Sheffield Cathedral, in partnership with artistic collaboration Luxmuralis, wanted to welcome new visitors to the Cathedral and for the people of Sheffield to experience the Cathedral in a new way. 

Luxmuralis, internationally renowned for their light installations, created “The Angels are Coming”, an exterior and interior Christmas light show.

Appt were asked to create a digital communications strategy with two aims:

1. Sell tickets

2. Grow the Cathedral’s social media following

Appt designed a digital campaign which utilised all the Cathedral’s social media platforms, with their website as the focal point. Social posts pointed towards the website, where tickets were sold.

As well as this, Facebook advertising and promotional pop ups on the website were used to attract visitors to the event.

In the build-up to the event, Appt utilised a combination of teaser videos, an exclusive newsletter pre-sale and images from other cathedrals to build up excitement for the event. 

The result was a successful strategy which achieved all the aims set out by the Cathedral.

The Cathedral sold more than 11,000 tickets to the event.

In addition to successful sales, increasing the Cathedral’s social following was also achieved. The response to the light show was overwhelmingly positive and engagement with the Cathedral’s social content prior and during the event were at a high level.

We engaged actively with visitors and shared their content, creating excitement whilst the event was taking place.

If we turn to the stats, we can see the success of the campaign:

On Twitter, the Cathedral saw 189.7K impressions, over 700 mentions and an average of 7 clicks through to the website each day. There were also an average of 5 retweets per day and 8 likes per day.

The Cathedral’s website saw 57.3K unique visitors over the course of the digital strategy.