The numbers behind a first.
A full cross-platform, website and on-ground performance breakdown for The Sunday Soirée AU-RCHEST-RA, prepared for our sponsors and financial partners. Reach, engagement, conversion and verified attendance across the full campaign cycle.
One production, seven channels, one verified room.
Performance reconciled across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, Google Search and the official website, measured against ticketed attendance and the full production crew on site.
Reach by platform
Who was actually in the room.
601 ticketed guests, and the people it took to put them there. Every figure below is a person who was paid, fed, briefed and on site on 30 August. Behind several of them sits a team.
We chose not to buy reach.
AU-RCHEST-RA was a pilot. Nothing like it had been staged in Malawi, which meant nobody, including us, knew whether a Malawian audience would turn out for afro house played by an orchestra. That question deserved an honest answer.
Paid promotion was used narrowly, to move people who had already seen the event to the ticket page. It was not used to inflate reach. On a first-of-its-kind production, paid reach creates a false signal: it fills a room without telling you whether the room would have filled itself. What follows is raw market data on a new art form in a market that had never encountered it, and it is more useful to our partners for being largely unpaid.
Deep-dive across every channel.
Seven channels, one campaign. Each platform measured on its own terms. The central finding is that no two behaved alike, and treating them as one social presence would have hidden it.
Views by content type
Views: followers versus non-followers
Top performing content
Facebook is winning new audience
87.6% of views came from non-followers. This is where people who had never heard of The Sunday Soirée found AU-RCHEST-RA, and it happened with 2,323 boosted views out of 445,819.
Long-form holds when it is posted
Videos over two minutes retained 17.1% of viewers past the one-minute mark. The 3 September performance video held 2,873 from 16,514 starts. They made up 12% of output.
Views by format
Interactions by format
Top performing content
Earned media via tagged accounts
Reels punch above their weight
27.4% of views generate 55% of all interactions, the highest engagement density of any format. Stories carry volume; Reels carry response.
Volume without conversion
400 Stories produced 540,463 views and 201 link clicks. Average views per Story fell from 2,707 in event week to 1,012 the following week, when posting more than doubled. Posting more produced less.
TikTok
Daily video views
Started ten days too late
TikTok activity began on 9 September, after the event. Six days of posting produced more new followers than Instagram posts did across eleven weeks. It was effectively unused during the campaign.
The most efficient acquisition channel we run
459 followers from 102,658 views, with almost every view reaching a new person. Live from announcement day, this is the top of the next funnel.
X
Top days by impressions
Engagement on peak days
The final week carried the platform
Five of the six highest-impression days fell between 25 August and 3 September. Pre-event anticipation, not the event itself, drove the peak.
Under-posted, not under-performing
28 posts averaged 7,137 impressions each. No video was used across the entire period. More output, with video, is the obvious lever.
Post performance
Impressions by phase
This audience clicks to see work
The three highest-converting posts all linked to galleries. The three lowest all linked to ticket sales. LinkedIn is a credibility and partnership channel, and it should never be measured on reach.
Silent at the wrong moment
109 impressions and 7 clicks across the event weekend, the weakest period in the window, because almost nothing was posted. Post-event then became the strongest phase.
Google Search
Clicks per day by phase
Top queries
The brand is well defended
238 of 360 clicks came from branded queries, at click-through rates up to 53%. When people know the name, they find the site immediately.
Discovery is unclaimed
One click in eleven weeks from 680 non-branded impressions. "Local events this weekend" alone showed 202 times at position 9.5 and converted none. That is the next edition's audience, unaddressed.
Website
Top pages by views
Traffic sources, active users
The blog post was the hub
"Everything you need to know" drew 3,611 views from 1,903 users, nearly 40% of all page views. On 21 July, its launch day, 679 new users arrived, 18% of the entire period in one day.
August went quiet
New users fell to 10 a day between 1 and 22 August, the gap between announcement and event week. That is where sustained content should have been, and where the next campaign needs a mid-cycle moment.
