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Partnerships are always important for festivals’ development and one of our Directors, David Allfrey of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, has just been involved in VisitBritain’s new international campaign alongside British Airways. In the campaign, a number of real British people extend an ‘invite’ to the world to visit Britain as part of the post-Games marketing push for British tourism.

The Edinburgh International Science Festival hs just launched with a significant environment strand, a great example of how the approach to sustainability across Edinburgh's Festivals spans all the work we do. We're ensuring that sustainability is considered in programming as well as impact monitoring, supporting public engagement alongside carbon footprinting.

In a developing partnership with German broadcast station RBB - Berlin and Brandenburg's regional public-broadcasting channel - their coverage of our International Storytelling Festival was recently made available online.

Edinburgh's Festivals are such a complex and chaotic landscape during the peak summer season that it's often difficult to describe it to people. So we wondered could we take the old adage 'a picture paints a thousand words' and adapt it for the digital age through visualising social media activity?  What would all the tweets and flickr photos look like across 28 days for 6 Festivas in 1 city? Well, here's the answer:

Following five years of joint activity, and in the knowledge that the wider environment has fundamentally shifted within that period, the Board of Festivals Edinburgh recently gathered to discuss and plan the next five year period.

The 12 CEOs or Directors of Edinburgh’s major Festivals came together in 2007 to create Festivals Edinburgh with a mission to:

Given that social media is radically altering the nature of public/media relations, we are trialling a new project this winter with Edinburgh's Hogmanay - Blogmanay - to more fully understand these changes.

During 2012, Creative Carbon Scotland has been making the case for carbon management in the arts and in recent weeks has been undertaking a series of workshops to introduce their proposed method of reporting and training/support, to get feedback and inform their plan for 2013.

The Edinburgh Festivals successful Geek-in-Residence programme has now been rolled out nationally by Creative Scotland, with the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo chosen as one of the hosts for the initial year of the programme.

A new film examining what factors make a city attractive to investors provided an opportunity for Edinburgh's Festival to once again demonstrate their wide-ranging impact.

Building on from the publicly sourced Ideas Challenge in 2011, the Festivals have created a prototype website to help individuals with access needs navigate their way around Edinburgh's 12 major festivals.