Since Kooba were announced as Bord Bia’s digital partners last year, we have been busy working on multiple projects with the Bord Bia team. In addition to launching the new Bord Bia website, we launched the new digital presence for Bloom back in early March.
Soon after the successful site launch, the Covid-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the 5 day event in the Phoenix Park. In an effort to continue the 13 year strong festival and to adapt to the new circumstances Bord Bia announced that they were taking the festival online for the #BloomAtHome event and partnered with Kooba to create an online experience for users to enjoy from the safety of their home.
Our team began workshopping ideas and themes around virtual events and what we could achieve for Bloom online to make the event a truly engaging and interactive online experience. Our approach boiled down to the idea of translating a real world festival to an online event within a limited timeframe.
Translating a real world festival to an online event
Various ideas were presented and discussed with the Bord Bia Bloom team and the final list of deliverables to make the event a success online included the creation of new landing pages, an interactive event schedule and multiple social assets to help promote the new format.
Event registration page
With the idea that the Bloom At Home event would be a series of webinars, one of the first areas that the team needed to look at was creating a way for users to register for the various webinar events. Along with this we wanted to incorporate a countdown clock on the page to create hype and excitement around the event.
Event live page
We envisioned this page to act as the main webinar landing page and hold event information, videos, a social wall and details on the RTE garden competition. As the RTE Garden Competition acted as a way for virtual Bloom goers to interact and get involved with the event through social media, we wanted to incorporate their posts into the page. We designed a section of the page to include steps on how to enter the competition and integrated a competition social feed so that the posts would appear on the live page.
Socials assets
As the website had become an integral part of the virtual Bloom event we wanted to ensure a homogenous look across the website and all associated social channels. To do this we worked with Bloom to create a look and feel for all social assets for the events; event schedule, competition/winners notices, quotes, etc. All of these designs were formatted for mediums such as instagram stories and posts, facebook and twitter. One of the assets included was a schedule that incorporated the Bloom branding and was able to be shared across the various platforms.
As a company we are always eager to help our clients out in any way that we can and explore new ways to work. Virtual Bloom has allowed us to take on a new design and development challenge and work with Bord Bia to successfully bring one of Ireland’s favourite summer/garden festivals online.
