Category Archives: Firsthand Experience

A post for those who love dolphins) Enjoy! My recent volunteering for dolphin monitoring expedition brought me to a marvellous world with glorious sea scenery, interesting meetings and challenging tasks. Green Balkans declared November the month of dolphins. Every month they devote to certain species and educate about them with creative activities, quizzes and games. This year the expedition devoted to the counting of dolphins overlapped with the programme but it’s a regular scientific project carried out in Bulgaria twice a year since 2017. Dolphin monitoring in the Black sea […]

This post presents the results of 6festhotweek campaign initiated by me two weeks ago in support of the crowdfunding campaign by Momchil Tsonev, the organizer of 6fest Street Art Festival. I travelled over 700 km around Bulgaria, did interviews with all the participants of 6fest and surveyed online the spectators. People from 15 countries have engaged with the 6festhotweek posts on Cultural Insights, and over 1000 user more were reached with Facebook and Twitter posts. The campaign hasn’t had significant financial achievements, but it has offered some useful insights for […]

How much will get the 7 Bulgarian fire formations for their participation in the upcoming 6fest Art Street Festival? It depends on the donations of Bulgarian spectators for the crowdfunding campaign specially launched by the organizer Momchil Tsonev. It’s the first case of application of crowdfunding to a large-scale cultural event in Bulgaria. The festival is the brainchild of Momchil Tsonev who’s been organizing it from 2017. This year he’s asked for public support to co-finance the festival. The Ministry of Culture of Bulgaria has drastically reduced the initial budget […]

For 35 years of its existence, the project European Capital of Culture has developed a professional system for communicating cultural topics, and Facebook has become the main channel for all the cultural capitals. For this post, I’ve adapted the Facebook strategy of the cultural capitals to the daily communication of ordinary users. Everyone is a media outlet Despite different cultural programmes, all cultural capitals use the same communication framework. For convenience, I’ll only use the example of Pafos 2017 Facebook strategy. I downloaded and analyzed the one-year communication campaign for […]

Galway 2020 has just extended the cultural programme of this Year into 2021. During my recent volunteering at this year’s European Capitals of Culture Galway 2020, I revealed incredible places that are a vital part of the region’s heritage and where the deeply-rooted traditions naturally weaved into everyday life. And those places can be visited at any time regardless of the Galway 2020 programme. A Conversation in a Traditional Thatched Cottage The trip to Menlo, an Irish village in about 5 km away from Galway, was part of my volunteer programme. […]

Get insights into the new European Capital of Culture! Together with volunteers of Plovdiv 2019, Matera 2019 and Galway 2020 we found 5 ways to make work the logo of Galway 2020 Let the magic in! It guided our exploration of city diversity after the official ceremony was cancelled due to the changing weather. My volunteering in Galway (Ireland), the European Capital of Culture – 2020, has become the logical continuation of the Plovdiv internship. I was selected to represent Bulgaria in the framework of the international exchange programme. Because […]

Learn how community engagement can be created globally! The spectacular outdoor show with actors on stilts and a lantern procession on International Volunteer Day was the most unusual event I worked on during my internship at Plovdiv 2019. The project was a collaboration of creative practitioners from 7 countries and the general public. Together we created and celebrated a great event. Learning to Collaborate through Lantern Workshops The EU Plovdiv School of Participation was a partnership programme of the EU Programme Creative Europe, the UK art-company Walk the Plank and […]