World Theatre Day Blog

Well, WTD10 was over a week ago, and I feel like I’m just starting to recover, and be able to write about it, now.

This was our second year running the WTD blog, and I only have one word: amazing!

For those of us behind the scenes here at the blog, this year was quite different from last. First of all, it was a lot easier. Last year, all the work of setting things up (we have an excellent team of technical Ninjas, here) was pretty intense. Figuring out how we could link everything together, and, in particular, coming up with a method of allowing theatre artists to submit stuff without having to have someone on the computer all the time, was our greatest challenge.

For the most part, we worked most of those bugs out last year, and everything ran fairly smoothly this year. Here are some numbers for you:

Blog: Between Friday (the 26th) and Sunday (the 29th), the blog got about 4,000 hits. 2,500 of those were on actual World Theatre Day, but note that our blog is hosted in London, England.

Facebook: we currently have 2,069 fans. A few days before WTD, we had about 1,500 (note, also that this was brand-new this year: last year we had a group and a fan page called World Theatre Day 2009. The current page is simply World Theatre Day, and will continue for the forseeable future.), and some people put the word out to try to get it up to 2,000 before WTD. We didn’t quite succeed, but we came pretty close.

Twitter: Our WTD10 account has nearly 1,000 followers. The hashtag #WTD10 was used extensively! We were doing a lot of re-tweeting, and having fun watching the Twtiterfall.

Tumblr: We had a bit of a technical fail, here. The whole point of the Tumblr is so that people can send in their photos, text, and video, and no one needs to administrate it: it automatically gets posted. Good idea in theory, but our feed was overwhelmed, and it got pretty chocked. This is on our list of stuff to find a better solution for next year.

Over all, I heard a lot less of “What’s World Theatre Day?” from people this year. I still heard it some, but not nearly as much as last year. People were more aware of March 27 , and were able to plan accordingly. We made excellent forays into South America this year, with contributions and parties in Mexico and Basil, and also Asia, with a contribution from Singapore.

A big thank-you to everyone who participated and helped to spread the word. An even bigger thank you to the WTD facilitation team, who all do this for free, on the side of their own busy lives and jobs and creating theatre.

Here’s to #WTD11!!