StokesleyTourFest – A great community project

Just over a month ago the Tour De Yorkshire gave us a three day spectacular, showing again  how our amazing the county we live in looks. For me it was particularly of interest, as this time we were to be honoured to have the Tour coming straight through our High Street. That alone was exciting but being asked to be part of the project team was huge!

All the fun and games started in late January when we were asked to put together some ideas to visualise StokesleyTourFest. It had be big, bold and bright as well as adhering to the strict brand guidelines the Welcome to Yorkshire and TourDe Yorkshire provided. Always happy to obey guidelines, we came up  our initial designs which were accepted by the Parish Council and project group. Step 1 complete.

To give the new brand as much as promotion as possible we decided to use the Stokesley Food Week social media accounts, which had been already well received, to help promote the event even though at this stage we didn’t know what it would be!

Our little Food Week had been bourne out of our Thirsty Thursday (a successful community based network in Stokesley) regulars and had gathered a nice steady following when it took place and seemed a natural springboard to launch the concept of StokesleyTourFest.

As the momentum started to build, we were busy posting, sharing and liking all our news and views about the Tour and working with our PR expert Anna Addison we were able to get ahead of the game in the High Street activities and event plans. As we had hoped Stokesley did not disappoint and were keen to interact, share their views, photos and promotions with us via Facebook and Twitter.

Working with local businesses we developed a range of sponsorship  options to gather funds and provide businesses with some fantastic opportunities to be seen at the Tour as well as within the local region. They culminated in us designing vertical banners, large format event banners as well as lovely event guide.