.nl in the spotlight: The Feed Factory

Can you tell us a bit about The Feed Factory?

"The Feed Factory is a smart, user-friendly tool and database of tourist information, which makes it easy to manage content and event data systematically," Arne explains. "It's aimed primarily at larger Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs): bodies whose role is to promote a city or region as a tourist destination. Their work involves managing large amounts of information about cultural attractions and events. Putting that information on their websites and keeping it up to date is a huge and issue-prone administrative task."

So what's your solution?

"Take the city of Rotterdam. It has 3 organisations that provide cultural and tourist information, each catering for a different audience. With our tool, the information only has to be input once, and then it can easily be published on multiple websites. So the thousands of items on the Rotterdam event calendar have all been processed using our tool. We also have automated interfaces with the city's 30 main event venues. Meaning that, if the details of an event change, the Rotterdam events calendar and the information on the DMOs' websites are automatically updated. Other big cities around the Netherlands, such as Amsterdam and Haarlem, use our service as well."

What's your mission?

"Our mission is to be the bridge between event organisers and audiences. Our tool and database interfaces get event information to the right people. Information about, for example, theatre shows, exhibitions, concerts, congresses and business gatherings in the Netherlands and further afield."

What's your role outside the Netherlands?

"We're currently exploring the options, in terms of what we can do in the regions along the Dutch borders. For example, a Christmas market in Germany could benefit from being drawn to the attention of people in nearby parts of the Netherlands. And a Dutch music festival could be promoted in Germany. It doesn't matter what country the event's in, because we can translate the event information for the relevant audience with a single click. Where cities in other countries are concerned, our main consideration is the extent to which the city has gone digital. Big cities such as Ghent, Antwerp and Berlin tend to be highly digitised already. But, for a smaller place, such as Bocholt, our tool can be a real boon. It would be great if we could use our tool to enable smaller places to have busy event calendars just like the big cities."

How did you come up with your domain name, thefeedfactory.nl?

"The Feed Factory is the successor to the National Database for Tourist, Recreational and Cultural information (NDTRC), which my business partner Maurice Jumelet and I developed for the national tourist information body in 2017. When the national body decided to take a different course, we were able to go independent with the tool and continue its development. That meant we could go on delivering support to clients that were already using the database. Our first idea was 'Feed Factory' without the 'The', but that .nl domain name had already been taken by a pig farming company. So we chose 'The Feed Factory' instead. The Feed Factory comes under the umbrella of Event Connectors, the company that Maurice and I co-own."

How important is online visibility for you?

"Our website is our most important online channel. We're working hard to get it just right, with multiple language versions. We also use social media and advertising to reach our target audience. And we send out a newsletter to clients, explaining what we're up to and what we've got planned, and giving advice on how to make the most of the tool."

Have you always wanted to have your own business?

"I've always been interested in making things, finding things out, and discovering things. I'm inquisitive and enterprising by nature. I started out teaching in a primary school, but I missed building and refining websites and products. So, in my free time, I decided to set up an online community for teachers. That led to me going into business in 2005."

Do you have any advice for other people starting out in business?

"A lot of what the internet now offers wasn't possible 10 years ago. The main message I'd like to pass on is that you can use your website to find out whether there's any demand for a product or service. For example, we can see from our stats on visits to and clicks on the website congresagenda.nl how much interest there is in a given type of event. So I can see, say, that lots of people are looking for information about medical conventions. Then I can look into the possibility of interfacing our tool with sources of information about medical conventions, so that our congress calendar is automatically populated and updated. That way, we can give people the information they're after," says Arne.