Visit Arundel Networking 2022
Thank you to Arundel Castle for letting us host yesterday’s Visit Arundel networking.
We had an incredibly successful evening, with over 120 in attendance. We raised a fantastic £500 for The Sussex Snowdrop Trust through the donation bar, raffle and gift tree. Please donate what you can to this wonderful charity.
We showed a presentation updating our attendees with Visit Arundel’s users, updates, the new Arundel Marketing Manager, and some very important news.
Please see the slides attached with notes here < important news here
Thank you once again for helping make last night possible; Arundel Castle, Gastro Catering, DJ Tony, Eloise’s Dad, the Visit Arundel Team, The Sussex Snowdrop Trust, Ally Berry Photography, our prize donators, and everyone who attended and donated.
Ash has lived in and around Arundel all his life, he has been involved with the Arundel community for 15 years, writing the Arundel Design Statement shortly after graduating from Chichester University in 2006, with a degree in Human Geography, and then purchasing ‘Arundel.org’ now known as Visit Arundel. He then become involved as artistic director with the Arundel Festival in 2012, taking over as co-chairman in 2013, the same year in which Eloise had graduated Chichester University with degree in Events Management, and became the first graduate events manager at the Arundel Festival. Eloise’s family have lived and been involved in the Town for the past 30 years also, so she spent childhood years at concerts at Arundel Castle, visiting the High Street sandwich shop and going for walks around Swanbourne Lake.
Ash and Eloise met at the Arundel Festival in 2013, and were involved with the festival until 2014, when Ash’s mum suddenly passed away only days before the Festival. The amazing team included Andy Heggadon, Sharon Blaikie, Lucy Ashworth, Barb Hogan, Suzy Willis, Annie Waring, Linda Clark, and Woody of which all remain good friends still today.
Visit Arundel h
as seen many different ‘skins’ and platforms over the years, having a redesign back in 2014, and most recently a major platform move and rebuild in 2020. Research carried out by Andy and Janet Batty with the Love Arundel listening sessions, showed what the Town needed and wanted through a website platform. Karl Salter was then brought in to overhaul the old site and reshape it and make it more functional, user friendly and tidied up, on WordPress. He also helped to align all the background business processes, implementing a new software system, Zoho, so no more spreadsheets!
One of the main things to come out of the listening sessions was the need for a community website, this came a few months after the Visit Arundel rebuild. Love Arundel, a mammoth task to collate information, and design on the same website as Visit Arundel, today is a very successful and informative website, with regular news, events, jobs, local contact details for groups, committees, local schemes, schools, and an ever-growing local directory.
Visit Arundel is going from strength to strength, with a knowledgeable and well connected team behind it. With lots of exciting new plans and projects to work on over the next 12 months, the website will only grow and continue to define Arundel on the map for tourists and locals.
We have had to make the difficult decision to move on from Visit Arundel, due to our incredibly sudden and complex life changing situation (full details in the presentation), and Amanda Hopkinson and her husband Christopher are fully-equipped to take over and continue the Visit Arundel legacy. We will still be in the background during the transition over the next year. Rest assured, the team are not going anywhere, and NOTHING is changing except the face running the website. But we must take time out as a family and care for our 2 sons and other work.
For those of you in Arundel, our other business Festive Illuminations Ltd, ‘the Christmas trees’, will not be affected, the 2 businesses are separate, and we are looking forward to focusing back on this in August (paperwork starts very early!).
We have too many people to thank for their support over the years, but our core group includes Andy & Janet Batty, Gill Farquharson, Sharon Blaikie, Suzy Willis, The Mayor Tony Hunt, Charlotte Wilson, Karl Salter, Charlie Waring, Nigel Cull, Sian Lewis, Margaret Murphy, our team, Barb, Katherine and Graham and of course our family and friends.
