Festival of sustainability

At its simplest, sustainability is the triple bottom line – economic, social and environmental. This means we begin by considering aspects such as environmental impact, carbon footprint and the disposal of waste. But working in tandem with ‘greening’ events, we need to look to the economic perspective. Festivals need to consider their financial feasibility in terms of what the market will pay for. In a recession, people demand more so we have to create events designed around the customer. To understand that market, we need to look first at those who live in the event location. The host population will find attending the event most convenient and will also be the ones to feel the most impact from it. If you have their buy-in, you have a base line of ticket purchasers and, potentially, a supportive base of advocates. No-one likes it when something is forced upon them so it makes sense to get the host population onside as quickly as possible. With Beach Break Live this year, the communication between the organisers and Cornwall Council broke down so far that a planning issue that should have been considered months in advance was not discussed until two weeks before the event. A lack of resolution meant that the entire event had to relocate from Cornwall to Kent.

Eyes wide open
When considering the broader market, we have to look at what is actually wanted, and whether we can deliver it within our financial and operational parameters. For example, when selecting a headline act, one needs to consider whether that act is a sufficiently attractive draw to the event. If a similar band is playing within 50 miles a week beforehand, your audience is going to be split and no-one gets the benefit. For an event to be a success, we have to consider what else is going on in parallel to what our audience actually want. In the case of two-day music festival Falmouth Sound, it was developed without consideration of what else was happening. There was a long-established festival which included music in the same town only two weeks earlier, and it was well before the students at the university had returned. The festival had to be cancelled due to poor ticket sales. Understanding your market is vital to ensure that you programme and develop something that is actually wanted.
Great ideas need refining and, for large- scale projects, they need a group of people to make them a reality. The danger comes when people are so used to working together that they all think the same thing. An example of this is Killiow 2008, a week-long music festival scheduled for early September 2008 in Cornwall with performances from high-profile classical artists. The tent venue could hold over 800 audience members, plus corporate hospitality tables for a further 200. The tickets were more than £40 each and, unfortunately, the sales were so poor that the performances were cancelled, the project failed and went bankrupt, and a number of audience members did not get their money back. The organisers failed to realise that a week of classical concerts was not different enough to warrant the higher ticket price or unusual enough to be a must-see event, and this was because they were all thinking in the same way and not broadening their network or gaining feedback from their audience. This shows how the financial and social aspects of the triple bottom line are highly dependent on each other.

Take root
So when we think about sustainability, we need to recognise that festivals are grown, and each time they take place we learn a little more and make it better. Festivals do not appear by magic and suddenly work and have a future. They require thoughtful, customer-focused design and awareness of the context that they are working in. Our market is saturated, so we need to help our audience realise why they have to come to our events. One way is to identify what we are trying to achieve right from the start. With all of our clients, we sit down and work out exactly what we want to achieve and the approach that we want it delivered with. Festivals and events need to have that deep awareness of their future, too. What do we want that future to be, how do we achieve it and how do we embody it in what we deliver? It’s time for us to aspire to greatness – from tiny acorns do great oaks grow.