ATLAS Special Interest Group
Events Research Group

Index

• Contact
• Introduction
• Annual review of activities 2022
• Annual review of activities 2021
• Annual review of activities 2020
• Annual review of activities 2019
• Annual review of activities 2018
• Annual review of activities 2017
• Annual review of activities 2016
• Annual review of activities 2015
• Annual review of activities 2014
• Annual review of activities 2013
• Annual review of activities 2011

Contact details

The contact person for this research group is:

	Greg Richards
	Breda University of Applied Sciences
	Breda, The Netherlands
	richards.g@buas.nl

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Introduction

There has been a rapid increase in the number of cultural, sporting and business events in recent decades, and cities and regions have made growing use of these events to support their policy agendas. This growth has been coupled with a growth in research output and educational provision in the academic world in general and among ATLAS members in particular.

Given the rapidly developing nature of the field and the international nature of the subject matter it seems appropriate to develop a focus for collaborative research and educational initiatives in the context of ATLAS. A number of ATLAS members have indicated their interest in such a development (see list below), and it seems likely that the number of potential collaborators will be much greater.

Aims

The aims of the ATLAS Events SIG will be to:

• Develop and support transnational research on events

• To stage expert meetings and other information exchange activities related to events

• To produce publications of interest to Group members and to the wider academic and practitioner communities.

Coordination

The Events SIG will initially be convened and coordinated by Prof. Greg Richards of the NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands. The international work of the Group will also be supported by the newly-established Events Group based in the Dutch Centre for Leisure and Tourism Research (CeLTouR), which combines the research capacities of Tilburg, Breda and Wageningen universities (all of whom are active members of ATLAS).

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Annual review of activities 2021

Greg Richards

In 2021 discussion about the state of event management research was stimulated by a paper by Emmy Yeung and Rhodri Thomas on the ‘Long Tail of Event Management Research’. Using data from SCOPUS, they demonstrated that the field of event management research is dominated by a handful of scholars and institutions globally, predominantly from English-speaking countries. This observation stimulated the development of the Event Management Languages Project, which aims to examine the literature produced in languages other than English. One of the challenges for researchers working in English as a second language is the lack of leading academic journals in other languages. Even so, an initial analysis by Richards (2021) uncovered many papers in other languages, which also reflect the cultural richness of the events field.

As Richards pointed out, Scopus and other abstracting systems are predominantly geared towards English language publications, and this bias is strengthened by the pressure to published in ranked journals, which also tend to publish in English. However, there is also a wealth of scholarship published in other languages, which does not become visible because of these language barriers. Even if texts in other languages can now be machine-translated, unless scholars are aware of sources in other languages these will not be used. A recent discussion of these issues on Academia indicated an interest in addressing these issues by increasing the visibility of event management research in other languages. This can also help to identify global themes in research, as well as tracing specific national, regional or linguistic areas of focus.

As an international organisation, ATLAS has long been concerned with issues of language. The most important thing is to be able to communicate and to exchange information and ideas. In practice, this means that the activities of ATLAS and other international organisations have tended to gravitate towards the dominant world languages, in particular English. In the early years, ATLAS did make considerable efforts to maintain linguistic diversity in its outputs. Early versions of the ATLAS Newsletter, for example, were regularly translated into French, and also occasionally into German and Spanish. Many early ATLAS Conferences also has simultaneous translation, usually between English and the language of the host country. The costs of simultaneous translation were prohibitive, however, and this led to the practice being dropped. A creative approach was adopted at the ATLAS Conference in Portugal in 1997, where Joachim Kappert and other colleagues volunteered to provide consecutive translation for the plenary sessions. Today, almost all ATLAS communication and the vast majority of events are run in English only. A revival of multilingual sessions for the ATLAS Latin America Conference held online in 2021 is a welcome indication of the continued commitment of ATLAS to linguistic diversity.

However, the current dominance of English in the ATLAS network also reflects a shift of activities towards research, and the increasingly English-dominated academic research field. In trying to uncover sources in other languages, we have put together a group of researchers able to work in Arabic, Czech, Croatian, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak and Slovene.

As a first step in creating an international, multilingual database, each member of the group should carry out a search for literature on ‘event management’ in their own language and country/region. This search is not based on SCOPUS (which mainly lists sources in English), but on search systems that feature other languages (including Google Scholar), or searches in journal databases directly to uncover publications. The period of publication covered is from 2009-2019, the period also covered by Yeung and Thomas. Each member of the group will produce a reference list of the publications, which we will then compile into a master database for the project.

So far, the review has revealed a considerable variation in the presence of event management literature in other languages. There are many sources available in Portuguese, for example, stimulated by the presence of many Portuguese language journals, particularly in Brazil. In contrast, only a handful of sources are available in languages such as Dutch or Czech, with many academics in these countries publishing in English. Most details about the project are due to be published in a paper that should appear in early 2022.

