BUSINESS EVENTS SPECIAL REPORT


Marketing Edinburgh has lost a third of its funding


‘Business as usual’ for Convention Edinburgh but uncertainty about the future remains


Te city’s conference and events arm survives the axe but faces a £300,000 black hole


BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN “I


t’s very much business as usual for us, despite everything going on,” says Amanda Fergu- son, Head of Business


Tourism at Convention Edinburgh. She’s speaking just a week after a controversial decision was passed by Edinburgh City Council to reduce funding to Marketing Edin- burgh, the overarching tourism and events body whose raison d’être is to promote the capital to the world. “We’ve been doing a lot of public- facing work around funding but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been going about our work as usual. We have a lot to get going for 19/20; we’ve got Destination Edinburgh coming up and two sales missions at the end of March,” she says. Ferguson has been deeply


involved in a city-wide engage- ment campaign to stave off what would have been an existensial threat to Marketing Edinburgh. An out-of-the-blue budget proposal at the beginning of February caught the industry by surprise when city councillors – under pressure from central government funding cuts – announced a raft of emergency measures to slash public spending by £40m in the next financial year, starting on April 1. Among the targets was Marketing


Edinburgh, whose £890,000 budget was to be reduced to just £100,000, representing an 89 per cent funding cut over two years and reducing her 14-strong team to a virtual shell. With no warning Ferguson, whose Convention Edinburgh unit helps generate £74m in business tour- ism revenue for the city, organised a grassroots campaign among the city’s more than 500 conference ambassadors to press for a council re-think. At the time of going to print,


78 messages of support had been received from that community among 153 positive responses


EVENTSBASE | SPRING 2019 | 27


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