In Summary
Joyfest is over. A week of intentionally and deliberately doing nice things for people… with an opportunity to connect it to our faith.
It’s been a really fun week, with great feedback from the people taking part and, most importantly, from the people who were on the receiving end of Acts of Joy.
How do you sum up a week like Joyfest - with 175 documented Acts of Joy done and 2,636 people being Joyfest’ed?
We asked for feedback - you could say what you did, how it went and any comments or stories. You wrote 5,833 words of feedback… well on the way to an undergraduate dissertation.
We’ve used the data and your feedback to try to capture a sense of the whole week, shown here in seven charts.
Mentions
We went through the 5,833 words and looked for what was repeated to give us an idea of what was going on during Joyfest.
One thing for sure, Cadbury’s weren’t wrong when they said chocolate was ‘A glass and a half full of Joy’, although we did it without a gorilla playing the drums.
Day by Day
Wednesday was ‘Whopper Wednesday’, largely due to the YMCA sending all their staff out for a midweek joy-juggernaut.
This chart shows us the number of acts done each day - one act was one submission of the form - overlaid with how many people were on the receiving end of an Act of Joy.
All The Feels
We wanted to be conscious of how we felt each Act of Joy went and how they were received. The truth is, it takes some emotional energy to step out of our normal comfort zones and do an Act of Joy.
And part of the difficulty is fear of rejection (which is why we asked how you felt it went). It’s great to see no one had to use the ‘Sad’ or ‘Upset and confrontational’ option for the recipients reaction!
In fact, it seemed to go the other way, with people being overwhelmed by the smallest tokens of joy, showing that a small act of kindness goes a really long way.
And, how did we feel after staring down our own anxiety about doing an Act of Joy?
A number of people commented on their own feelings, reflecting the challenge of being motivated to go and do their Act of Joy, but feeling equipped and encouraged knowing so many others, from churches across the city, were doing the same thing.
It was really well summed up by someone who wrote in their form, having handed flowers to a stranger on Exeter High Street - “Super scary but totally worth it".
Individual Connections to Mass Joy’ing
There was a really wide variety of how many people each Act of Joy connected with. The largest was giving away cakes in offices for front line service personnel - where 256 people munched into the baked, sugary joy!
But lots of acts were at an individual level, often in established relationships. A number of people commented Joyfest gave a reason to bring up their faith and church where there hadn’t been a natural opportunity before. This sometimes led to really good conversations.
There were also the random connections to strangers where there was something very timely in the connection, meeting people precisely at a time of real need.
Creativity Unleashed
There are so many ways to brighten someone else’s day. We split it into 5 types and asked you to fit your wonderfully creative ideas into one of the five.
Here is the split by number of acts done:
And, perhaps just because we like any chart that reminds us of Pacman, here is the type of act by the number of people impacted
If you have any specific feedback, thoughts, great stories or amazing pictures, we’d love to hear from you. Contact the team of church leaders behind Joyfest here: churches@joyfest.org.uk