From impression to ticket-holder.
How cross-platform reach translated into profile interest, website traffic and a verified seat on the night.
Against the previous edition
VINŌIR reached 4.26 million impressions and 1,854 website users. AU-RCHEST-RA reached 61% of those impressions and more than double the website users. Less was seen; far more was acted on. Facebook page visits are not in the export, so the profile-visit stage understates the true middle of the funnel.
What 16% means
One in six people who visited the website went on to buy a ticket. That conversion rate, from an audience that arrived largely unpaid, is the most commercially significant number in this report.
Rooted in Malawi, watched from 309 cities.
Where the website audience is physically located, per GA4 city-level data.
Top cities by active users
A domestic, urban core with a measurable diaspora footprint across Singapore, London, the United States, Ireland and South Africa. Singapore's 76 users, ahead of any other international city for the second edition running, is a pattern worth understanding.
Malawian music, from the first bar to the last drop.
This is the part no reach figure captures. Every note performed on 30 August was Malawian in origin, made from scratch, and owned by the people who made it. An orchestra opened it. The DJs closed it on their own original mixes and remixes. Nothing was borrowed.
One continuous evening, in four movements
The orchestra opens
A full live orchestra scored from original Malawian compositions
Voices enter
A cappella and vocalists carry the arrangement forward
The band lifts it
Live instrumentalists bridge orchestra and dancefloor
The DJs close
Original afro house mixes and remixes, played by the artists who produced them
One night, rings of work spreading outward.
A production of this size does not end at the venue gate. Money and work radiate from the stage into a community of people who were never on the crew list and were essential anyway.
A new format, built and owned end to end.
AU-RCHEST-RA competed for attention against events that bought their reach, and it did so almost entirely without paying for its own. The numbers held. The conversation on the street held. And every piece of what was built now belongs to The Sunday Soirée.
It held its own against paid campaigns
2.58 million views and impressions, with 99.5% of Facebook video reach organic and zero sponsored LinkedIn spend. Every other event in the same window was competing with paid distribution. AU-RCHEST-RA matched them on attention while spending on conversion rather than reach, and one in six website visitors went on to buy a ticket.
The audience did the marketing
Tagged partner, artist and guest accounts generated more than 130,000 views on their own, with no brief. Post-event content outperformed the night itself by a factor of eight. People talked about it afterwards, unprompted, and kept talking for weeks. That is the clearest signal a pilot can send.
A new event format now exists in Malawi
Afro house performed by a full live orchestra, moving continuously into vocalists, instrumentalists and DJs, did not exist in this country before 30 August. It does now, with 601 people who have seen it, a proven audience for it, and a market that has been measured rather than guessed.
The production is owned, not hired
The music was composed and scored from scratch. The stage was designed and engineered from scratch. The engineering drawings, the acoustic learning, the orchestral arrangements and the working relationships between musicians, engineers and architects all sit with The Sunday Soirée. None of it was rented, and all of it is reusable.
The score travels
Because the music exists as a written orchestral score, it can be performed with any orchestra, anywhere in the world. This was not a one-night event. It is a body of work, made in Lilongwe, that can now be staged on any stage that will have it.
The next edition is already cheaper
A pilot's most expensive output is knowledge. Every element of this production now has a tested cost, a tested audience and a tested channel behind it. A second edition is planned against real numbers rather than estimates, and the expensive part, learning how to build one, has already been paid for.
601 in the room. 2.58 million watching them get there. And a format that is now ours.
This is the audience your brand stood beside at AU-RCHEST-RA. Verified, rooted in Malawi, reached almost entirely without paid support, and converting to a seat at one of the highest rates we have recorded.
Corporate support for the arts tends to attach itself to formats that have already proven themselves. FDH Bank Plc and Ekhaya Farms Foods did the opposite, underwriting an untested format from a small company before a single ticket had been sold. That is what made a pilot possible at all.
Ekhaya Farms Foods
BCA Travel
Ketase Group
STEM, event management