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The new National Theatre Wales has just launched with an online presence that is a social network.
My environmental sustainability company, Envirodigital, worked with NTW on their digital strategy, and we recruited Cardiff-based social media developers Native to bring the approach alive. The idea was to produce the new theatre company’s audience organically and through two-way discussion, rather than pushing a message out there via a more traditional brochure-style website. Said Artistic Director John McGrath last Thursday on launch night:

Tonight we are letting everyone know the ideas behind our first year of activity at National Theatre Wales. We have an office party, a bunch of volunteers – our ‘TEAM’ members – helping us out, a beautiful ‘newspaper’ developed by our designers Elfen, and of course this online community to help spread the word behind our plans.

We’ll be opening our first show in March next year, and for the whole of the year after we will be creating new theatre across Wales – with three main strands of work – CREATE, DEBATE, RESPOND.

We chose an online social networking platform as the initial online mechanism for NTW because of the potential for anyone interested in NTW to create, debate and respond online. We’ve benefitted from all the photo and video widgets that we could embed, as well as being able to offer a platform for the community to blog and build their own profiles and groups, as well as discuss issues and ideas through comments and a forum. This has really enabled the sense of creativity, debate and response being possible.

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