Festivals: a backstage pass

What does it take to project manage a festival? As we anticipate a rebooted summer festival scene, Dave Waller takes a look behind the scenes and speaks to the professionals tasked with making these major events happen.

“It was a baptism of fire in terms of the nuts and bolts of project management,” says Rob Gorham of Bestival, the music festival on the Isle of Wight he co‑founded with his wife Josie in 2004. “That first night, we’d been pouring cocktails at one bar and were transporting hundreds of pounds in float in a golf buggy up the hill to another one, when we were told people were rolling burning toilet paper into the woods, trying to set them alight.

“Other people were telling us the sound system in the big top wasn’t working, or asking us where they should be deploying security. Meanwhile, [conspiracy theorist] David Icke was in the forest hosting his own sound system. We had to close that down. At 5am, we crawled into a spider‑covered teepee for half an hour’s sleep before being woken up: people were at the gates waiting to be let in. It was totally nuts.”

While Bestival began with only 5,000 guests, and Gorham’s “naive” misreading of the scope of the project, it would become one of the key events in the UK festival calendar, hosting the likes of Stevie Wonder and Outkast for crowds of around 50,000. Bestival matured alongside the country’s festival scene, which is now a major mainstream industry. According to The Future of UK Music Festivals, a 2021 report by the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, there are close to a thousand such events in the UK every year. In 2019, music festivals contributed a combined total of £1.75bn to the UK economy.

Stakeholder diplomacy

When staging a festival, you’re effectively building a makeshift town from scratch. That means providing food, water and sanitation for the thousands of people who will make it their home for the best part of a week. That includes the army of food and drink vendors, security teams, facilities crews, performers and sound engineers. No surprise, then, that universities now offer degrees in festival management: such a task is guaranteed to leave project managers fighting fires.

For Paul Spencer, the pyrotechnics began when his Americana festival, Maverick, was still just an idea. Spencer wanted to stage the family‑friendly party at a farm park near his home village in Sussex. But his neighbours objected, fearing a wild influx of drugs, public defecation and graffiti. Spencer stresses the importance of diplomacy. He says he attended countless meetings, got embroiled in endless licensing applications and presented a meticulous case to the police. Yet with the villagers mobilising against him, the council refused permission.

But Spencer was holding a trump card: his farm park venue already had an event licence of its own. “I had to bulldoze the whole thing through and do the festival for a couple of years, much to the disgust and horror of the village, until everybody calmed down,” he says. Fifteen years later, the festival is an established success, with around 4,000 Americana buffs turning up each year. He still won’t show his face in the local pub, but says people have long stopped complaining.

A seamless experience

Once the venue is secured, festival planning becomes a vast machine of thousands of intricate moving parts. Here’s just a small selection: securing funding and sponsorship; sourcing infrastructure, including stages, fencing and toilets; booking a mix of acts that will delight your audience; finding food and drinks traders of the required standard and, increasingly, ethical values; assembling a loyal team who’ll deliver the right service; and putting detailed plans in place to keep all stakeholders safe. Then there’s branding, marketing and sales. The list is endless – and that’s all before the first truck even arrives on site.

Spencer points out that it takes him a couple of weeks to turn the fields of the farm park into a festival. “I’m not going into a theatre, it’s a farm with loads of barns and outbuildings,” he says. “Yet every detail has to be right – the showers, the toilet experience. People need it to be easy to park, and to get from their vehicle to the site. They need good food and good beer, without having to wait long to get served. Then the sound has to be right. You can’t have spill‑over from other stages.”

Festival‑goers want a seamless experience. Mandy Johnson has project managed a host of festivals, including Love Supreme, an annual jazz festival in the village of Glynde, East Sussex. She highlights the work that goes into crowd dynamics there – predicting people’s behaviours, and balancing the numbers at each different stage at various times through the long weekend. She says it’s joined‑up communication that ensures things run smoothly.

“Things are always changing – the line‑up, the availability of supplies and how many people buy tickets,” says Johnson. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, where every piece has a knock‑on effect. So every single planning assumption needs to be rechecked every year. You need a clear organisational structure of who’s looking after what, where people are constantly checking that everybody’s looped in as things evolve, and that nobody is making assumptions.”

One year at Love Supreme, Gregory Porter, then a relatively unknown jazz singer, was appearing low on the bill in a tent with limited capacity. Just weeks before the festival, he had a hit record – too late to change the billing to accommodate the now surging demand. For Johnson, it was tempting to rush him to a bigger stage at the last minute, but that risked sparking further unseen issues. “It’s often less risk to manage the known problem,” she says.