The Event Experience Scale (EES) developed by members of the ATLAS Events Group continues to be used at a wide range of events around the world. We now have an Italian translation of the scale, provided by Enzo Grossi of Turin University. Data from different locations around the world also continue to be analysed. For example, surveys from Iceland were drawn from visitors to the cultural family festival ‘The Night of Lights’ (Ljósanótt), in Reykjanesbær, Iceland. Students from Breda University of Applied Sciences, Tess Damen and Steffie Wellens, analysed the Icelandic data. They largely replicated the EES experience dimensions, with a Cronbach’s alpha (0.781) for affective engagement, (0.825) for cognitive engagement, (0.399) for physical engagement and (0.649) for novelty. These findings suggest a slightly different pattern from many previous analyses, particularly in the absence of a reliable scale for physical engagement. Tess and Steffie found that only novelty had a significant effect on social impact in the Icelandic data.


References

Richards, G. (2021). Pulling the long tail of event management research. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events. DOI: 10.1080/19407963.2021.1890755

Yeung, E., & Thomas, R. (2021). The ‘long tail’of event management research: evidence from the field’s main journals. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events, DOI: 10.1080/19407963.2020.1862855
 

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Annual review of activities 2020

Greg Richards

The group has been working on the production of two journal special issues over the past year. The first special issue has been published online in the Event Management journal. The theme of the special issue is Events as Platforms, Networks and Communities, and it brings together many of the papers presented at the Special track organised by the Events Group at the ATLAS Annual Conference in Copenhagen in September 2018. The session made a particular contribution to the development of a ‘network approach to events’, which different members have been working on since the inception of the group in 2011.

Many of the papers published in the special issue edited by Greg Richards and David Jarman deal with event networks, expressed through networks connecting similar types of events (such as fringe festivals), networks of performers, as well as conceptualizing the differences between event networks and platforms.

Events as Platforms, Networks and Communities

Greg Richards and David Jarman - Events as Platforms, Networks and Communities. https://doi.org/10.3727/152599520X15894679115420

Lénia Marques, Carla Borba, and Janna Michael - Grasping the Social Dimensions of Event Experiences: Introducing The Event Social Interaction Scale (ESIS). https://doi.org/10.3727/152599520X15894679115448

Weng Si Lei (Clara) and Chun Chen Li (Claudia) - The Mechanism of Linkages Between Online Community Participation and Festival Attendance – A Case Study of a Chinese Music Festival. https://doi.org/10.3727/152599520X15894679115457

Greg Langridge-Thomas, Philip Crowther and Caroline Westwood - The Royal Welsh Show: The Nation’s True Cauldron. https://doi.org/10.3727/152599520X15894679115466

Alba Colombo, Jaime Altuna and Esther Oliver-Grasiot - Playing With Fire Collectively: Contemporary Cultural Rites As Devisers And Outcomes Of Community Networks. https://doi.org/10.3727/152599520X15894679115475

Mark Norman and Nana Nyarko - Networked Economic Value Creation In Event Tourism, An Exploratory Study Of Towns And Smaller Cities In The UK. https://doi.org/10.3727/152599520X15894679115493

Greg Richards - The Value of Event Networks and Platforms: Evidence From a Multi-Annual Cultural Programme - https://doi.org/10.3727/152599520X15894679115501

David Jarman - Festival to Festival: Networked Relationships Between Fringe Festivals. https://doi.org/10.3727/152599520X15894679115510

Research continues on the event experiences of visitors worldwide, with regular use being made of the Event Experience Scale (EES) developed by the group (de Geus, Richards and Toepoel, 2016). Thousands of surveys have been completed across a range of different event types and in many different countries and locations. The EES has provided particularly useful in comparing events in terms of the experience offered to visitors, the strength of different experience dimensions and the impact of experiences on event outcomes such as satisfaction and intention to return and recommend.

One of the outputs of the project is a special issue, edited by Greg Richards and Vern Biaett, deals with Event Experiences: Measurement and Meaning, publication of which will be finalised in early 2021, although most of the papers are already available online from the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events. The special issue presents both quantitative approaches ot experience measurement, as exemplified by the EES, and qualitative approaches that attempt to uncover more of the richness of subjective event experiences.

Event Experiences: Measurement and Meaning

John Armbrecht & Tommy D. Andersson - The event experience, hedonic and eudaimonic satisfaction and subjective well-being among sport event participants. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19407963.2019.1695346

Caitlin Brooks - The transformative potential of community-created consent culture. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19407963.2020.1717078

Willem J.L. Coetzee & Shahab Pourfakhimi - Affective engagement as a contextual dimension for predicting intentions to revisit and recommend events – a multinational comparison. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19407963.2019.1695345

Katherine Dashper & Anne Buchmann - Multispecies event experiences: introducing more-than-human perspectives to event studies. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19407963.2019.1701791

Karen Davies &Dewi Jaimangal-Jones - The case for constructionist, longitudinal and ethnographic approaches to understanding event experiences. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FW55IQTZNAZKRDEPQJTZ/full?target=10.1080%2F19407963.2020.1718340

Alex Grebenar - Lost in music: mapping the 21st century house music event experience. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/figure/10.1080/19407963.2020.1727604

Jonathan Moss, Peter A. Whalley &Ian Elsmore - Phenomenological psychology & descriptive experience sampling: a new approach to exploring music festival experience. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19407963.2019.1702627

Greg Richards - Measuring the dimensions of event experiences: applying the Event Experience Scale to cultural events. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/figure/10.1080/19407963.2019.1701800

Elaine Rust - Understanding experiential value creation at small-scale events: a multi-stakeholder perspective. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19407963.2019.1701811

Abiola Sobitan & Peter Vlachos - Immersive event experience and attendee motivation: a quantitative analysis using sensory, localisation, and participatory factors. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/figure/10.1080/19407963.2020.1721638

The meeting on Festival Cities and Cultural Tourism, planned in conjunction with the Cultural Tourism Research Group, is now being held largely online on October 22nd. It is also planned to stage a further meeting of the Events Group during the ATLAS Annual Conference in Prague in September 2021.

