Our prospectus.
Building an Arts Festival for East Surrey
The challenge we set ourselves in 2022 was to build and establish an annual arts festival for East Surrey, with the village of Bletchingley as its hub, to promote the arts in all its diverse inclusive forms and provide a platform for local artists of all abilities with all the benefits that engagement to the arts can bring to the mental health and wellbeing of the community
Our first year
With a completely blank page and lots of ideas we designed a logo, created a website and social media pages and called for engagement from the community to help build the events that would make up the festival.
Comedy Night
Our first event was a comedy night held at Bletchingley Village Hall with 5 comedians, headed by TV star Paul Sinha, entertaining a full audience. The event sold out within 2 weeks of tickets going on sale. The evening was a great success.
Art Exhibition
We followed the success of our comedy night with an exhibition by local artists, painters, photographers, ceramicists, sculptors exhibiting and selling their works. With live music and a demonstration by local artist Uncle Stubble the two-day event drew a steady audience.
Music in the Meadow
The third event in our 2022 festival calendar was a music festival held on Grange Meadow. With local musicians providing a variety of musical styles from singer-songwriters, cover tunes, indie-folk through to blues/reggae an estimated crowd of some 200 people enjoyed and appreciated the variety of musical talent we have in East Surrey.
The community
As we developed each of the events in our festival calendar, we were able to engage with different parts of the local and artistic communities to build and stage these events. Going forward we hope to build on this community engagement to make BletchFest a bigger and better arts festival with each year.
Our reach
Along with the physical attendance at our events our website launched in late January 2022 has been visited by almost 7,000 unique mainly local visitors and has had 16,000 page views. In the same period our Facebook and Twitter pages have had a reach of some 60,000. We have also been supported by a number of editorials in local magazines around the events we have staged this year. Many others will have seen the posters and flyers posted around Tandridge and adjacent areas as each event was launched. At the same time, we have built a contact database of those that have registered for our events.
Future Plans
The proven events of Comedy Night, Art Exhibition and Music Festival were repeated bigger and better in 2023’s festival with the addition of a Blues Themed Music concert and the reintroduction of an annual village Panto. To these we aspire to add other events. Under consideration are dance, film and theatrical events for which we are seeking community engagement and input.
Your support
For BletchFest to achieve its aims we will need to build the support of sponsors. community bodies and individuals. Community engagement is a proven benefit to companies, businesses, traders and social groups of all kinds. Relationships built through popular local community activities are the surest way of building favourability and recognition.
Ways to engage
We are currently seeking sponsorship opportunities and believe that we can, having staged successful events, and having measured both direct and social media responses, offer genuine access to a local market of enthusiastic support. There are many different levels of sponsorship available from a whole festival throughout 2024, or sponsoring individual events, to display advertising at the events. We would like the opportunity to discuss these opportunities openly and in detail with you.
