‘The Results Are In’: Unpacking the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest’s Impact on Liverpool
The glitter has settled (writes Elliot Simmonds), the Turquoise Carpet has been rolled up, and I recently had the privilege of attending ‘The Results Are In’‘ a fascinating symposium dissecting some of the emerging data around the impact of the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest held in Liverpool, on behalf of Ukraine. The first thing to say was that the atmosphere in the room was fantastic, mirroring the vibrancy and excitement that Eurovision brought to the city – it was also great to have representatives from both Ukraine and Malmo, Sweden, who will be taking on the Eurovision baton following Loreen’s victory a few months ago.
In this blog, I’ll walk you through a few of the key findings and thoughts shared during the symposium, as well as some of my own reflections. These are often rambling and always my own opinion, not that of M·E·L.
It’s also important to note that the event was streamed, with a few options for breakout sessions in the afternoon, so this won’t cover everything that was mentioned. Please also note, I’m not a journo, so all quotes are paraphrased from my iPhone notes!
A Festival Like No Other
The introduction session was a ride through the big picture findings and takeaways. Steve Rotheram, LCR’s Metro Mayor, kicked things off by contextualising Eurovision in time – it’s 15 years since Liverpool was the European Capital of Culture in 2008, a year which sent Liverpool’s civic pride “stratospheric”, and the city has pushed on since then, but Eurovision has managed to build on that further. Whilst this was a review of figures and successes, it’s almost certain that “the value of those two weeks far outstrips the figures we are seeing today.”
Councillor Liam Robinson, Leader of Liverpool City Council, followed Steve, again highlighting some of the successes within the city – see below – but also noting that it was “really important to us to understand the impact on citizens of the city” – I’ll take this opportunity for one of several unapologetic plugs for the work we at M·E·L helped to deliver, looking at citizen wellbeing and civic pride.
But it really was a huge success both in economic and community benefits and in terms of openness and inclusion – hardly a surprise in a city like Liverpool which does many of these things so well.
The final was the most-watched in the competition’s history;
475 volunteers gave 12,000 hours of their time;
25% of those coming to Liverpool to visit identified as LGBTQ+;
£54.8million (net) of economic impact with restaurants, accommodation providers, shops, bars and transport networks all benefitting.
473,000 people attended Eurovision events in the city, with 306,000 additional visitors heading to Liverpool to be part of the celebrations.
In May, 175,000 city centre hotel rooms were sold – the best month on record since 2018.
These are amazing numbers, and you have to give huge credit to the teams who delivered them and the degree of collaboration and trust that that takes, in such a short space of time. Culture Liverpool, the Council, the BBC etc may get the plaudits (and rightly so) but the teams from the Arena, hundreds of hotels, traffic management, security, wayfinding, individual restaurants and hospitality businesses etc, all need to sing together to deliver major events and it was great to hear this recognised on the day.
Speaking of singing together, at the end of this plenary session we were treated to the Liverpool Signing Choir – who performed a rendition of the Ukranian National Anthem, followed by All You Need is Love (of course.). They then asked us as the audience to join in. I have absolutley no doubt that I was significantly behind the timing but there is something very wholesome about an auditorium full of people sing-signing in silence (say that three times fast), that I won’t forget for some time – it was also great that a good number of people in the audience knew the sign for applause.
Luckily, I have a video of the choir’s first run – not the one with the audience! And can I just say, that takes some bottle at any age never mind for those who were youngest among the group, so well done everyone! (Click to play)
However, prior to that, we got a run down of the media findings from the EBU, and subsequently Paul Harrold, from the BBC, who made the point that, falling as it did in the same week as the Coronation of HRH Charles III, this was perhaps the “greatest week of costume drama ever staged in the UK.”
But taking that point further, and more seriously, Eurovision – and other musical and cultural events (such as Unboxed, but also Glastonbury, the Edinburgh Fringe and in years to come, whatever Taylor Swift decides to do, probably) – demonstrated something very important:
“It isn’t just sport or royal events that bring people together in the UK; arts and culture can too.”
Paul Harrold, Company Secretary and Chief of Staff, BBC
“It takes people.”
But how do we do that? Claire McColgan CBE, Director of Culture Liverpool, provided an overview of the organisational process and systems that are needed, but also praised the intangibles that cities, like Liverpool, either have or don’t have. A ‘box’ of people, who when the time comes, align themselves with a common ambition and move forward with trust and purpose. Claire made the great point, which I alluded to above, that “it takes people to do events like this.” It takes passion and knowledge and determination and that comes from individuals.
I take a lot from this when I look at the work M·E·L Research put in to this. I am incredibly lucky to be the “face” on this article and to be able to be there on the day when results like these are announced, but too often it goes without saying that to deliver 1,400 in-home interviews, sampled to strict quotas in a short timeline, takes tens of interviewers, our office-based fieldwork department, our survey scripting and data analysis team, our finance team (we paid thousands of pounds of incentives to thousands of individuals), our telephone interviewing team – who followed up with respondents in later waves to encourage them to complete…
…then there’s our Project Management team, and our client partners and their sub-teams within their own organisations. It’s probably not quite Eurovision (probably) but it was a big beast, so a huge thank you to everyone involved – and particularly to everyone who actually completed the survey. It’s odd that participants (in art and in research?) are sometimes the ones most likely to be forgotten. We’re nothing without them, of course.
