‘Harness the Power of Web Marketing’ with Susan Hallam

Members and non-members have been invited to attend Susan Hallam’s latest Web Marketing conference on Friday 14 May with discounted ticket prices.

Visit Lincolnshire members can receive a half price ticket (£175 instead of £350) until Wednesday 31 March. Contact susan@hallam.biz and quote your membership reference number, if you need reminding of your number please speak to fiona@visitlincolnshire.com or ring 01522 561676.

Grant funding may also be available, as long as you have five or more employees who need to learn more about internet marketing. If this applies to your business you can claim 100% funding for the first £500, and a further £500 is available at a 50% match. To apply for grant funding please email Susan directly (susan@hallam.biz)

VisitBritian invites you to ‘Get involved with the 2012 Olympic Games’

VisitBritain have launched a new tourism website, in partnership with London 2012’s Nations and Regions Group. Its aim is to help tourism businesses get involved in the Olympic Games.

If you work in tourism and want to know more about the London Olympic Games and Paralympics Tourism2012Games.org is the website for you.

Get an insight into the UK’s preparation to host the biggest event in the world and find out how your business can make the most of the Games. You can even sign up to the Tourism 2012 Games free e-newsletter.

Coming soon – We’re working with Lincolnshire Sports Partnership to hold a county based conference specifically for tourism businesses, the aim will be to explain how to get involved and reap the benefit of working with Sports Associations to maximize the potential of 2012.

Free Business Workshops throughout April

Have a look at these free business workshops run by the NE Group based in Boston.

If you’re interested in learning more about team work; speed networking or managing effective teams we think you’ll find this website useful.

Calling all heritage & cultural attractions

The BBC has launched a new History Campaign for the summer holiday and needs help from cultural and heritage businesses to get as many children and families involved as possible.

History is a major theme for the BBC this year and many programmes will be shown on TV as a result. To compliment the programmes the BBC wants to work with local businesses to help inspire families across the UK get ‘hands on’ with their past to help them discover history in their local area. As a result they want to provide businesses with Holiday History Packs bursting with ideas that will inspire heritage and cultural attractions to run family activities. In return any activities provided will feature on their website.

For more information email helen.sykes@bbc.co.uk.

Lincoln Book Festival – become a friend & attract visitors

Events act as a hook for attracting visitors and we need your help to promote the Lincoln Book Festival on 12th – 16th May. The programme has just been launched and can be viewed on the Book Festival’s Website from 25 March onwards.

If you want to support the festival please contact Sara Bullimore (sara.bullimore@googlemail.com). You can become a ‘Friend of the Festival’ by paying a small subscription fee, this will give you priority access to the headline events; or you can just request festival brochures, posters and other promotional material to display in your business.

Useful links
- Follow the festival on Twitter! /lincolnbookfest
- Become a Book Festival Fan on Facebook
- For the box office call (01522) 873894 or http://www.lincolndrillhall.com/

Did you know Lincolnshire has Robin Hood connection?

It’s not long now until the release of the new Robin Hood movie starring Russell Crowe (sorry, but I can’t get the vision of Robin Hood, Men in tights out my head).

In anticipation on this, (the movie, not Russell in tights) we have been researching any connections Robin Hood had to Lincolnshire.

We’re doing this because when the movie is launched it will get global promotion and Lincolnshire could get a little slice of the cake– like we did for The Da Vinci Code and The Young Victoria.

Although none of the movie was filmed in Lincolnshire, people following the Robin Hood Movie Trail or story of the man himself will want to visit places that have connections to him…. and Lincolnshire is one of them!

Work is been done by us, VisitEngland and Experience Nottinghamshire to develop movie trail maps. But in the meantime have a little read of these….

• To get a sense of how big Sherwood Forest really was go on a Lincoln Cathedral roof top tour and see the boundaries where the forest use to border Lincolnshire. Sherwood Forest came within 6 miles of the Cathedral!


• Lincoln Castle is the only place in the world where you can see the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forrest together.


• The material that his clothes were made of was from Lincolnshire, it was called “Lincoln Green”.


• The library in the Cathedral has one of the very first hand written rhymes of Robin Hood. Dr Nicholas Bennett resident at the cathedral said “Lincoln Cathedral’s Library is of major importance in Robin Hood studies. It has the first hand written rhyme / verse which refers to Robin Hood.
  The verse reads (In modernised form), ‘Robin Hood in Sherwood stood, hooded and hated, hosèd and shod’. This is the earliest surviving written rhyme of Robin Hood in existence anywhere. We display this in the Library exhibition every year.” See the copy on a visit to Lincolnshire.


• Robin Hood was known as ‘robbing the rich to feed the poor’ and it would have been Lincoln’s ‘rich’ he robbed at city events as it was the closest most affluent city to him.


• The Sheriff (or Shire Reive) of Nottingham administered Lincolnshire as part of his area of jurisdiction.

Fingers crossed for the Oscars

When we heard ‘The Young Victoria’ movie (partly filmed in Lincolnshire) had been nominated for several Oscars we excitedly dusted off our posh frocks and waited with starry-eyed hope…

Alas, our golden invitations failed to drop through the letter box. But if the Young Victoria were to scoop a little gold man this weekend it would, once again, put the movie and it’s filming locations into the global spotlight.

This would be fantastic news for Lincolnshire! We’ve already had one bite of the cherry when the movie was released, because people wanted to visit the set locations and follow the footsteps of their favourite stars - like Emily Blunt (who played Victoria in the movie).

Keren from our office spoke to Rod Whiting at BBC Radio Lincolnshire this morning on the subject - if you missed what was said you can hear it here on the stations ‘listen again’ weblink.

Useful links

• BBC Radio Lincolnshire ‘Listen again’
• Film locations in Lincolnshire