For more information on the activities of the Events Group, please see the relevant section of the ATLAS website, or visit the group pages on Academia (https://independent.academia.edu/gregrichards/ATLAS-Events-Group) or Researchgate (https://www.researchgate.net/project/ATLAS-Event-Experiences-Project) If you are interested in participating in the Event Experiences Project, please contact Greg Richards (richards.g@buas.nl).
 

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Annual review of activities 2019

Greg Richards

The ATLAS Events Group was founded in 2011, and since then it has continued to grow in terms of both membership and activities.

Meeting Copenhagen on the theme of Event platforms, networks and communities: making time and space to link people. This attracted a total of 20 papers, which covered a number of themes, including Networks and identity, Community making and event networks, Social effects of event platforms, Cities as platforms for events, Industry platforms for events and Online, offline networks. This was one of the best attended tracks of the ATLAS Conference. A special issue of Event Management based on the papers presented at the Copenhagen conference is currently being edited by David Jarman and Greg Richards. Another product of the meeting was a review of event experience research, which is due to be published in a volume edited by John Armbrecht, Erik Lundberg and Tommy D. Andersson (Richards, forthcoming).

The following Events Group meeting at the ATLAS Conference in Girona is dedicated to Transformation through Innovation and Creativity in Events. Plans for future meetings are currently being developed, with a proposal to stage a meeting at Edinburgh Napier University in 2020, which is provisionally scheduled to cover cultural festivals. There is also a proposal to stage a meeting in Breda in 2021, to celebrate the 10th annniversary of the first Events Group meeting there.

Following the work of a number of Events Group members on event experiences, a special issue of the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events on Measuring Event Experiences is currently being edited by Vern Biatt and Greg Richards. The call for this special issue attracted over 30 submissions, underlining the growing interest in event experiences. The final publication will include a range of quantative and qualititative approachs to experience measurement, as well as some conceptual papers. It is hoped that this collectiion will advance the discussions in the group about the role and measuremnt of visitor experiences.

Continued work on the Event Experience Scale by members of the ATLAS Events Group confirms the generic dimensions of event experience proposed by de Geus et al (2016). Coetzee et al. (2019) found that the affective, cognitive, physical, and novelty dimensions proposed by de Geus et al. could also be applied to sports events.

References

Coetzee, Willem J. L., Craig Lee, And Abrar Faisal (2019) Predicting Intentions To Revisit And Recommend A Sporting Event Using The Event Experience Scale (Ees). Event Management, 23, 303–314.

De Geus, S., Richards, G. and Toepoel, V. (2016) Conceptualisation and Operationalisation of Event and Festival Experiences: creation of an Event Experience Scale. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, 16(3), 274-296.

Richards, G. (forthcoming October 2019) Event experience research. In Armbrecht, J., Lundberg, E. and Andersson, T.D. (eds) A Research Agenda for Event Management. Edward Elgar.
 

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Annual review of activities 2018

Greg Richards

The work of the ATLAS Events Group continues to expand, particularly in terms of data collection and analysis on event experiences. Event experiences and experience design have been a key theme of the group since 2013, when a meeting on this theme was held in Portugal. Since then members of the group have been involved in collecting data from events in many different countries around the world. This work has supported a number of publications, a number of which have been collected in the volume Experiencias turísticas de festivales y eventos edited by Greg Richards and Agustín Ruíz Lanuza, published in 2017.

The 2017 meeting of the ATLAS Events Group was held in conjunction with the ATLAS Annual Conference in Viana do Castelo. A total of 30 delegates attended the meeting sessions, and 19 papers were presented. There was lively discussion about research approaches to event experiences, and in particular how to use and combine quantitative and qualitative data sources. This event attracted wide range of papers related to event experiences, and also considerable discussion on the further development of the Event Experiences Scale.

The Event Experience Scale at different locations has not only provided very interesting comparative material, and has also stimulated a search for more flexible and shorter version of the scale. Work has also been done with a reduced scale at events and attractions in Hong Kong, which has emphasised the distinctive nature of experiences at attractions and events. The application of the EES to Carnival was also continued in 2018, with surveys being distributed in Brazil, Portugal and the Netherlands (see separate report below). Recent surveys have been carried out at other events in the Netherlands, including a major Jazz Festival.