Do it because it’s worth doing
However, Claire also said something else that really resonated, “Legacy is great, but you’ve got to get it right first.” This aligned with something that Prof. Matthew Ashton, Director of Public Health touched on:
“Music, art and cultural activity are essential to public health – especially in a city with poor health outcomes and deprived communities.”
The latter point has recently been echoed in both the Lancet and by the WHO, and is hardly a novel idea anyway – Matt Hancock said it in 2018 and, perhaps more credibly, the Ancient Greeks experimented with musical therapy. However, it was fantastic to hear it so clearly expressed at an event like this and in-front of such a large and relevant audience.
She may not have meant it like this, but I heard Claire’s point as being that sometimes, major events are worthwhile just for themselves, just because they are worth doing. The economic impact and the legacy and the soft-power and the glitter are all excellent benefits, but fundamentally you’ve got to do a good job in order to get any of that – and the health stuff – and a way to do that is to think about what people are really going to enjoy, in the moment.
Wellbeing and Community Impact
Some of ‘that health stuff’ is of course where things got close to home, as M·E·L Research Ltd conducted a large portion of the wellbeing and community impact evaluation, in partnership with the University of Liverpool, who undertook the analysis and a tranche of in-depth qualitative research. It’s really important to take a second here and say a huge thank you to the UofL team, particularly Rhiannon Corcoran (Professor of Psychology & Public Mental Health) who has been a pleasure to work with and who commissioned us in the first place.
In the same vein, Prof Iain Buchan (Associate PVC, University of Liverpool) lauded the serious evaluation that went into understanding well-being and community impact, which was wonderful to hear and Amy Coleman (Head of Media Analysis, DCMS) stressed the importance of leaders creating space for thorough evaluation, a philosophy we thoroughly agree with.
Findings
The research we undertook and analysis by the team at the University of Liverpool combined with in-depth interviews demonstrates that a high proportion of Liverpool’s residents expressed enthusiasm for hosting the Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of Ukraine, with 74.1% of surveyed individuals being in favour. This sentiment was especially strong among women. The survey also revealed that 80% of respondents felt a sense of pride that Liverpool had been selected as the host city, a sentiment which was further substantiated in one-to-one and group interviews.
Wellbeing appeared to be positively influenced in anticipation of the Eurovision event. Survey data showed that personal wellbeing levels exceeded the national average in the lead-up to the event, though they stabilised afterwards. However, individuals who felt a personal connection to the event demonstrated sustained improvements in wellbeing from before to after the contest.
Liverpool residents engaged more actively in Eurovision-related events than initially predicted. While less than 20% expected to attend such events, more than a third actually did. Age had an impact on this; those aged 25-34 were more likely to attend televised shows, whereas those aged 35-49 saw the greatest increase in actual attendance compared to their initial intentions. Eurovision fans were notably more likely to attend live events.
The event also had a transformative impact on local perceptions of global citizenship. Although most respondents initially identified primarily as citizens of Liverpool, there was a post-Eurovision shift toward a broader sense of global citizenship, as opposed to local or national identification.
Lastly, the language used in interviews suggested that feelings about Eurovision closely mirrored sentiments about Liverpool as a city. This indicates that Liverpool was well-suited to hosting the event, reflecting its reputation as a vibrant, inclusive, and music-loving city.
The diplomacy session added a global lens to the conversation. David Watson (Executive Director of Audiences, National Museums Liverpool) questioned the universal applicability of certain Western perspectives, particularly with reference to Ukraine, and told a story about a team member commenting, ‘That does not mean anything to the Ukranian people.’ Firstly, this shows the value of both lived experience and directness, particularly in such high stakes and tight timelines, but secondly it is also a learning point for many cultural and artistic organisations, many of whom I’ve worked with in the past decade or so.
In my experience, people in general are not sat at home ‘wishing’ they could attend museums and galleries (in particular) if only there were more buses / easier access / they weren’t socially anxious about crowds. Of course, all of these issues exist and should be addressed, but a key issue is relevance. Arts and culture are simply not things that many people wake up and think about doing, and no amount of step-free access or subsidised travel is going to change that if you are fundamentally programming without listening, or hearing. By and large, if you simply ‘build it’, they will not come – unless it’s relevant.
By and large, if you simply ‘build it’, they will not come – unless it’s relevant.
Robin Kemp (Host City Head of Creative) also talked about the need for ‘trust’ – between different partners and organisations, but I think this also applies to audiences. One way to build that was referenced by Christine Wilson (Director of Research and Insight, British Council), who emphasised long-term commitment to audiences and ensuring that work done with them is a) done with them (not to them) and b) on-going and can potentially build self-sustaining frameworks. No one likes it when, when the funding ends, so does the project (read: interest in that community).
These comments, and the whole experience, really drove home the point that Eurovision is not just a spectacle but an event with global implications – but global anything is local is for someone, and Liverpool smashed it.
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