The Open Golf Championship represents significant opportunities and economic benefit for any host town. Carnoustie hosted the 147th Open in 2018. The value of The Open to Angus that year was projected to be £75 million.
Carnoustie Community Development Trust (CCDT) took the opportunity to promote Carnoustie to a global audience: to showcase our people, place and produce beyond golf. We worked with other community groups to secure the funding needed to invest in a series of activities before and during the Open.
CCDT DEREK MILLER v3 – YouTube
Our aims were to:
- Visit the High Street: to encourage visitors to stay a little longer and visit more of our local businesses after their day at the golf is done.
- Come back soon: to ensure the experience visitors have whilst they were in town for the Open gave them a reason to think of Carnoustie as a destination beyond golf and to come back again.
- Throw a party called ‘Carnoostival’: to say ‘thank-you’ to Carnoustie for hosting the 147th Open
Here’s a list of the activities we delivered; Schools Art Competition; Talent Competition; Carnoostival; The Real Price of Fish a play performed at Carnoustie Church; Carnoustie Shorts: 10 short films about local people doing extraordinary things; Come Back Soon (Carnoustie film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5D9dGk_2Os ; Carnoustie Ambassadors – In partnership with Community First we organised a team of people to greet visitors and help ensure they enjoyed their stay
To raise awareness and profile of Carnoustie beyond golf we-
- Issued Press releases to local newspapers; radio & television.
- Conducted Social marketing campaigns across a range of digital platforms and organisations.
- Published a Visitors brochure to promote businesses ‘on the High Street’ during the week of the Open including digital version of this brochure.
- Produced 20k Visitor maps, 10k visitor postcards and 1k Carnoostival flyers
We’ve hung on to the Carnoostival logo in the hopes that we can find some local musicians or music fans willing to volunteer to organise a similar event sometime in the future – or how about a food festival, or outdoor cinema? If you think you can take on that challenge, come and talk to us.