A further meeting of the group will be staged in conjunction with the ATLAS Annual Conference in Copenhagen in September 2019. This meeting will be on the theme “Event platforms, networks and communities: making time and space to link people”. This has also proved a popular theme, with an even larger number of abstract submissions than in the previous year. There are plans to produce a publication from the meeting, which will be discussed in Copenhagen.

More information about the Events Group and its activities can be found on the Academia page: https://independent.academia.edu/gregrichards/ATLAS-Events-Group
 

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Annual review of activities 2017

Greg Richards

Founded in 2010, the ATLAS Events Group has held expert meetings in Breda (2011), Peniche (2013) and Sheffield (2014), Lecce (2015) and Barcelona (2016). Special tracks were also organised at the ATLAS Annual Conferences in Malta (2014) and Lisbon (2015). The group has also produced two books with Routledge from previous meetings - Exploring the social impacts of events (2013) and Event Design: Social perspectives and practices (2014).

In 2016 specific attention was paid to the development and testing of the Event Experience Scale originally created by a number of group members (De Geus et al, 2015). There has been much written about event experiences, but very little empirical measurement of what type of experiences event participants actually have, or how experiences vary between events. The basic research questions to be addressed by the this project therefore include:
• What is the relationship between event experiences and event type (sports, culture, business, etc.)?
• How are event experiences affected by event content?
• How do event experiences relate to event location (country, region, urban, rural, etc)?
• How do different visitor types experience events?
The project currently has a dozen members from 8 different countries, who have collected data on a wide range of different events, including Carnival in Brazil, the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona and the John Coltrane Jazz Festival in the USA. These studies are beginning to reveal the very different experiences that visitors have of events, and how experiences very according to visitor background, event context and location.

One of the major areas of research has been in Mexico, thanks to the initial efforts of Daniel Barrera Fernández and Agustín Ruiz Lanuza. Daniel initiated surveys at the Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato, the initial findings of which were also published (Barrera-Fernández and Hernández-Escampa, 2017). Agustín Ruiz Lanuza later coordinated the production of a book including a report on this research, as well as other event case studies and an overview of the Event Experiences research to date (Richards and Ruiz Lanuza, 2017, eds).

Other papers relating to research activities of the group have been published in a special issue of the International Journal of Event and Festival Management (De Brito and Richards, 2017), which looks at the relationship between events and placemaking. Other research related to the work of the group on the network approach to events has included the role of festivals as knowledge hubs (Podestà and Richards, 2017) and the creation of network value through events (Richards and Colombo, 2017).

In the near future the publications from the last expert meeting of the group are due to be published in a special issue of Event Management (Richards and Colombo, forthcoming). The next expert meeting of the group will also be staged during the ATLAS Annual Conference in Viana do Castelo, Portugal in September. Publications are also expected to be forthcoming from this special track of the conference, which will see the presentation of over 20 papers from delegates from 8 different countries on the theme of “Event Experiences: Special, Engaging, Different?” This meeting will also include a discussion on the future research and publication activities of the group.

 

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Annual review of activities 2016

Greg Richards

The ATLAS Events Group now has more than 20 members, and continues to expand its range of activities.

After previous Expert Meetings held in Breda (2011), Peniche (2013) and Sheffield (2014), in May 2015 the group held a meeting in Lecce, Italy. The meeting was organised by Ana Trono and her team from the University of Salento, who did a wonderful job of hosting the event and putting together a lively and engaging programme. The theme of the meeting was ‘Bidding for and Creating Events’, and 13 papers from delegates from nine countries were presented. A full report of the meeting is available on https://www.academia.edu/12521039/Creating_and_bidding_for_events

Founded in 2010, the ATLAS Events Group subsequently held meetings in Breda (2011), Peniche (2013) and Sheffield (2014), Lecce (2015), Barcelona (2016).

Special tracks were also organised at the ATLAS Annual Conferences in Malta (2014) and Lisbon (2015). The group has also produced two books with Routledge - Exploring the social impacts of events (2013) and Event Design: Social perspectives and practices (2014). The ATLAS Events Group continues to develop research and knowledge development activities rapidly, organising another expert meeting in 2016 and planning for more publications.

The main activity staged this year was the expert meeting on Rethinking the Eventful City in Barcelona in May. This event attracted 20 experts from around the world, including Don Getz, who gave a presentation on event sustainability and eventfulness. There was a lot of discussion from the assembled delegates about emerging concepts such as event portfolios and event systems.

The meeting was prefaced with a discussion on the relationship between cities and events, a report of which was made by Anna Ibañez, a PhD student at the Open University of Catalunya (UOC) and one of the meeting participants:

On May 11 a seminar was held at the CERC (Centre for Cultural Studies and Resources) in Barcelona on Eventful Cities: New strategies for sustainability. This event was organised by the ATLAS Events Special Interest Group and #UOCeventos.

During this meeting, we explored the relationship between events, the city and sustainability; in terms of economic, and social, cultural and environmental sustainability. The speakers were Donald Getz and Greg Richards, and the session was moderated by Alba Colombo, academic director of graduate studies in the Management of Cultural, Sporting and Corporate Events at the Open University of Catalunya (UOC).

