1 digital engagement action, 5 handpicked creators…
We tell you all about the success of the digital engagement activity to support the digital promotion of Ravenna’s Dante celebrations
Since August 2021, BAM! has been working alongside the Comune di Ravenna in the management of the Ravenna per Dante social media channels, dedicated to the celebrations marking the 700th anniversary of the Supreme Poet’s death.
Among the digital engagement actions designed and developed for this project, the most recent involved digital creators, bloggers and YouTubers, who were guests of the Comune di Ravenna for two days, with the aim of showing their followers the many initiatives planned in Ravenna in honour of Dante.
More and more often, museums and cultural institutions – in this case the Comune di Ravenna culture department – are turning to popular faces from the web in order to promote their initiatives. We’ve seen the launch of Instagram profiles dedicated exclusively to the world of culture or museums. Not just fashion bloggers and make-up artists, but also teachers, art lovers, students and young creatives who have chosen to enter the world of influencer marketing, focusing on the cultural sector.
In Ravenna, after extensive mapping, we focused on five diverse profiles, able to reach different targets in terms of age, area and familiarity with Dante. But how did it go? What results did this communication action achieve? Let’s share a few of our reflections.
Reaching broad audiences: Wikipedro and Cartoni Morti
With over 130,000 followers on Instagram and over 30,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, Pietro Resta, known as Wikipedro on social media, is a young Florentine who loves his city and has a real passion for art and culture. Through his videos and his content on Instagram and Facebook, he provides all sorts of interesting facts about Florence and more. He had already touched upon Ravenna and Dante, dedicating a YouTube video to the city and the poet a few months ago. With this collaboration, Wikipedro returned to Ravenna, creating a series of stories on his Instagram profile in which he not only featured the streets of Ravenna, but also the main places linked to Dante’s life: Basilica di San Francesco and Quadrarco di Braccioforte, but also the mosaics that the Supreme Poet probably saw during his stay in Ravenna. Dante’s tomb is the setting of the next reel, in which Wikipedro offers an ironic account of the matter of Dante’s bones. In the space of just a few days and without any sponsorship, the content achieved 80,000 views, with more than 5,000 users liking the video and a very high number of interactions in terms of comments and saves.
Andrea Lorenzon, aka Cartoni Morti, is probably best known for his animated videos dedicated to a wide range of topics, from politics to general current affairs, often selecting subjects with an excellent real-time marketing strategy. His Instagram account has over 220,000 followers, while his YouTube Channel has more than 79,000 subscribers. He produced a series of stories for Ravenna per Dante, as well a reel (with almost 100,000 views) linked to a video on YouTube, which in just a few days reached 48,000 views and led to more than 150 enthusiastic comments such as “This will be the video that teachers pull out when a student says that studying Dante won’t be any use in the future” and “After having studied it in detail at school, hearing you talk about Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio is an indescribable feeling for which I cannot be grateful enough.”
Reaching specific targets: ioedante; Dantepertutti; larossa.pinta
The other three creators involved had more thematic profiles, intended to reach a decidedly more concentrated and specific audience, in line with the main audience of the Ravenna per Dante profiles.
Valentina Iosco, is the young woman behind the Instagram page ioedante, followed by more than 5,000 people. With her reels and posts she told her audience about the many initiatives linked to the Dante celebrations in Ravenna, from the perpetual reading to the main attractions in the city.
Mariangela De Luca is a young literature teacher, a Dante enthusiast and author of a book published by Mondadori, dedicated to Dante’s Inferno. She uses her page larossa.pinta (with more than 20,000 followers) to illustrate interesting facts related to Italian literature, from Dante to contemporary authors, making them accessible to students and non-students alike. Her content highlighted the beauty of Ravenna and its links with the Supreme Poet, leading to lots of interactions and expressions of amazement.
Luca Maria Spagnuolo and Lucia Cambria are the creators of the Dante per tutti project (more than 20,000 followers), in which Luca Maria interprets and explains Dante’s link with Medieval Theatre in theatres. Let’s be clear, the content by these creators doesn’t reach the dizzying numbers achieved by Wikipedro and Cartoni Morti, but it has been invaluable in terms of producing followers for the Ravenna per Dante page. Since the publication of their first content, the Ravenna per Dante Instagram page has seen a huge jump in the number of followers.
Quantity vs Quality or Quantity & Quality
All the creators were given a lot of freedom when it came to creating content, simply establishing the objectives in agreement with the Comune di Ravenna, such as combining promotion of the Dante celebrations with promotion of the Ravenna area. Each creator therefore had full responsibility for their own content, and it was up to each creator to determine the accuracy of the information provided and the degree of detail offered to their followers.
The Comune di Ravenna also provided them with a guided tour of sites associated with Dante, offering explanations and detailed information about these historical places, such as Dante’s tomb and the “zona del silenzio” (zone of silence), as well as a visit to the new Museo Dante and the MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna, where an impressive exhibition entitled Dante. Un’Epopea POP (Dante. A POP Epic) was being held. During their visit, the creators took part in unique moments such as the perpetual reading of the Divine Comedy in front of Dante’s tomb and some of the initiatives on the celebration programme. This reception greatly excited and stimulated the creators, while also ensuring that they were fully informed about the historical sites and events they would be featuring on their channels.
So, ultimately, what is the point of this content?
We would like to hazard this answer. On the one hand, the “general” contents help to position Ravenna fully as a “Dantean city” in the collective imagination. The matter of Dante’s bones and the “cult” linked to the Supreme Poet have been made accessible to an audience that is very different from the one that had followed the Ravenna per Dante channels until then: the very young and teenagers in particular.
On the other hand, the work by the “specialist” creators helped to identify new audiences in line with the existing audience and to strengthen overall page engagement, boosting followers’ affection for the institution. The mediation in this case was more accurate, providing new insights and, generally speaking, helping to relaunch the page in line with the other strategies implemented by BAM!
In the light of the results obtained, it can be said that the work with the creators has guaranteed both quantity and quality: a multitude of people have learned once and for all that Ravenna is home to Dante’s tomb and is a place where the celebration of the Father of the Italian Language is taken very seriously, while some of our main communication content has been shared and promoted on social media, from the exhibitions at the MAR in Ravenna to the main cultural sites in the city. Above all, it has driven traffic to the official Ravenna per Dante channels.
The work on social media is just one part of the more complex communication strategy for the celebrations, but it would be interesting to know how many of those planning to visit Ravenna in the near future have been reached by the social media channels and, particularly by the content mediated by the creators. In your opinion, what impact does this content have on visitors’ actual awareness? Influencer marketing is still in the early stages for the cultural sector, yet the results convince us that it is an effective way to engage audiences.
Learn more about the Ravenna per Dante project
Discover other digital engagement activities we’ve involved creators in…
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