When we started Bettakultcha back in January 2010 myself and Ivor never imagined many people would come to Temple Works on a cold, bloody cold in fact, Tuesday evening to watch a five minute PowerPoint about unknown subjects by people they’d never hear of. Well would you?
But come they did, and at the end they asked when the next one was. Two years later we’re putting Bettakultcha on in four cities on Yorkshire and regularly getting 200 people to sit and watch more people they don’t know, present about things they didn’t know they wanted to know. Guess we’re doing something right.
Late last year we were approached by the Media Museum in Bradford, they had a new exhibition opening and asked would we like to put on a Bettakultcha as part of the opening? Well never one to look a gift horse in the mouth we tentatively agreed.
One of the quandaries we had was that Life Online is a theme. Now we never have a theme at Bettakultcha for the very reason that not everyone will like the theme. Bettakultcha is designed to have variety. So we ummed and arred about it and decided that we’d stick to our guns and not theme it.
Our thought process was that, Bettakultcha demonstrates Life Online itself (that sounds really grand and over blown now I’ve typed it, but stick with me). Once we had the nod for the first Bettakultcha all that time ago, we did three things immediately. We created a twitter address @Bettakultcha, an email address and a blog www.bettakultcha.com. The only promotion we carried out was via twitter, pointing people to the blog and email address to generate interest.
We threw out the convention of turning off phones at events and actively encouraged the Bettakultcha audience to tweet #bettakultcha before, during and after each presenter, creating an event you can follow even if you can’t attend. After each Bettakultcha we post the videos, and people pop back to the blog.
Bettakultcha was born online and lives its own life on there, as well as bringing people together in one place where they’ll even tweet each other at the event! How much more of a fit can it be to the museum’s idea!?
Bettakultcha at Life Online is on Saturday March 31st at the National Media Museum in Bradford, there are only 80 tickets available at £10 each before March 1st. You can get your tickets for Bettakultcha at Life Online here.