The discussion reflected on the trend towards stronger relationships between cities and events and how this relationship is reflected in the evolution of management strategies, which are also increasingly influenced by sustainability issues. Large cities have often become a scenario or container to host major events, the city assuming a role of receptor. One wonders what events can bring to a city and what the city can bring to events? There are many studies of events in cities, but not all cities can be considered as ‘eventful’. In order to be an "Eventful city" it is necessary to have a good management strategy, which is sensitive to the specific characteristics of each city.

For example, a small town may lack the necessary infrastructure and therefore cannot compete globally, and in big cities sometimes in danger of becoming one runs in a single container without room for a type of more local event, more according to the identity of the place, ultimately, more authentic. In fact, a good strategy for an "Eventful city" such as Barcelona, is to find the midpoint between the major events planned in a top down fashion and the events arising from local communities, from the bottom up, which often provide an element of authenticity. For example, in the case of the 1992 Olympic Games the local community was intensively involved through the volunteer program. In contrast, the Forum of Cultures 2004 was organized with little reference to the city and was a failure. These examples might cause us to ask whether working closely with local citizens is essential to ensure the success of a major event.

The study of success factors is important, but to study the reasons for the failure of events can also teach us a lot about how to develop good management practices. The problem is that there are almost no data from failed events and indeed failures are often forgotten. Most failures are due to economic factors: either there are not enough resources or they are poorly used. By definition, the event is not economically sustainable in the long term unless it develops a relationship with the civic administration, which acts as a motor, or that it ensures that resources are well managed, in a sustainable way.

Environmental sustainability was also discussed, because in a city full of events it is difficult to have a positive effect on the environment. The events create litter and other problems, but there are also potentially positive effects, for example, generation and dissemination of tools to be more sustainable. Through event management you can introduce a philosophy of sustainability from new practices, e.g. contributing through education. It was concluded that an event should itself be a sustainable model, both economic and social and cultural level, while being respectful of the environment. But in order to have a good strategy for event portfolios it is important to have the know how to manage events sustainably in all these areas, and to identify successful strategies and experiences. For this, it is also important to have measurement tools for the monitoring and evaluation of event effects and the outcomes of different management strategies.

The ‘eventful city’ concept developed out of the basic observation that cities are using events to achieve a growing range of policy objectives, including economic growth, image change, social cohesion and physical redevelopment. The growing importance and scale of event activity in cities is driving a rapidly changing relationship between events and the city. Cities are no longer simply containers for events; they are co-creators, innovators, directors, managers, partners and beneficiaries of events. Events in turn are shaped by the cities they take place in, with their form, duration, content and effects being determined to a large extent by urban space, place and process.
Few cities illustrate this dialectic relationship between cities and events better than Barcelona, the host city for this meeting. Starting with the World Expo in 1888 and continuing through the 1929 World Expo and the 1992 Olympic Games, Barcelona has harnessed the power of events to put itself on the global map, shape perceptions and drive economic, cultural and social development. With the Mobile World Congress recently secured for a further eight year term, Barcelona is rapidly establishing itself as a global events hub.

This development has not always been smooth or entirely progressive. The forging of an economic growth coalition in Post-Franco Barcelona helped to secure the Olympics, but the focus on external promotion and economic growth has also attracted increasing criticism from social partners and local citizens concerned with the globalization of the city and the loss of identity. One of the basic emerging questions is – do events serve the city, or does the city serve events?

When the original eventful cities concept was developed a few years ago, few cities had experience of managing, developing and directing their event programmes to produce effective outcomes. In recent years, however, different models have emerged that show how cities can develop a constructive relationship with their events, and how the events can benefit from this relationship as well.
The aim of this meeting was to review the development of ‘eventful cities’ such as Barcelona, to analyse the emerging trends in the eventful landscape and to trace potential future development directions. The meeting will bring together leading international scholars in the event studies field, as well as practitioners from the events industry and the policy field in Barcelona and beyond. Selected papers from the event will be published in a special issue of Event Management in 2017.

The group is planning to hold a follow-up meeting linked to the ATLAS Conference in Viana do Castelo in September 2017.

In terms of research the group launched the ATLAS Event Monitoring Project in 2014, and is now developing a project on event visitor experiences using the Event Experience Scale (de Geus et al., 2015). Surveys have been conducted by ATLAS members in a number of locations, which are producing valuable comparative data about the experiences and profiles of event visitors.

For example, Daniel Barrera Fernández from the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico used the Event Experience Survey to study the Festival Internacional Cervantino. The Festival Internacional Cervantino (popularly known as El Cervantino) takes place in the city of Guanajuato, in central Mexico. The festival originated in the mid 20th century, when short plays by Miguel de Cervantes were performed in the city’s plazas. El Cervantino is now promoted by Visit Mexico as “one of the premier arts and cultural festivals in Mexico and Latin America”. In 2010 the festival attracted 179,000 people. The 2015 edition of the festival was celebrated on the 400th anniversary of the death of Cervantes.

Daniel Barrera Fernández was able to obtain funding from his university to carry out surveys at the 2015 edition of the event. In total, 230 surveys were collected during the festival, with the vast majority of those interviewed coming from Mexico. The USA (12%) was the biggest foreign visitor contingent. Almost 60% of the respondents came from the 20-29 age group, which is related to the large number of students in the sample. Over half of the visitors had been to the event at least once before. There was a high level of satisfaction and intention to return.

