WELLINGTON
DRAGON BOAT
FESTIVAL
Wellington Dragon Boat Festival takes over the harbour every summer with returning crews, first-time paddlers, corporate teams, schools and a lot of people who have suddenly become very invested in matching team shirts.
For 2026, the social account had a long runway and two clear jobs: keep the festival visible across the season, and turn that momentum into registrations.
The catch was that race weekend sits at the very end. The account had to stay interesting through Open Day, Harbour Fun Day, training and the lead-up without spending seven months yelling that registration was open.
Rather than treating each event as a one-off promotional beat, the season itself became the content structure.
Open Day made the sport approachable. Training gave the community something ongoing to recognise themselves in. Preliminary events built momentum. Festival weekend was the payoff.
The account needed to speak to a few different groups at once. Returning crews already knew the event. New single paddlers needed it to feel approachable. Corporate teams needed to be able to picture themselves in it.
The content could flex between them, but the central idea stayed simple: make the festival feel like something worth being part of, not just something worth watching.
So the social strategy leaned into the community around the racing: crews, training, personalities, team culture, event-day energy and the bits of the experience that make sense even if you have never held a paddle.
The account still needed to sell an event. It just did not need to behave like an event poster every day for seven months.
THE RACING WAS IMPORTANT.
SO WAS EVERYTHING
HAPPENING AROUND IT.
A fairly significant part of the job required actually being there.
I was on the ground across preliminary events, training and festival weekend filming, editing, publishing and covering things as they happened.
That gave the account the immediate stuff — Stories, race-day moments, training updates and recaps — while also building the content library we would need for the following season.
ALSO PLAN NEXT YEAR'S.
The account moved between different parts of the Dragon Boat world, without trying to make every post do the same job.
The strongest work gave people more to care about than the start line.
Across the 2026 social campaign, the strongest work kept the energy of the event moving well beyond race weekend itself.
For 2026, my role also expanded into the creative side of paid social.
I was not executing the media buying. My contribution was to the development and production of video creative, adapting the broader social feel for campaign placements and objectives.
ACTUAL CAMPAIGN PLACEMENT
NATIVE ENOUGH
TO BELONG IN
THE FEED.
One of the strongest traffic videos used a simple POV format around the social side of joining a crew rather than treating the placement like a traditional event ad.
Across three festival seasons, my involvement grew while I moved from Social Media Coordinator through to Social Media Manager.
For 2026, I led organic content production across planning, filming, editing, publishing and reporting.
I was on-site throughout the season covering events as they happened, and I contributed to the creative development and production of video assets for paid social.