Cultural Content with guest Amy Stutz
Catching up with Birmingham Hippodrome's Digital Content Manager
Happy February 17th,
Today I’m delighted to share with you this guest post with Amy Stutz who creates the brilliant digital content for Birmingham Hippodrome.
We worked on a Social Media Strategy with Amy and the Hippodrome earlier in the year.
This initially presented a bit of a challenge for us as Amy’s content was, and is, really engaging (and award winning!) - there are some fantastic examples of content she’s created to drive awareness of particular shows; in this case Mamma Mia, Kinky Boots and Take That.
Fortunately our work with the Hippodrome and Amy was still useful, which Amy - unprompted - talks more about later in the post.
Without more ado, here’s our Q&A with Amy…
Role: Digital Content Manager
Where can we find you online? On Twitter and LinkedIn
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I had an unhealthy obsession with watching Casualty so I wanted to be a heart surgeon – turns out it is a lot harder than it looks on telly.
Could you give us a whistle stop tour of your career to date?
I studied musical theatre at college and whilst studying I joined Birmingham Hippodrome’s blogging scheme and fell in love with writing about theatre. I then continued to pursue a theatre blog whilst studying Journalism at uni.
I then began interning in the Communications team at a time where social media was small part of the team, but not a huge focus. I enjoyed exploring the digital side of the job and was passionate about moving with the huge digital shift that was happening online. Over six years, my role developed into my current role as Digital Content Manager, to lead on our social media strategy - transforming the social channels into what they are today.
Proudest moment of your career?
Not one particular moment, but how far we have come as a regional theatre in making a digital impact. It can be tougher sometimes when you work in a venue that is mainly a receiving house, but instead of just using the content that is provided to us – we work hard to create bespoke content that is always relevant to our loyal audience of over 166K.
The usual artwork and trailers perform really well, but making content engaging to our local audience is a huge priority. We often work with local communities and other organisations to make bespoke content that speaks to Birmingham. Examples of this include –
- When we had the UK tour of Kinky Boots - a show about drag queens and drag culture, we got together with the local LGBTQ+ community and made a lip sync video with local drag queens. Not only was it strong content for our channel, but the drag queens themselves had big followings, so we were able to reach new audiences.
- Working with the locally owned Greek restaurant in Birmingham to create a video with the cast of Mamma Mia learning to make traditional Greek food. This was a fun short-form video content which also supported a local business, we work with lots of our amazing independent businesses in the city.
- Ran around Birmingham City Centre getting people to sing along to Take That songs ahead of the arrival of Take That’s Musical – The Band. The video showcased many of the city’s iconic landmarks and people whilst building momentum for the show, and we won a Birmingham Award for this which I am super proud of.
What project/idea has got you really immersed/excited at work recently?
Pantomime is the biggest time of the year for us at Birmingham Hippodrome and our online audiences adore it. We have more creative freedom with our pantomime and it’s on for a good chunk of time. This allows us to really experiment with all different kinds of content – we learn a lot from how our audience respond to this content and implement it into our strategy for the rest of the year.
We create a mixture of longform, shortform, live, hi-res and lo-fi video alongside imagery and graphics. It’s a great time to be creative but also gives us insight into what our audiences are loving.
If you had a 10k grant to spend within your department as you pleased, what would you spend it on?
Videographers/editors – there is so much more we can always do if we had endless amounts of time and resource.
Tell us about a tweet/blog/practitioner that made you think / changed your professional views
I was actually really inspired by One Further’s very own Louise Cohen’s blog on this site itself:
One Further did not ask me to say this! But this did inspire me to enquire with the team and we did a really interesting Social Media Strategy project together.
We had made great strides digitally before the pandemic, then during the pandemic we had to shift our whole online engagement to suit the situation we were in. Coming out of Covid, I felt a bit lost, not knowing where to take our channels further. This project gave me both the relief that some of the things we were already doing were working brilliantly, and ideas and inspirations of how to grow even more. It’s really important to step back and look at your content strategy as a whole. I found this process really empowering and it gave me a refreshed energy for our content strategy and helped us refocus on our different audiences on each platform.
What advice would you give to graduates starting out in the sector hoping to follow a similar career path?
If you’re struggling to get that first step in, start creating your own content. Experiment with writing blogs, creating TikTok’s and reels. Volunteer to help a local business, charity or freelancer to build their social media following and build up a portfolio of content creation.
That’s it for this week. If you’d like to hear more about our Content Strategy process, get in touch.