Almost all aspects of the EES scored highly among the participants in the Festival Internacional Cervantino (Figure 1).

Figure 1: EES experience dimensions for participants in the Festival Internacional Cervantino


In Brazil a different data collection approach was adopted by Lénia Marques and her collaborators in Recife. There, the survey was circulated via social media, using a snowball approach to reach people via Facebook and Whatsapp.

The survey generated 308 responses, and over 80% of the respondents indicated that they had celebrated Carnival in 2016. Of these, the majority had visited Carnival in Recife (44%) or the neighbouring city of Olinda (44%). Most people attended Carnival as individual visitors, but almost 11% indicated that they were part of a Carnival group (bloco). The position of Carnival as an institution in Brazilian life is underlined by the fact that over half the respondents indicated that they ‘always’ celebrate Carnival.

In terms of experience, the Brazilians were even more enthusiastic about Carnival – perhaps not surprisingly. Excitement was the most highly scored experience element, and learning was scored much lower than in the Mexican case. Location also did not seem to be a particularly significant influence on experience. The neighbouring cities of Recife and Olinda (both of which are famous for their Carnival celebrations) both had very similar experience profiles, with no significant differences on any dimension (Figure 2).

Figure 2: EES experience dimensions for Carnival participants in Recife and Olinda


Lénia Marques has also developed a Social Interaction module to complement the EES. This has been implemented at a range of events, including an eGaming event in the UK.
Further details of the activities of the group and the research projects can be found on https://independent.academia.edu/gregrichards/ATLAS-Events-Group
 

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Annual review of activities 2015

Greg Richards

The ATLAS Events Group now has more than 20 members, and continues to expand its range of activities.

After previous Expert Meetings held in Breda (2011), Peniche (2013) and Sheffield (2014), in May 2015 the group held a meeting in Lecce, Italy. The meeting was organised by Ana Trono and her team from the University of Salento, who did a wonderful job of hosting the event and putting together a lively and engaging programme. The theme of the meeting was ‘Bidding for and Creating Events’, and 13 papers from delegates from nine countries were presented. A full report of the meeting is available on
https://www.academia.edu/12521039/Creating_and_bidding_for_events

The group is currently considering publication options for the papers from the Lecce meeting, following the previous group publications with Routledge - Exploring the social impacts of events (2013) and Event Design: Social perspectives and practices (2014).

Members of the group have also continued to conduct joint research through the ATLAS Event Monitoring Project:
https://www.academia.edu/2333874/ATLAS_Events_Monitoring_Project_Overview

Members of the group have so far conducted surveys in Portugal, Russia, Finland, the UK, the Netherlands, Cyprus and Spain, and more surveys are planned in the near future. This research involves the basic monitoring of events and their visitors to provide a basis for comparative research. However, we are also currently expanding the research in a number of directions. These include the development and testing of the Event Experience Scale (EES), which is designed to measure the different dimensions of visitor experience. The scale has already been tested at events in the Netherlands, and group members are planning to use the scale at events in a number of different countries in the next 12 months. Lénia Marques from Bournemouth University has also started a project to develop a social interaction scale, which can be added to the basic event questionnaire.

These and other developments will be discussed at the ATLAS Annual Conference in Lisbon in 2015, where the group is also staging a special track on Placemaking and Events. This track attracted 17 abstracts with a wide range of different empirical and conceptual contributions.

Plans are also well underway for the next Expert Meeting of the group, to be held at the Universitat Obert de Catalunya (UOC) in Barcelona in May 2016. This meeting will be on the theme of Rethinking the Eventful City: Perspectives, Practices, Prospects. It will examine the changing relationship between cities and their portfolios of events, considering the use of events as policy tools in the contemporary city. A call for papers will be issued at the ATLAS Conference in Lisbon and circulated to all members shortly afterwards.

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Annual review of activities 2014

Greg Richards

The Events group currently has 25 members from 12 different countries. Over the past three years the group has organised meetings in the Netherlands, Portugal and the UK. Following the publication last year of the group’s first collected volume Exploring the Social Dimension of Events (Routledge), work has proceeded on bringing together the papers on Event Design presented at the second meeting in Peniche, Portugal in 2013. The volume Event Design: Social perspectives and practices, edited by Greg Richards, Lénia Marques and Karen Mein, was published by Routledge this month. It contains a range of perspectives on event design, including service design, visitor journeys, ritual analysis, urban studies and Imagineering.

The long term development of the social network perspective on events was continued during the meeting on Visitor Engagement organised at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. This event brought together 22 scholars from seven countries to analyse different dimension ¡s of engagement and visitor experience. The concept of engagement proved particularly difficult to pin down, and many different conceptual approaches to the question were presented. Much of the discussion revolved around the extent to which engagement could be equated with experience, in particular ‘peak experience’ or ‘flow’.

