Marketing Events Update
Entry posted by Ben Wright in Marketing ·
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Hello Everyone,
First of all I hope you are all doing well and enjoying the new year. Loui, Piers, and I decided it might not be a bad idea to give an update of our plans for this year, as it's been over a year and a half since the last announcement! Following our usual break at the beginning of the calendar year, we have moved into full steam ahead with events. We are aiming for two per month, excluding GA events, which Piers will provide an update on in a separate post. An event every two weeks is much less than our average during lockdown (where at one point we had three events in three days!), but also much more than the historic average prior to Loui's appointment. Naturally there will be some months where we have three, or maybe even four events, however we don't believe that many is sustainable in the long run and we want controllers to enjoy these events, instead of feeling compelled to control for them. You may have noticed that, since we returned to a normal event schedule, events are almost exclusively run during the weekends; sometimes this is dictated by the available of other divisions, but this was mostly the case to keep pilot numbers high. Over the last 6 months we held a handful of events during weekdays, and (much to the delight of @Harry Sugden) these have proved not only viable, but very well attended by both pilots and controllers. We therefore plan on holding more weekday events to include pilots and controllers who often find themselves busy during the weekend.
We are occasionally asked if Midweek Madness can make a return and the answer is currently, sadly, no. As mentioned in my previous update on the end of Midweek Madness, this event was not supposed to become the traffic-fest it became renown for! It was designed to increase staffing during weekdays which, although hard to imagine now, was an area of concern prior to the pandemic. As mentioned above, we want our controllers to enjoy controlling for events and avoid burnout as happened before. The UK was not alone in cancelling our recurrent event and indeed many divisions have reduced the frequency of, or outright cancelled, their weekly events over the last year and a half.
Next is the topic of where our events are held. We try our best to host events at a range of airports across our green and pleasant land, as after all we represent the UK in it's entirety and not just London. With this being said, it's becoming increasingly harder to use some of our smaller airfields; either the events are very quiet and controllers regard them as boring, or they are overwhelmingly busy and controllers find them difficult to control in an effective manner. Furthermore, we get a disproportionately large number of requests from other divisions to hold events at our larger airports, and this is especially true for Heathrow. The upshot of this is that we currently have a waiting list of a year for any division which wants to hold an event at Heathrow. Given the choice between waiting a year or holding the event elsewhere in the UK, many choose the former, which truly highlights the demand for events here. Having a backlog of Heathrow events also means we can't use this airport for the events that we want to run, such as our long haul events, without pushing everything else back. Most other divisions throughout Europe feature major airports in almost all events, and while we don't want to be anywhere near as extreme in the UK, we would like to slightly increase the number of event we hold at our most popular airports such as Heathrow, Gatwick, and Manchester. This of course means slightly decreasing the events at our smaller airports, however we remain committed to providing a wide offering of airports throughout the year. In practise, this means removing events like Solent Staff-Up and Aldergrave, which receive limited attention, and retaining unique or well loved events at our smaller airports such as Mersey Night and the Channel Island Christmas Shopper.
We would also like to expand the number of social events that we hold. The addition of voice rooms and screen sharing to Discord has made hosting quizzes and group flights even easier, and this is something we would like to capitalise on. When I joined VATSIM UK 5 years ago, Teamspeak was always full of people chatting, flying, playing soundboards and getting into trouble, but above all having a good time. It would be great to get some of that community spirit back, and encouraging people to get chatting through quizzes and group flights is a great way to break the ice.
Finally, we would like to continue to ask our members for events suggestions. If you have an interesting idea for an event at your local airport, or would like to see a particular city pair at a large airport, then please let us know in the replies below. Most of the events we create are based on suggestions from our community and, although they often may not prove a huge success, sometimes result in a new UK classic being created. The Canaries events are a great example of this, and has become one of our most popular offerings. I hope you enjoy the events we have to offer over the next year, there will be some exciting announcements soon so stay tuned on Discord and the forums!
Take Care,
Ben, Loui, and Piers
(The Marketing Ladz)
Edited by Ben Wright
- Archie Middlefell
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