub will have a distinct organic flavour. For example, A Criminally Good Day will focus on crime writers; The Pleasure Garden will focus on nature and well-being; Midsummer Madness will focus on storytelling and family events.

• Green themes We have an opportunity to make change, influence others and shape our environment with and for the community. Our Manifesto for Essex work will give a voice to

young people who are passionate about culture and the environment. In addition, we will embed a strong environmental focus throughout all our activity to help raise public awareness of the current and future impacts of Climate Change.

• Focus on Writers One of the key functions of Essex Book Festival is writer development. By offering creative writing workshops, mentoring opportunities, residencies, and networking as part of Essex Writers House and Essex Authors Day we can connect with writers at all stages of their lives across the county with a special focus on diverse communities. We are especially keen to focus on writing projects that support physical and mental health well-being.

• Multi-discipline Projects Our multi-discipline projects enable us to develop our creative programming in innovative and ambitious new ways, building new and often surprising interdisciplinary partnerships with excellent outcomes along the way. One example of this is The Radical Pilgrimage, a 70-mile 7-day unique cultural experience extending from Southend Pier to Saffron Hall in Saffron Walden led by artist Lora Aziz, involving a number of creative interventions and workshops on route, which took place in June 2023.

• Partnership events We are fortunate to have such a diverse range of cultural organisations working in Essex. We aim to provide a dynamic platform for our partners to promote and showcase their work as part of our festival programme. This reciprocal arrangement allows for us to extend our reach within our limited resources.

• Schools We will pro-actively develop and deepen our relationships with Essex schools via our Spoken Word Power Project (in partnership with Eastside Educational Trust and Essex Children’s University), our new activity with Chelmsford Local Education Partnership, and ongoing and future activity with Essex Libraries.

Essex Book Festival has been and continues to be in an exciting period of transition. Due to the turbulent few years both at home and globally, this is an ideal time for Essex Book Festival to reset and look ahead to the future. We cannot and will not rest on our laurels, but rather it is our intention to increase our impact across all communities incrementally by 2026.

We are committed to fulfilling all of our key objectives outlined in this plan. Our ability to do this, rests on the realisation of our creative vision, our organisational development, and the strength of our collaborations and partnerships.

Essex Book Festival is for everyone. It’s that simple.

For more information please contact:

Ros Green, Festival Director

07913 061948

ros@essexbookfestival.org.uk

www.essexbookfestival.org.uk