By Dan Barron, Community Organiser
For Pancake Day 2021 Rotherfed decided to create we decided to create a “flipping fun” competition for our communities in order to help keep families engaged and entertained during lockdown. The event managed to engage with over 126 unique members of the communities over the events duration. The competition awarded a winner for each category that was voted by the
Rotherfed Good news online community. So let’s go through the winners!
The winner of the Best Pancake flip category was Vicky Watts’ son with a style pancake flip that was the tippity top of the picks. You can see that he was pleased with his winning effort.
The best pancake creation winner was Leanne Ferguson and Drew won with their dinosaur shaped pancake!
The best breakfast winner was Cheryl Addison and her son Ethan created this mouth-watering pancake that we wish we could all eat for breakfast. Ethan was excited to receive his prize from the competition and gave us a great big smile whilst when he got his winners prize.
The engagement from families has been amazing. We have received pictures from families cooking their pancakes together, youth learning how to make pancakes (under supervision), SEND children and adults getting involved and some individuals who wanted to join in the fun. Overall the competition has managed to reach a wide variety of people from different backgrounds.
We have seen families recording videos attempting to flip pancakes and laughing at each other’s attempts which had brought laughter to households that might not have happened otherwise. The best breakfast and best creative pancake categories saw families using fruits and confectionaries as part of their design. These categories were by far the most popular and gave the younger audience a great opportunity to develop positive relationships with fruit moving forward. We have seen several creative designs such as Mickey Mouse, pancake bears, kiwi hedgehogs, funny faces, birthday pancakes, pancakes stacks and scrumptious masses whipped cream fruit and delicious pancakes for those who took the more professional approach, a feast for our eyes.
We have even seen some toddlers get involved for their tea eating pancakes and fruit. In Rotherfed’s true fashion, as always, a dinosaur appeared in a kitchen to create a pancake. It would not be an event without an inflatable dinosaur participating via Tok-tok of course.
We have seen a variety of participants making some very creative pancakes and probably the pancake flip of the year for Rotherham from a young lad. Some of the event page community have supported other entries through social media by commenting or leaving reactions on their posts. The event has had a feel-good effect about it because of the novelty and creative aspect to the competition. We as staff have also released some rather comical content to help everyone get into the flipping mood for Pancake Day.
The event page saw over 90 pictures and videos from staff and participants for the event. The majority of this was from participants. We saw joint effort from families and some individuals in the event. Therefore we achieved just under 80 media entries for the Pancake Day.
The event was well prepared in most of the processes create for it to go ahead. The marketing for the event was began 2 weeks prior. We used a pre-sign-up event to load event interest early. By signing up to a free pancake mix pack we were able to encourage community members to enter the event. Every member who signed up was sent the event link to the competition after the sign-up period had finished. After the pre-sign-up period was completed the event page was set up and ready for marketing to the community. The event was shared online with our Lottery communities over the next week. We engaged with 49 unique individuals through the pre-event sign up gift pack we had run to prepare families for the event. The pancake competition on the day engaged with 62 unique individuals excluding those who were on sign up. The pancake day was a great success having a total of 126 unique engagements in total from sign up to the end of the entry phase of the event. Additionally we managed to get the Rotherfed Good news Community to choose a winner for each category.