On Thursday 23rd February Engage held an extremely well-attended event for local residents of the waterfront and city centre at the Convention Centre, Kings Dock by kind invitation of ACCL Chief Executive Faye Dyer. It was by far the biggest event Engage has organised to date and showed both the draw of Eurovision and Engage’s ability to connect with and communicate to our resident demographic.

Presentations were made by Chris Brown (Marketing Liverpool) and Sue Finnegan (Culture Liverpool) as well as Faye Dyer (ACC Liverpool Group) and Veronika Yasynska (Ukraine community in Liverpool). The information shared was very well received by the audience and there was good time for questions at the end. What interested Engage was that it turned out to be a two-way event as the Council discovered from residents something important that they hadn’t known (namely that Royal Quay was about to have cladding-replacement building work that would visually impact upon everyone attending the Eurovision events!)  And questions about the clarity or otherwise of the route from Lime Street Station to the venue of Eurovision were raised as points of concern.

Engage asked everyone present to give us some feed-back which many did and the analysis is as follows:

• 98% said they learnt something new.
• 91% met someone they hadn’t met before and spoke with them
• 85% said they would come to an event like this again
• 70% had never been to an Engage event before – showing we were reaching new audiences

It was interesting for Engage to discover how people heard about the event:

• 42% through digital contact (24% Engage Grapevine Newsletter and 18% Social Media)
• 40% through the Engage event flyer being distributed to their apartment
• 11% through word of mouth
• 7% other means of contact.

Our analysis of the data on the night shows that residents came from The Colonnades (16), Royal Quay (15), One Park West (12) and South Ferry Island (10 from 4 different developments) , Mann Island (5) and Armstrong Quay (5) and then Copper House (4) and The Keel (4) followed by Beetham Plaza (3) and Wapping Quay, The Tobacco Warehouse and The Lexington all on (2). Plus many more from different locations on the Waterfront and in the City Centre and indeed across the city. One request we received on the form was “to feed as much Eurovision info as you can through Residents Associations”. We would like to do that but don’t have the necessary contact details for each block in the city. We will follow-up this event by asking people to send us their contact details for a ResidentsAssociation (RAs) where they live. We hope that will make a good start. Frequently officers in RAs change and it is easy to lose contact with people.

Here are some of the comments that people wrote on the night on their Feed-back Form:

• The Ukraine dimension was the stand-out of the evening. Well done!
• Well organised event and very informative. Well done all at Engage!
• A very well organised event! x2
• Very interesting and useful event.
• Very good and useful.
• Excellent event – thank you!
• Excellent presentations
• Excellent speakers and audio-visuals
• Thanks for this event which has been really informative
• An informative and moving presentation
• Informative and interesting presentations
• Very informative, thanks for your work
• Very informative
• Keep up the good work
• Thanks for your effort and work, really appreciated
• Thank you to all speakers
• Thank you for hosting! Loved hearing from Veronika especially!
• Thank you! x2
• You rock!
• Enjoyed that!
• Looking forward to the party
• Slava Ukraini!

Many people commented that one of the highlights of the evening was meeting Veronika Yasynska and you can find out more about her and her host family in the video below:

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