WMZA/WLM 2014 exhibition

This page summarises the Wiki Loves Monuments exhibition that was held in Cape Town, South Africa on the 8th May 2014. It was a once off 'pop-up' exhibition that lasted for one night.

The exhibition featured winning photographs from the 2013 Wiki Loves Monuments photographic competition. Eight physical copies of the winning photographs from South Africa and physical copies of the top five winning photographs from the international competition were displayed. An additional 120 digital versions of the 503 top entries from 50 countries were displayed.

The event was hosted in collaboration with the Friends of Design at their office space in the city centre as part of First Thursdays who helped publicise the event. In addition to publicising the even First Thursdays also connected us with the Friends of Design.

The entire event was oragnised in one week once the venue location was secured. The pictures had been printed and mounted by Orms two months before hand.

Key details

Location: Friends of Design - Academy of Digital Arts, 186 Bree St, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
Date: 5:30pm to 9:00pm, 8th May 2014

Support & external partners

Publicity

The invitation that was mailed out to everyone with the mapped location incorporated into it.

The press statement for the event.

Below is a list of Wikimedia ZA's event partners.

Friends of Design: provided us with a venue and an event DJ at no cost.
Orms: printed out the pictures for free and mounted them in Perspex at cost price.
First Thursdays: introduced us to the Friends of Design and publicised the event for R250.
De Grendel Wine: donated wine for the event.

Publicity

In addition to the publicity that was provided by the Friends of Design and First Thursdays we emailed the Wikimedia ZA mailing list twice. Once with an official introduction a week before the event with a follow-up reminder email sent 24 hours before the event time. Both emails included an invitation png file that included a map to the event location.

The event was also put up on Facebook a number of times throughout the week before the event date on both the Wikimedia ZA profile page and the Wiki Loves Monuments ZA profile page. A press release was sent out 24 hours before hand; in the future we would like to send out such press releases one week before the event date.

Impact

Impact

The crowd at the exhibition at around 7:41 pm.

The crowd by 6pm.

A media clip of the event taken at roughly 7:40pm.

We estimate that roughly a total of fifty people attended the event. Attendees ranged from about 5 Wikipedians, an number of friends and colleagues of the organisers, and a large number of people who had heard about it through First Thursdays. If it had not rained on the night of the exhibition the event would have had a higher attendance. However the event was rated as one of the most successful event of that night on First Thursdays and we were very happy with an attendance that exceeded expectations. A total of ten bottles of wine were consumed during the course of the event.

To offset costs and raise funds for Wikimedia ZA a number of the physical copies were sold at R350 per picture. Seven pictures were sold. A list of these pictures can be viewed below.

Picture	Paid for	Delivered	Cost	Income	Balance
	Done	Done	NA	R350	R350
	Not done	Not done	R264	R350*	R86
	Done	Done	R264	R350*	R86
	Done	Done	NA	R350	R350
	Done	Done	R148	R350*	R202
	Done	Done	NA	R350	R350
	Done	Done	NA	R350	R350
Totals			R676	R2,450	R1,774
* Denotes that an additional prints. Orms kindly gave us a 20% discount on these prints.

Costs & Income

Item	Notes	Income/(Expense)
Mounting images in Perspex for the exhibition	Costs offset by purchase of two of the pictures by the organiser. Printing of photographs was done for free by Orms and mounting at cost price.
First Thursdays	Cost of promoting and helping to organise the event	(R250)
Wine	Donated by De Grendel	free
Mounting gloves	white gloves for handling photographs	(R115)
Printing & mounting of ordered copies	Three duplicate copies were ordered and need to be printed and ordered. Need to get quote from Orms.
Sale of pictures		R2,450
Total		R2,085

Lessons learnt

Charge more than R350 per picture. The downside of getting all the pictures printed for free and framed at cost is that we had no idea of their true worth. A more accurate measure of their worth would have been to sell them for R900 each. This almost caught us out when other pictures were ordered but thankfully ORMS gave us a significant discount so we remained in the black on each picture sold.