How We Helped Shaftesbury's First Food Festival Become a Resounding Success

As part of the SHaftesbury Food Festival organsing team, wehad a bold idea, a brilliant location, and very little time. What followed was one of the most rewarding projects we've worked on at Okapi & Co and the results speak for themselves.

A Brand New Event. No Room for Error.

Running a festival for the first time is a leap of faith. You have no data to lean on, no footfall from previous years, and no existing audience to market to. Everything has to be built from scratch, the brand, the website, the digital presence, the ticketing, the logistics.

The Shaftesbury Food Festival launched this year for the very first time, and it attracted over 12,000 visitors and 200 competitors in the Gold Hill Cheese Race. For a debut event in a small Dorset market town, that is extraordinary.

Here's how the digital side of things came together, and what other festival organisers can take from it.

The Website: Built to Be Lived In, Not Just Launched

One of the biggest mistakes festival websites make is launching and going quiet. A static page with a date, a map, and a contact form doesn't cut it anymore. Visitors want to know what's happening, who's coming, and whether it's worth the trip and they want that information to be current.

We built the Shaftesbury Food Festival website with daily updates in mind from the start. The content management system meant the team could add new sponsors, announce new events, and publish fresh content without needing a developer on call. It was designed to grow throughout the lead-up to the event, getting richer and more useful as the day approached.

Key features we built in:

Interactive Food Trail Map

This was one of our favourite elements. We mapped all 10 food trail destinations across Shaftesbury and built an interactive page where visitors could explore each stop and then generate walking or driving directions from their current location directly to each one. Simple idea. Genuinely useful. The kind of thing that turns a passive visitor into an active participant before they've even arrived.

Online Trader Registration

Traders could browse, apply, and pay for their pitch entirely online. No emails back and forth, no spreadsheets. This alone generated over £4,000 in revenue directly through the site before the festival even opened its gates.

Cheese Race Entry

More on the cheese race in a moment but having a clean, simple online entry process meant competitors could sign up at any hour of the day, from anywhere. This is the kind of frictionless experience that converts interest into commitment.

Volunteer Applications

Running an event this size requires a small army of helpers. We built a simple volunteer application form directly into the site so the team could manage enquiries in one place and follow up efficiently.

The Numbers That Mattered

Over the month leading up to and including the event, the website received 6,000 visitors with an average dwell time of 1 minute 16 seconds. That might sound modest, but for an event site where most people are visiting to check a specific detail it tells us people were actually reading, exploring, and engaging with the content rather than bouncing straight off.

The £4,000+ in online revenue from trader bookings alone more than justified the investment in getting the e-commerce side of the site right.

The Chatbot: Fewer Repetitive Questions, Happier Organisers

If you've ever run an event, you'll know what the inbox looks like in the week before. The same questions, over and over again. What time does it start? Is there parking? Can I bring my dog? Is the cheese race still open?

We added an AI-powered chatbot to the festival website something we've written about in more detail on our Substack that was trained on the event's own content and FAQs. It handled the simple, repetitive questions instantly, at any time of day, without anyone having to type a reply.

This freed up the organising team to focus on the things that actually needed a human. It's a small addition that makes a big difference when you're running flat out in the final days before an event.

Social Media: Partnership Over Takeover

We set up and helped manage the festival's presence across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. But we want to be clear about something: the real social media magic came from the festival's own PR team.

They were exceptional. In the weeks around the event, the Shaftesbury Food Festival was featured in every major national newspaper in the country. That kind of coverage doesn't happen by accident it comes from a team that knows how to tell a story, build relationships with journalists, and get the right images and angles in front of the right people at the right time.

Our role was to make sure the digital infrastructure was ready to receive that traffic that the website could handle the sudden spikes in visitors, that the social profiles looked the part, and that there was always fresh content to point people towards.

The Gold Hill Cheese Race: A Festival Within a Festival

No account of this event would be complete without talking about the Gold Hill Cheese Race.

Gold Hill is one of the most famous streets in England steep, cobbled, iconic. Racing a wheel of cheese down it is exactly the kind of brilliantly British absurdity that gets people talking, sharing, and showing up.

Okapi & Co sponsored the promotion of the event through advertising in the Blackmore Vale Magazine reaching the local and regional audience that forms the backbone of any community event.

Jim organised the race logistics alongside the wider team, managing the categories and heats, building the full schedule, and making sure 200 competitors had a clear, safe, and memorable experience. He even ran the race himself. Twice. We'll leave the results out of this post to protect what remains of his dignity.

What This Means for Other Festival Organisers

If you're planning a festival whether it's food, music, arts, or something entirely niche here's what we'd want you to take away from this:

Your website is your hub, not your afterthought. Invest in it early, make it easy to update, and treat it as a living thing that grows alongside your event.

Friction kills conversion. Every extra step between interest and action (registration, booking, entry) loses you people. Make things as simple and seamless as possible.

The chatbot isn't a gimmick. When you're running an event, your time is your most precious resource. Automating the easy questions means you can give proper attention to the hard ones.

Digital and PR work best together. Our job was to make sure the digital side was solid enough to support the PR team's efforts. When those two things are aligned, the results compound quickly.

Community matters. The Shaftesbury Food Festival succeeded because it was genuinely rooted in the town. Shaftesbury showed up for it and the digital tools we built made it easy for people to do exactly that.

Okapi & Co: Digital Support for Events That Mean Something

This was a project we're genuinely proud of not just because the numbers were good, but because the event itself was a joy. Seeing 12,000 people fill the streets of Shaftesbury for a brand new festival, watching the chaos and laughter of the cheese race, knowing that the website and the tools we built played a small part in making it possible... that's why we do this work.

If you're organising a festival or community event and you want a digital partner who'll get stuck in properly website, social, automation, the works we'd love to hear from you.

Okapi & Co is an AI-first digital marketing and web development agency based in North Dorset. We build websites, run SEO, and help businesses grow with a particular soft spot for projects that make our local communities better.

Read more about how we used AI and chatbot technology to support the festival on our [Substack newsletter].