The annual St. Patrick’s Festival is renowned as a series of large-scale gatherings that bring a range of performances and artistic mediums together to celebrate our national heritage.
In 2021, when the Festival’s main mode of celebration was hampered by lockdown, a partnership with newly Ireland-based social network TikTok allowed them to create an ambitious digital programme while re-engaging with creative community groups across Ireland.
With a mission ‘to inspire creativity and bring joy’ and having recently established themselves in Ireland, TikTok was actively looking for sponsorship opportunities to invest in the creative landscape in Ireland. The Festival was instantly drawn to TikTok’s mission as it connects closely to what the Festival strives to achieve each year.
Former St. Patrick’s Festival CEO Susan Kirby led the pitch to TikTok, outlining how a St. Patrick’s Festival & TikTok partnership could contribute to the regeneration of the arts and events communities by creating employment and commissioning during an extremely difficult time.
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Adapting together
While the partnership was initially envisioned as a series of outdoor art and lighting trails, as the pandemic showed no signs of abating this format was reimagined. It became Solas, a large-scale audiovisual project that was mounted across the country in two strands alongside an #AwakenIreland hashtag challenge and a creative communities fund activated after the 2021 Festival.
“The most challenging yet rewarding aspect of the partnership was that our joint impetus became to deliver creativity and joy despite all odds. The Solas project responded to and flourished under the deepest of the Covid lockdowns, creating employment and encouraging creativity when things seemed to be very dark indeed, especially for the cultural and live events sectors,” says Anna McGowan, deputy chief executive of St. Patrick’s Festival.
A driving element of the partnership for TikTok was a meaningful investment in the creative landscape in Ireland, therefore a key metric was around employment and artistic opportunities created as part of the project. ‘Solas’ was directly responsible for the creation of 778 days of employment for 122 personnel across the arts and events industry. McGowan and the Festival team were blown away by the impact of the digital and social media activities and they have been able to apply that knowledge and expertise going forward to boost access and engagement with the 2022 Festival, which was both in-person and online.
The relationship in 2021 laid the foundations for a further project, the ‘St. Patrick’s Festival x TikTok Creative Fund’. In the same vein as Solas, the goal of the project was to spread connections and creativity throughout the nation. In 2022, the Festival and Tik Tok were able to take the partnership a step further by supporting in-person connections and collaborations, as well as digital and metaphorical ones. McGowan explains, “this drive towards reconnecting and re-engaging with our communities was a key element of the overall 2022 Festival theme of ‘Connections’.”
For Ailish Finnerty, partner at Arthur Cox and a member of this year’s judging panel, the scale, and ingenuity of TikTok’s partnership helped it to stand out from the competition.
‘The entry was an excellent example of business and the arts community closely collaborating on a project that is so clearly carefully considered and mutually beneficial. Few projects can demonstrate TikTok’s commitment to Ireland as well as its involvement in our St Patrick’s Day celebrations,’ she says.
As part of their Sustainable Business Programme, Arthur Cox has always recognised that the arts are a fundamental component of a healthy community and are passionate about supporting the artistic sector, both through the firm’s commissioning programme and art collection. You can learn more about their Sustainable Business Programme here.
Responding to the pandemic
In 2020, Bank of Ireland worked with Business to Arts to create an all-island corporate philanthropic fund that would demonstrate Bank of Ireland’s support for the arts and provide much-needed funding to artists and arts organisations at such a difficult time. The all-island approach meant it had input from leading curators and judges from Northern Ireland, as well as receiving applications from a wider range of art and artists.
“We felt this [response] was best delivered by a managed fund over three years, and took the advice of Business to Arts to create a Fund that was widely accessible to every genre of art and artist across Ireland,” says Paula Murphy, head of Strategic Sponsorship and Corporate & Social Responsibility at Bank of Ireland.
Applicants were asked to submit projects that were either adapted due to the pandemic, or had been inspired by its effects. Each project could apply for up to €10,000 in funding and the objective was to fund a project in every county in Ireland. This approach aimed to direct money towards artists’ fees, helping to maximise the budgets of arts organisations, and to enhance the well-being of the audiences and communities involved.
Although singling out specific projects is difficult, Murphy highlighted a few with particularly innovative approaches. These included SingStrong, who work to build lung capacity in post-Covid and COPD patients, BenchMarks in Antrim who created a unique carved bench to enable socially distanced meetings, and King Lear in a Van who brought a key Leaving Cert play to students across Ireland by performing from an adapted van.
“Ireland has a vibrant and hugely creative arts community, who add such colour and meaning to all our lives. Support for the arts is support for our heritage as well as our future. Creating a philanthropic fund, which can be aligned to the values and objectives of the organisation, is hugely worthwhile and Bank of Ireland have found the Begin Together Arts Fund to have had a very positive impact on our brand and our engagement with the community,” says Murphy.
Enabling resilience
For Mark O’Kelly, representing the Arts Council when judging the Best Philanthropic Support to the Arts Award, this project was also significant in its scope and ambition:
‘This outstanding contribution to our national arts culture stood out to me in particular for the scale and breadth of leadership demonstrated by the reach and impact of this philanthropic fund. The Bank of Ireland Begin Together Arts Fund demonstrated real and committed leadership in its support of artists over these last few years and in this, provided great national means to sustain and enable resilience, artistic innovation, audience engagement, and participation.’
In 2021, a total of 39 projects created works for their local communities, and by the end of the Bank of Ireland Begin Together Arts Fund in 2023 over 100 projects will have taken place. A total of €1 million has been allocated to the Fund over the three years, which is a substantial level of support relative to Bank of Ireland’s other partnership activities, in line with their purpose, to enable customers, colleagues, and communities to thrive.