Sherborne Arts Link held a three-day project at the end of May in Sherborne Town Centre, where contemporary artists left the comfort of their studios and worked in spaces around the town.

Keen to encourage the public to comment on the artists work, the organisers planned to use traditional paper forms and text-messaging.

ArtsLink Director, Caroline Southcombe said "The public will have the opportunity to make comments about what they see either with traditional pen and paper, or, and this is the bit that has really captured the press’s attention, via text-messaging. . . . we had planned to simply ‘jot down’ text messages as they came into our phone, but obviously if we have lots (and we hope we do!) that will become impossible."

We agreed, and working with Caroline and ArtsLink, we set up a Text-Connect™ 'text-number' for the duration of the festival.

During the festival members of the public could use their mobile phones to send in comments as they watched each artist at work.

As each text message arrived it was forwarded to the Artslink office as an email where the publics feedback was consolidated and passed on to the artists.

ArtsLink's use of Text-Connect™ to receive incoming texts, allowed them to offer festival goers an easy and fun way to interact with the event. The innovative use of text messaging created heightened press coverage for their event while at the same time the Text-Connect™ service proved affordable and simple to use.

The project ran over the Bank Holiday weekend of 27th - 30th May.