The TechArts Festival, a showcase of the creative talents of students and faculty, ended last Saturday. The Festival had over 30 different events held over two weeks with several forms of visual and performance art. However, even though the Office of the Arts put together many great shows, they could have publicized some of the smaller events more effectively to attract a larger and wider audience.
For instance, the Art Crawl, held on the last day of the Festival, was by far the best-attended event. This success can be attributed partially to word-of-mouth. Since the event exclusively featured student art, students encouraged their friends to attend the event. Many of the smaller events were not as actively publicized, and they did not enjoy the word-of-mouth publicity that the Art Crawl did. These events were advertised through a relatively narrow set of media, with few on-campus posters, emails and limited Facebook marketing. Moreover, while there was advertising for the Festival as a whole, specific events might not have been marketed sufficiently.
The TechArts Festival could improve its attendance by implementing methods to make its events more central and visible. For example, some events could have been held in more central locations, such as the CULC or Tech Green. Some musical events such as the TechArts Music Showcase would have attracted larger crowds if they were held at Tech Green like the Homecoming Concert. Moreover, some of the events could have been combined to merge different audiences. For example, there were multiple concerts for the different music ensembles on campus and merging these concerts would have accumulated larger crowds.
The TechArts Festival exposed the wonderful and diverse artistic talent that the students and faculty have, and by making its events more visible and accessible, the Festival can become much more popular with the student body.