2009 is the year of Homecoming Scotland, a celebration of contemporary Scotland which marks the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns birth.
Robert Burns is a truly international character whose personality, works and philosophies are celebrated around the globe. A man who was in many ways ahead of his time, Burns enjoys a great deal of contemporary relevance and is celebrated internationally through the ritual of the Burns supper.
In September 2008, Homecoming Scotland, in partnership with The Famous Grouse, briefed Frame Digital to create a website that would provide a vehicle for fans of the Bard across the Scots diaspora to come together and share how they would be celebrating their Burns Supper in 2009.
One of the core functions of the site was to provide a useful resource to 'affinity Scots' who wanted to celebrate a Burns Supper. As well as examples of Burns poetry, the site also offered a downloadable pack, which included templates for invitations, menus, placeholders and other collateral to help participants organise their Burns supper.
All of these were branded with The World Famous Burns Supper logo to help build a sense of a joined up, global celebration of the Bard. The site also featured a selection of recipes and cocktail mixes provided by The Famous Grouse (courtesy of their award winning executive chef, Steven Craik) which helped participants create a genuinely Scottish Burns supper, whether they were hosting an relaxed dinner for four or a formal dinner for forty.
As well as provide the tools to help participants organise their Burns night under the World Famous Burns Supper banner, we also wanted to communicate a sense of the true spirit of Burns Supper in that the only necessary ingredients are some Scottish food or drink, paying your respects to Burns himself and good friends.
In fact, this idea was central to the ambition to promote and facilitate a globally connected celebration of Burns, in that those celebrations could range from a formal burns Supper in Canada, to a Burns 'barbie' on Bondai beach. It was also important to capture a lasting record of World Famous Burns Supper events that reflected this diversity we felt that asking for user generated content would be the best way to achieve this authentically.
Prior to burns night, we emailed everyone who had registered an event and asked them to take pictures and videos and submit them to the site after their Burns supper.
In order to make this as easy as possible for users, we utilised the Flickr and YouTube APIs to handle the image and video file uploading. This had two benefits in that as well as ensuring the technology was robust (those guys have done way more usability and stress testing that we could have), both of those channels are well recognised brands which people both trust and are fairly comfortable using.
The files were uploaded to dedicated World Famous Burns Supper Flickr and YouTube channels and set to 'private' by default. This meant that they didn't display publicly until the client had been able to approve them in a moderation zone we created for them.
All in all, we were very pleased with the results, with 3,627 people from Barrhead to Brazil registering an event and over 350 photosets uploaded onto our Flickr channel. We also asked users to tell us how many guests they expected when they registered their events and we worked out that across all the events, in excess of 150,000 guests celebrated The World Famous Burns Supper in 2009. Slange var!