I had a wet but stimulating time at The Hay Festival last weekend, camping out with friends and attending a variety of interesting talks. Hay is a lovely town and the festival puts on events with a great range of writers, although due to the weather the number of linen suits and panama hats were way down this year.
I booked the individual event tickets for all of us and so whenever the festival had any updates or additional information I received an email from them.?
As a result of booking Michael Grimes‘ ticket to see Stephen Fry interview Kay Redfield Jamison I got the following email.
Dear Hay Festival Customer,
You have purchased tickets for one of the following events…
162 Stephen Fry & Kay Redfield Jamison
175 Stephen Fry, Ruby Wax & Monty DonWe wanted to let you know about an open meeting that will follow the Talking it Over session about Depression on Monday 4 June with Stephen Fry, Monty Don and Ruby Wax. The NHS in Wales are launching a new consultation paper and they?d like to consult you.
Monday 4 June at 7pm in The Summerhouse. FREE ? all welcome.
?Together for Mental Health: a consultation on the new mental health and well-being strategy for Wales?
David Crepaz-Keay,??Mental Health Foundation?lead in Wales,?Ewan Hilton,?Executive Director of Gofal,?a leading Welsh Mental Health & Wellbeing charity,??Stewart Greenwell lead Director on Mental Health Services for Association of Directors of Social Services Cymru and Director of Social Services for Newport City Council? and?Sarah Watkins Head of Mental Health &?Vulnerable Groups Policy? and Senior Medical Officer?within Welsh Government?join?Benna Waites Joint Head of Psychology and Counselling for the Aneurin Bevan Health Board?to discuss?improving mental health services across the age range, a new partnership with the public, challenging stigma and discrimination, and why it all matters so much.??Come and find out more about the strategy, share your views and raise questions.
The event is free but ticketed, so please reserve your ticket through the box office.
If you want to know more about the new mental health strategy (and for information about other consultation events) please follow the following link:?http://wales.gov.uk/consultations/healthsocialcare/mhealth/?lang=en
You may also want to know about other important related developments in Wales which support the strategy:
http://wales.gov.uk/topics/health/nhswales/healthservice/mentalhealthservices/?lang=en
Now this struck me as a nifty and quite clever way of using technology to encourage people to participate in a consultation. The fact that they have signed up to the event demonstrates that they have an interest in the subject, at the very least.
Last year I worked on a project with Darren Wright and Nick Booth to encourage public sector workers to think about how they could use the social web to encourage people to take part in consultations. I’d definitely add this to our toolkit of digital consultation methods for the future.
Wanted to do something similar for R1 Hackney Weekend re: recycling. Idea was roundly knocked back.
What I liked about the Hay Festival signposting is that it was directly relevant to the event that people were attending. Unless you were telling them that your message was relevant to their audience as Radio 1’s content is all?hackneyed?and?recycled ……;0)