A workshop session was also organised at the ATLAS Annual conference in Malta on Event Evaluation. A total of seven papers were presented during this session, including contributions from the Netherlands, Romania, the UK and Malta. Two of these papers have subsequently been published in the Journal of Policy Research in Leisure, Tourism and Events (Peperkamp, Rooijackers and Remmers, 2014; Richards, 2014). The papers presented during the Malta conference touched on many issues surrounding monitoring and evaluation of events, including problems of attribution of impacts, political influence and comparability of results.

Following the success of this workshop stream, another event is being organised in conjunction with the Budapest conference, focussing on the relationship between Quality of Life and Events.

Research has also continued in the framework of the ATLAS Event Monitoring Project. This uses a basic standardised questionnaire to generate comparative data on events from different countries and contexts. A number of studies have been completed in the past two years, including medieval and gastronomic events in Portugal (Cardoso et al., 2014), the Pori Jazz Festival in Finland, the Feria de Abril in Seville and Barcelona in Spain, and other festivals in Cyprus and the UK.

An analysis of the data from the first rounds of data collection has revealed strong links between modes of event participation, event form and levels of engagement. For example, the more engaged people feel with an event (as measured through an ‘event engagement scale’), the more likely they were to ‘feel part of a bigger community’ (figure 1). Engagement with the event also increased with the number of visits to the event (figure 2).

 


Figure 1: Engagement scale scores (1-5) by ‘feeling part of a bigger community’



Figure 2: Engagement scores by number of previous visits

The group hopes to expand participation and coverage of the research in the coming year.
The next meeting of the group is planned to be held at the University of Salento, in Southern Italy, in May 2015. The proposed theme of the meeting is Creating and Bidding for Events.

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Annual review of activities 2013

ATLAS Events Group Expert Meeting Report
Imagineering Events and Event Design
Peniche, May 2013
Greg Richards, Lénia Marques and Karen Mein

The second Expert Meeting held by the ATLAS Events Group was hosted by the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria in Peniche, Portugal in May 2013. The meeting centred on issues of event design and Imagineering and featured eleven presentations by delegates from Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the UK.

The aim of the meeting was to explore how the design of events can influence their outcomes and impacts and how design strategies can be employed to increase the value of events for stakeholders.

Greg Richards from Tilburg University in the Netherlands opened the meeting with a theoretical consideration of the role of ‘interaction ritual chains’ (Collins, 2004) as design tools for events. The co-presence implicit in events can be used to focus attention, create a feeling of belonging to a group and so generate ‘emotional energy’.

Many of these principles were illustrated in the case of Draaksteken Beesel presented by Ilja Simons from the Academy for Leisure, Breda. This event is only staged once every seven years by the inhabitants of a small village in the south of the Netherlands. The effort involved in the staging of this event by a small community means that they have to take their time and develop a ‘slow’ event that is rich in tradition. But at the same time the long time period reveals the changes that are taking place in the local community and the local culture.

Anna Trono and Katia Rizzello from the University of Salento, Italy analysed the Rites of Holy Week in the Puglia region. Their analysis showed that these traditional rituals are still very conservative, even if spectacular elements have been highlighted for tourist consumption. The centrality of certain people who buy particular roles in the ritual through an auction also mirrors to a large extent Collins’ model.

The design of music festivals was considered by June Calvo-Soraluze from Deusto University in Bilbao. Her research at three different festivals underlined how design is usually undertaken for the audience, which negates involvement and co-creation. Instead she proposes that festivals should move towards designing ‘with’ participants, so that a more active co-creation system can develop.

Satu Miettinen, Anu Valtonen, and Vesa Markuksela from the University of Lapland outlined the ways in which principles of service design can be applied to events. In this relatively new field experiments are being used to design services, looking at the customer journey and touchpoints to improve the experience of events. They define touchpoints as something physical through which you use the service – objects, places, interfaces.

Case studies of Portuguese and Danish events were presented by Marisa de Brito from NHTV Academy for Leisure, Breda, in terms of design for sustainability. She demonstrated how post-event sustainability actions are extending these festivals in time and space by prolonging interaction with the audience and other stakeholders. She illustrated how events were being made more sustainable through innovative approaches, such as re-using material from other events.

Carlos Fernandes, Goretti Silva and Marta Cardoso from the Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo, Portugal analysed the Santarem national gastronomy event in Portugal. Although the festival is now in its 32nd year there has been little change in the design of the event, and this may now be contributing to a decline in visitor numbers. The research indicated that functional characteristics (such as the quality of the food) were more important than intangible factors, showing that there is still much work needed on the design of the visitor experience.

The use of the customer journey in Imagineering events was discussed by Dorothé Gerritsen and Ronald van Olderen from NHTV Academy for Leisure, Breda. They showed how the customer journey through an event is marked out by a series of ‘touchpoints’ at the interface between consumer and producer. They also reflected on how touchpoints can also imply that the visitor is touched at an emotional level, so that there is mutual touching between supplier and consumer.