‘Like a cliff edge’

But when considering unexpected impacts, none can match Covid‑19. The vast majority of festivals in 2020 were cancelled, and the sector’s revenues dropped by a whopping 90 per cent. Many were canned the following year too, with widespread question marks over insurance. As festivals are typically seasonal, one‑off occasions, it meant an entire lost year for many events companies – two for some. “March 2020 was like a cliff edge,” says Sorcha O’Reilly, artistic director of Kaleidoscope, a 15,000‑person family festival in County Wicklow, Ireland. “You got the sense that everything was going to be gone.” Two years on and the impact is still being felt in everything from ticket sales to the timelines for booking acts and the availability of staple supplies.

“Key infrastructure has been redirected into the construction industry and to Covid testing and vaccination centres,” says O’Reilly. “Warehouses that used to have thousands of panels of fencing, for example, are empty right now. Festival staff and crew are very thin on the ground too, because so many people had to pivot to other work to survive. Crew costs have gone up as a result. Everyone in the industry here is working through it by trying to define their production specs as early as possible.”

Simon Fell is director of festivals and events at Alexandra Palace, which launched its own (unrelated) Kaleidoscope Festival in 2018. He says the pandemic has forced festival project managers to become even more adaptable than they were already. “We’re used to making some things up as we go along,” he says, “but Covid reinforced that not every decision has to be based on a strong framework; you can think out of the box. When we came back in 2021, we were suddenly making loads of big new decisions. Do we need to wear masks? How do we socially distance people? How do people queue for toilets and bars? It forced us to acknowledge that you shouldn’t shy away from doing something differently. In that way, the pandemic period has been really empowering.”

Sharing knowledge

It seems learning on the job is very much in the festival project manager’s remit. Back in 2008, Bestival’s Gorham co‑founded the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF), a trade body dedicated to sharing knowledge across the nascent industry. Back then, he says, it was “three or four of us sat in a room, asking where to get fencing and what these new compostable toilets are”. The AIF now has 65 member organisations, which cover an audience of 600,000 and contribute over £200m annually to the UK economy. Communicating the issues around Covid, both internally and externally, has been a key concern for the organisation.

An industry back on its feet

Gorham himself has had to learn a lot since that first night fire‑fighting – Bestival has been in administration, and the festival faced controversy in 2018 when a 24‑year‑old attendee died of a drug overdose. Gorham and Josie now run Camp Bestival, a 30,000‑capacity family festival mirroring their own changing tastes as parents of two who still enjoy a party. This year, the festival is expanding beyond its Dorset base to a second site in Shropshire, reflecting an optimism that many in the sector are now feeling, albeit tentatively.

Despite all the added stresses, the festival machine is gearing up again for a return to restriction‑free summers. It’s sorely needed – and not just for the finances. When the government loosened restrictions in the summer of 2021, Alexandra Palace’s Kaleidoscope was the first UK festival of more than 10,000 people to go ahead. For Fell, it was an emotional experience, something he saw reflected in the faces of those lucky enough to be back on site, shaking off the troubles of the previous 18 months.

“I choked up when I announced we could go green on doors,” he says. “People were suddenly out again. There was a really special feeling that I don’t think I’ll ever experience again. It was like the Summer of Love. It gave me a real buzz to walk around the site and think: ‘We persevered. We’ve done it’. And it hit me like a steam train: the festival industry was back on its feet.”

Five project management tips from the world of festivals

1. Don’t rush to make changes. In an event with so many interconnected moving parts, scrambling to solve problems may simply spark further issues elsewhere. If you foresee a problem, create a plan to manage it instead.
2. Stay connected. Unexpected changes will have knock‑on effects, so everyone should be looped in at all times as plans inevitably evolve. No one should be working to assumptions.
3. Take the rap. Customers have a right to complain when the service they expected isn’t delivered. Even if an issue is no reflection on your planning, be open, apologise and get to putting it right.
4. Create buy‑in. Even a commercial festival is essentially about community, which means building brand loyalty from the ground up. Reward people well, with money, other perks or a great experience, and they’ll become evangelists who will repay you in spades.
5. Get feedback. Once the project has wrapped up, collect notes from key stakeholders on any issues and any improvements that can be made. That includes outsiders who are affected by your project. A festival, for example, needs landowners and the local community on board in order to flourish.
   
   

Resources

• Elizabeth Harrin, Engaging stakeholders on projects: How to harness people power (APM)
• APM Podcast, ‘How to be a great communicator’

 

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE SPRING 2022 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.