Stanfield Gray, Founder of DIG SOUTH

By Alan Cooper

 

DIG SOUTH 2015 is April 28-May 2 in Charleston

 

LowcountryBizSC:
What is your education and background?

Stanfield Gray:
I am originally from Spartanburg, South Carolina and attended the University of South Carolina where I majored in English Literature. After graduating, I went to New York to work at Spin, a rock magazine.  It was a lot of fun and introduced me to the New York arts and culture scene.

I returned to South Carolina to work on a political campaign for South Carolina Representative Liz Patterson of Spartanburg.  Politics was not the best fit for me so I decided to go to graduate school at the University of Mississippi in Southern Studies where I also served as the entertainment editor for the Oxford Town weekly.

After finishing grad school in 1998, I moved back to Charleston to perform in a band and work as a freelance writer.  I’m a guitarist, singer, and songwriter and have been involved with various bands and creative projects throughout my life.

LowcountryBizSC:
So you are an English major with graduate work in southern studies.  Not exactly a typical background for someone who starts a technology festival.

Stanfield Gray:
DIG SOUTH is not just a tech festival, though. The vision for the Festival is to operate at the intersection of business, technology, culture and quality of life.  It is a multi-industry interactive festival focused on digital innovation, entrepreneurship and building connections. And I have a background in marketing and digital strategy, which are important aspects of DIG SOUTH.

I have always been interested in technology and innovation and how they both relate and reflect current culture.  My education in southern studies is not just as a way of understanding the past, but also a means of gaining insight into where southern culture might be moving in the future.  As a long-time subscriber to Wired magazine and reader of Po Bronson, a writer who covered Silicon Valley in the 1990’s, I’ve followed tech innovation and startups for a number of years.  In 1999, I decided to move to San Francisco to work in marketing for a startup.  Unfortunately, my timing coincided with the burst of the first tech bubble.  If you were not from San Francisco, it became nearly impossible to get a job, particularly in marketing.  So I returned to Charleston.

In terms of job opportunities, the Charleston of the year 2000 was dramatically different from the Charleston of today. Then, unless you were in tourism, a lawyer, or in real estate, it was very difficult to find a job that paid a living wage.  I went to work for the College of Charleston in the marketing division where I led the team that launched the institution’s tour app, the first of its kind in the nation. I was also involved in developing, branding and promoting major scale events at the College of Charleston and leveraging social media channels to market them.

LowcountryBizSC:
What was the spark for starting DIG SOUTH?

Stanfield Gray:
In 2011, I attended the AD Age Digital Conference in New York and had the opportunity to hear from so many great leaders from the tech world.  I had this strong conviction that there were many equally talented people in the Southeast.  Many of them had moved to San Francisco, Austin, or New York, or other places that that were more conducive to getting a job in the tech field.  Many left because they either did not have access to capital or could not recruit talent to their companies.

I had a fair amount of experience in event management at my job at the College of Charleston and I ran operations for Piccolo Spoleto, an event that includes over 700 performances over 17 days.  I started thinking that maybe there was a way to help prevent this brain drain.  And, why not do something that was unique to the Southeast?

So when I returned from AD Age, the spark of the idea for DIG SOUTH was there, but I was not quite ready to pull the trigger.  Then, I had a pretty serious health scare when a tumor was discovered in my neck area. Fortunately, it was benign, but the whole incident really caused me to do some deep reflection. It was now or never.

LowcountryBizSC:
How did you get the first event off the ground?

Stanfield Gray:
I put together an executive summary, a preliminary run of show, and some branding materials for the conference and went out door to door to pitch the idea.  The Southeast needed its own interactive festival.  I hired a part-time sales person and we met with the Charleston Digital Corridor, the Charleston Regional Development Alliance, SPARC, Benefitfocus, People Matter, and many more companies to pitch the idea.

Many of those companies either sponsored us right off the bat in that first year or they were very supportive.  Many helped find panelists.  I hired a team and we really started cranking things up in the fall of 2012.

In order to gauge public support, we launched a Kickstarter campaign in November and December of 2012. It raised about $20,000. There was such a groundswell of support at that stage that we felt that we really needed to ride the zeitgeist and forge ahead.  Our first DIG SOUTH conference was in the spring of 2013. Each of those initial investors became our “Kickstarter Founders” and they are still listed on our website as we approach our third year.  We are very grateful to them.

LowcountryBizSC:
What is the mission of the organization?

Stanfield Gray:
We are the Southeast’s first and foremost interactive festival and our mantra is “Succeed in the South.”  First, we hope that large Fortune 500 companies will consider the South as a great place to expand their business.  Second, any mid-size companies that are considering new locations, we think they should take the southeast seriously as a potential headquarters.  Third, we support homegrown talent and homegrown entrepreneurs. We want to build the talent pipeline from the Southeast and help people make connections across the region, the country and globally.

I am a strong believer in the importance of the cross pollination that can occur between music and design, creativity and technology.  In addition to the interactive program, we put a lot of energy into presenting national touring acts to DIG SOUTH.

LowcountryBizSC:
How has the conference grown in terms of its scope?

Stanfield Gray:
In the first year we had about 134 presenters and 430 attendees. Last year, we ended up with 221 presenters and over 1,000 attendees.  If you include the conference, the expo, and all the evening events, we had close to 5,000 people attending over the four days of DIG SOUTH 2014.  Last year, we also hosted a hackathon and a “wild pitch” event.  Both were so successful that we decided to break that out this year into a third DIG Demo Day.

So, we host the DIG Conference featuring presenters in tech and creativite industries and the DIG Show, which is an expo featuring tech and tech-related companies plus innovative and interesting products and services.  And, we enhance the networking experience with nightly Shindigs in beautiful locations around Charleston and Mount Pleasant.

 

Photo by Glenn Barnett

 

LowcountryBizSC:
What is your goal in terms of attendance?

Stanfield Gray:
The Super Bowl of this type of event is the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.  They welcome about 70,000 all access badge buyers.  Our current model is not to scale to that size, but rather to focus on quality and creating the opportunity for people to develop relationships.  If we could carve off 10-20% of the size of the South by Southwest conference we would consider ourselves to be incredibly successful.

LowcountryBizSC:
Is this a full-time job for you right now?

Stanfield Gray:
Yes!  We have a team four people working on the Festival year round and hire seasonal coordinators who come on board in the spring.

LowcountryBizSC:
Who should attend the conference?

Stanfield Gray:
Anybody who works in a tech or tech-related field will find a lot of great content.  In addition, if you own a business and you are doing anything web, e-commerce or social media-related, there will be great takeaways for your business.  DIG SOUTH offers content related to UX design and software but is not currently a deep dive into  complex coding.  Some of those may occur in smaller workshops, but we take a very broad approach and encourage all of our panelists to make sure that the takeaways are for a broad audience interested innovative platforms and strategies.