Roberta Garibaldi from the Università degli Studi di Bergamo in Italy presented an analysis of the use of Web 2.0 tools by museums I n marketing events. This underlined the relatively limited use currently being made of the interactive potential of new technology to market events. This was a theme also picked up by Phil Crowther and Chiara Orefice from Sheffield Hallam University in their analysis of events as mutual value creation spaces. They showed how events have previously been seen as relatively peripheral in marketing, but that they have the potential to become much more central ‘value creation spaces’ if they are used effectively.

The use of events to support a creative entrepreneurship network was examined by Lénia Marques, Karen Mein and Marcel Bastiaansen of the NHTV Academy for Leisure, Breda. Using the example of the COLIN network they showed that it was important to engage entrepreneurs through the strategic use of events. They argued that networks are now shifting towards facilitation and becoming ‘pancakes’ instead of ‘pyramids’.
The discussion during the meeting generated a number of interesting perspectives that will be analysed in the forthcoming Event Group publication.

The purpose of design
As Richards and Palmer have argued in Eventful Cities, events are designed to serve a range of different purposes, and the effectiveness of events, and therefore event design strategies, should be judged in terms of how well the aims of the event are met. The aims of the event also usually emerge from interactions between the different stakeholders.
The function of events and event design was therefore a major area of discussion. It is clear that different stakeholders will have different priorities, but all are engaged in creating value through events, whether this is economic, social, cultural, environmental or creative value. Event design can therefore be seen as a strategy for generating (stakeholder) value from events. Events may also be ‘designed for success’, where success can also vary according to the perspectives of different stakeholders.

Co-creation
The network economy is increasingly an arena of co-creation, where distinctions between producers and consumers are becoming increasingly vague. Events are also co-created to a greater or lesser extent. At a basic level one could argue that all events involve co-creation, because they bring people together in physical co-presence, which means that every participant is also helping to create the ‘atmosphere’ or generate the ‘emotional energy’ of the event, even if they are not actively involved in creation or programming. Phil Crowther argued that this can be seen as a form of ‘co-creation by default’, which contrasts with the active ‘co-creation by design’ being stimulated by other events. In principle, as events move from passive to active co-creation, they should be able to generate more value.

Participation-Involvement-Engagement
Events can be seen as value creation platforms where levels of involvement by the different stakeholders can vary significantly. This can be seen as a continuum ranging from participation (which can be relatively passive, as in the spectator role) to involvement (which implies a more active role) to engagement (where there is active commitment and co-creation on the part of stakeholders).

Organic change vs radical change
The speed with which an event changes can have an important recursive relationship with design. Many mega events, for example, are designed to be catalysts for change, and as such are also designed to break with the past in a radical way. Such ‘pulsar events’ have an important influence in changing mindsets and perceptions of locals and visitors alike (Glasgow 1990, Barcelona Olympics, etc). Other events, and many smaller scale events are subject to more incremental change, which may be imperceptible at the level of individual editions of the event.
Taking Sewell’s definition of a historical event as a ‘gap between expectation and reality’, there is often a need to design change and innovation into events, so that the element of surprise or novelty enhances the event experience. This is an interesting discussion in the context of traditional events, where there is usually an emphasis on continuity, but where there is also a need to stimulate change to respond to changing generations of event users.

Time
Events are a temporal phenomenon and therefore the time dimension is crucial in design. This covers many different design attributes, including duration, speed, frequency/recurrence, regular vs irregular. Ilja Simmons illustrated how some events can become ‘slow’ by design, which contrasts with the kind of ‘fast events’ that have to generate a large number or a wide range of outputs (economic impacts, image change, social cohesion, etc).

What is being designed?
Depending on the perspective of the stakeholders, there are often different foci of design. For example one can design experiences (output for consumers), externalities (e.g. economic impact for the city), profit (usually for the organisers), etc. These perspectives will also change depending on the disciplines involved - experience designers, service designers, social designers, creative entrepreneurs, etc.

Designing the next publication
The papers presented at the meeting, as well as the input from the discussion, will be included in the forthcoming book Event Design (Routledge). The final versions of the chapters should reflect the feedback given by colleagues during the meeting, as well as the points emerging from the general discussion. Final drafts of chapters should be submitted by July 1st.

Next meeting in Sheffield, UK
Delegates agreed that the next meeting of the ATLAS Events Group will be held at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK in May 2014. The general research theme of the meeting will be New Business Models for Events, but there will also be a stream dedicated to the production of case studies for events education.

The ATLAS Events Monitoring Project
The meeting period in Peniche also coincided with the award of the first Masters thesis in events to be defended at the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria. The study entitled Eventful Cities and Cities of Events was undertaken by Carla Delgado, and included collection of almost 1000 surveys using the ATLAS Events questionnaire. This rigorous testing of the research instrument indicated that there were significant differences between Portuguese cities in terms of their staging of medieval events and their levels of success in creating an authentic atmosphere for visitors. The research also indicated that the social dimension of the event was particularly important in Portugal. It will be interesting to compare the data collected in Portugal with those obtained from other countries, such as the Netherlands and Russia.

Acknowledgements
The ATLAS Group would like to extend their thanks to the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria in Peniche for their hospitality and support in staging the event. In particular we are grateful to Nuno Almeida for his tireless work in pulling the programme together and making sure that delegates had a fruitful working environment as well as an engaging social programme.

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