The Ship’s Company Directors woke up on Monday to find our website kept crashing, but why? It turned out that the Times newspaper ran a page 3 spread about our reconstruction project which was copied by the Mail on-line – the interest it has all provoked has been incredible.
We are very pleased to raise our profile for lots of reasons. Principally because the Shipbuild is a community project, and our definition of community is a pretty wide one. Secondly, this Shipbuild is probably the biggest venture in experimental archaeology in Europe to date and people need to know about it. Thirdly, the more people know about us and get interested, the more likely it is we will achieve the significant levels of funding that we need to complete the build and trials.
So why did the website crash? Well, because this latest publicity advertised the fact that anyone can be part of this project by sponsoring one of the many fixings. Given that Christmas is next week hundreds of people have seen this as an opportunity to sponsor rivets for their loved ones who will always know that that they have a small stake in this amazing Anglo-Saxon vessel.
So, is there a downside? Just a little one! For us, apart from having to very quickly upgrade our website server, a number of us are spending quite a lot of time stuffing envelopes with sponsor badges and certificates! A small price for us to pay for a giant boost to a project that we are very, very proud of and maybe time to apologise to all of our own friends and family who won’t be getting a Christmas Card this year as the thought of sticking any more stamps on envelopes is just one small step too far…